this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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The issue with this is beehaw is large enough that them defederating from other instances is potentially a serious threat to those instances. Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation. Moves like this could be interpreted as an attempt to become the dominant instance, defeating the purpose of the fediverse.
I am not 100% sure where you are going with this, however I am going to say I agree that the move by beehaw is a blatent move to exert control on other instances, and it was never in question, in my mind atleast that it was their goal from my reading of their first post. I however disagree that they pose a threat to the other istances, they pose a threat if instances give in, like it apears sh.itjust.works may have done given their new post. Beehaw, sense the begining has been going arround acting like they have quite a bit like they are the arbitor, and everyone else should join them. I for one think the other instances of Lemmy should band together and let Beehaw wall themselves off. I do not think they would sucseed in this goal, and they would either give up on their imperialistic conquest or they would die a death of isolation.
it is a threat if users jump ship to beehaw from the smaller instances beehaw has blocked. but when I wrote that comment I wasn't aware that lemmy.world is now three times the size of beehaw, at least according to this tally https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. that should counterbalance things.
I am not sure I have seen, in my time watching beehaw block first justify later, a mass transfer to beehaw before, but I uderstand the potential threat now.
It's just that network effects are real. I want to be where all the smart, fun people are, not on a ded site or nazi island. I don't really care about who's on my instance, just who's on the network. Federation and decentralization were never huge selling points for me. And as Mastodon demonstrated, most people just want to log onto a big network and don't care or want to think about instances.
Is there an Out of the Loop thread for this? I'm new here and not sure what's going on.
Beehaw.org, one of the largest instances suddenly decided to also defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works....
They are becoming an incredibly insular community which would normally be fine...but the frustrating bit is that many of us have been enjoying and participating in content from many instances and then suddenly it gets taken away from us.
If they had defederated from the very beginning or if they were a much smaller community it wouldn't be as frustrating imo.
I just want to be able to interact with people, not keep jumping through hoops to find which instances support other instances and making new accounts there.
To be fair, they've basically said they would not like to stay permanently defederated and are just waiting for the proper mod tools or whatever else they need to keep up.
They are having trouble keeping up with the large volume of people participating in their communities and moderating this huge influx of new users. When most of their workflow is apparently coming from these other servers I think they're justified in defederating.