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.
That's my bad, I had kinda assumed you'd reply something so the silence was a bit unexpected. I apologize.
@Lionir@beehaw.org, @alyaza@beehaw.org I realize a three day old buried comment chain is not the best place for this, but seeing as how the fediverse is difficult to search, and as a moderator of a medium-sized community on lemmy.world where I have not personally seen any content needing moderation, I'm curious if there has been a public statement somewhere on Beehaw you can direct me to that explains the specific issues and reasoning behind defederating with with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works?
As of today, @ruudtest@feddit.nl has implemented a captcha on lemmy.world and sign ups are currently closed due to an influx of spam accounts being created, which he already banned as stated here: https://lemmy.world/post/293545.
Lastly, why have other large instances with similar growth and open registration like kbin.social and lemmy.ml been spared?
What I noticed and why your experience probably doesn't match with ours is that people signed up lemmy.world to harass in other instances that are closed like ours and usually centered on LGBTQ+ communities. That might be a significant factor.
Here is the public statement we made about the issue a few days ago : https://beehaw.org/post/567170
As for why kbin.social and lemmy.ml were spare : I've not personally seen many reports from lemmy.ml and kbin.social was not even federated when we made this decision so it wasn't on our mind.