Beehaw mods had issues moderating a flood of new users and low quality posts from here. As they put it, it was more “we don’t have the tools and staff to handle tons of new people” and less “we don’t like SIJW”.
If I remember correctly they defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works because they were two huge and largely unmoderated instances but did say that they'd like to refederate if solid moderation was put in place.
The SIJW admin and them had talks and agreed that they'd refederate when Lemmy would have decent moderation tools that allowed for that, which hasn't happened yet.
If what you're saying is accurate, and these huge communities are largely unmoderated, then we have a pretty outstanding community here on Lemmy. Can you imagine the hate, vitriol, and absolute trash that would be visible if Twitter or Reddit were unmoderated? Yes we have some weird opinions and content, but nothing I've seen is overtly dangerous or hateful. Pretty cool, Lemmy. Pretty cool.
A lot of it is self-selecting IMO. We're big enough to have a good sized community, but we aren't so big as to become a big target. That will change as Lemmy gets bigger, but it least for now, it's small enough that the trolls probably don't get enough attention to bother sticking around.
If you want trash, you can find it on Lemmy, just check the list of most defederated instances. You don't see it because... well, they're defederated, which itself is one of the moderation tools available in the Fediverse.
Because sign ups were totally open during the Reddit Exodus was what started it, it lead to a huge influx of new users that had access to their instance while they run a tight show over there...
I hope we'll get to a place where they'll refederate with us. They have some really interesting communities. I didn't sign up for an account there because I wasn't willing to write a 7 page essay and take the blood oath to be admitted. I'm exaggerating... a little.
They want to be the "Elks Lodge" of the fediverse and that's totally fine. They were pretty transparent about their reasons for defederating with us and their reasons were understandable.
I didn't sign up for an account there because I wasn't willing to write a 7 page essay
Yeah, you're not welcome. Everyone calling a couple questions an "essay", can shitpost somewhere else. I'm not exaggerating a bit, if someone can't be bothered to think through a couple answers ONCE, I don't trust them to think through the rest of their comments either.
Except that wasn't how they described it. They said they were getting a lot of posts that required moderator action, and people there said it was trolls and harassment.
A lot of NSFL stuff not tagged, a lot of blatantly transphobic and homophobic stuff meant to upset beehaw users since it's designed to be a diverse and welcoming space. Definitively not "lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works users were posting a lot of low effort memes" and much more "a small subset of lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works users are gaming the open sign ups to make the lives of our users worse"
Exactly - that description was kind of frustrating. It makes it sound like they took a drastic action to deal with a very mild annoyance, when apparently that wasn't the case
I've said before that I think Beehaw's goal of a harassment-free and troll-free space is unlikely to succeed on a federated platform, but I respect their right to give it a shot and their actions seem reasonable given the situation.