hey folks, here's a quick update on our decision to defederate from sh.itjust.works! (and here's sh.itjust.works's side of this update)
we got in touch with the head admin over there, The Dude, and we had a pretty good chat about our concerns and reason for defederating. while immediate re-federation is just bluntly off the table with the rudimentary state of Lemmy's moderation tools, we now have a pretty good idea of the roadmap to refederating with them. we think we'll eventually be able to do this, although we don't have a timetable on when yet.
we're also now collaborating with him on how to move forward--and in the weeks and months to come we'll be pushing to expedite the process of developing some of the necessary tools. this decision has really helped us make connections that can hopefully realize those tools both on the desktop side and in apps being developed for Lemmy. we're also hoping to collaborate with other Lemmy administrators who have needs like our own, or just generally want more granular tools at their disposal.
we did also get in touch with the lemmy.world owner prior to defederating to share the concerns that prompted us to defederate[^1]--but we have not received any communication from him since it was levied, so there's no roadmap at all there as of now. we're always open to reconsidering and collaborating to end the defederation with him, but for now the earliest i can give you is "when mod tools are in a better state".
that's all for now folks. if any new significant developments take place we'll announce them as needed.
[^1]: we're only bringing this up now because it was just not useful information in the context of our announcement. it almost certainly would have been interpreted as some sort of callousness and/or brought unnecessary sectarianism and grief to him. at the end of the day he has his reasons and desires for running lemmy.world how he does, and we have ours for running Beehaw as we do. because of social and technological circumstances those are just incompatible right now, and that's fine.
Beehaw is a lemmy instance, which is the equivalent of a reddit.
There are different communities on this instance which is the equivalent of a subreddit.
You are on a different lemmy instance, kbin.social. Which has its own communities and users there.
The cool thing about this setup is that you can mostly interact with any community on any occasion.
You're currently interacting with !support@beehaw.org from kbin.social
Hopefully that makes sense.
A correction, kbin.social isn't a Lemmy instance, it's a a kbin instance. Kbin is a different, but similar, platform from Lemmy (that's able to federate with it, just like other platforms using ActivityPub do).
Looking at kbin.social (without logging in because I have no account there), it seems a lot of things appear into some general timeline that show stuff from all over the "known network" of the kbin.social server. Including things from communities (Kbin calls those "magazines", I think) on other (kbin, Lemmy, etc) servers that yours is following.
So I think that Kbin should by default show only things from their own server, and the rest only after some more explicit clicking on all/known-network/whatchamacallit. Because it makes no sense indeed that a community (kbin seems to call those "magazines") that is very specifically about an "allied" server, to appear in the main timeline without the right context.
But I doubt I am making much sense now with my ramblings at 1 a.m., so I am going to leave further talks/halfhearted explanations/etc for another time.