is lemmy already fracturing so I can’t see stuff on beehaw? Doesn’t this kind of defeat the purpose?
I'd say it's both a feature and a bug of the Fediverse!
Everyone is free to start their own server, just as everyone is free to splinter off. This means no central authority deciding what you can see and can't see.
In the ideal state, there would be multiple servers with the same discussion topic (eg a few "news" communities would exist on beehaw, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml etc). Each of them will slowly take a different direction. This is already kinda happening on reddit (news, worldnews, neutralnews, etc), but here it should happen across servers.
Beehaw is a bit of a weird animal, they don't like having so many users all at once because it leads to moderation issues. I think they should have just appointed more mods, but they decided on the last-resort option of splintering off temporarily. They really value having a small,close-knit community - they don't allow people to start their own communities (the subreddit equivalent), downvotes aren't allowed, etc, so discussion is only focused on a few main channels.
As a new user, i think it's fine for you to be on lemmyworld! It has the largest variety of content here, although the pace of new content is still slow because lemmy has 1% of 1% of reddit's userbase. Feel free to contribute!
The takeaway for now is, you can see beehaw posts but can't really participate. I personally found it useful to block beehaw communities so I can see the activity elsewhere. The current default lemmy sort isn't very good - I would try sorting by Hot or New.
Thanks for this explanation. I’m starting to understand this a bit more and more. I think once apps become more mature things will become better… I was spoiled by Apollo.
Long story short, Beehaw is a heavily moderated instance and said that Lemmy didn't have strong moderation tools yet. So for the time being, they have defederated.
You can't see new stuff from beehaw, unless the new stuff is posted by other members of your own instance.
Each instance has its own rules and requirements, and beehaw decided that moderating users from lemmy.world and sh.it.justworks due to the volume of said users is too difficult with the current moderation tools and staff - so they defederated.
This leaves lemmy.world unable to sync with original communities on beehaw, so it can't update its own copy of the community with new posts and comments. But it also leaves members of beehaw unable to sync with Lemmy.world. - federation is by default enabled or "opt-out", but in order to federate both instances have to agree to do so, if one suddenly refuses to federate, then no federation happens.
The thing about the fediverse is it allows you to go where you want - my instance (iusearchlinux.fyi) is still federated with both, so I can see both beehaw and Lemmy.world, comment and make posts on both. - if you don't like who you are federated with or not with, find a new instance.
The fediverse was always "fractured", which is the whole point of it. Beehaw is a heavily moderated and with that censored instance. If you're not a fan of that, then you just shouldn't join Beehaw. Lemmy.world is still federated with the majority of instances, so is kbin and a lot of other big instances.
If you truly want to see "everything", it's best to join a small instance that is federated with everybody. I joined an instance called Rammy. It's nothing special in and of itself, just one guy nice enough to host the server. But I can interact with Beehaw, Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, Lemmy NSFW, all of it. So if that's what you want, join a small instance.
Beehaw won't allow you to post things on their site or subscribe to notifications when new content appears on their site, unless you go through a vetting process they've decided to put in place (I've been trying to sig up for beehaw for a week now - pretty sure it's a problem on their end and not a deliberate decision against me...)
It's their service, they're free to do whatever they want with it. Lemmy is just software - the people running the software ultimately control how it works.
The point of the fediverse is decentralization, so it doesn't really defeat the purpose. It's what makes sure what happened on reddit and twitter doesn't happen on the fediverse because nobody controls everything.
Some people want to be in a tightly controlled, highly moderated environment. Some people want basically no moderation, and many people are in between. The nice thing about decentralization is that each of those groups of people can have their communities without breaking the others, and depending on everyone's tolerance for one another they can participate in each other's communities.
This is common on the fediverse, and it sucks that some communities don't want to be part of what the rest of us enjoy, but that's their choice.
I'm vocally against defederation except in extreme cases, but I understand why communities that want to lock down and only allow voices they agree with even if I disagree with it completely. The key is to reward libre instances with attention in my opinion.