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.
It seems like the admin of lemmy.world is eager to work with our admins, but yeah, I also noticed the community response on sh.itjust.works was mostly "I get it. It's not what I would want, but I get it" while the community response on lemmy.world was mostly "Fediverse ruined, day ruined, beehaw a bunch of fascist dictators." Which is a little bit wild to me since sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world both have very similar moderation styles. I guess it just goes to show the difference a sidebar can make in setting a tone. sh.itjust.works has a very basic sidebar with some rules of the road, while lemmy.world has a sidebar that says the sidebar is TBD. I wonder, and this is purely speculation, how many people signed up for lemmy.world explicitly because they wanted to be a problem. sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world both have the same signup process, but then they picked lemmy.world because "Oh hey, there's no rule against being a bigot (yet)." Me, I would have assumed that was just... Implied, but it's truly fascinating that they have such different communities already, and I wonder anthropologically why that happened.
this is honestly not a bad theory. when there's a lack of gatekeeping and a lack of specified rules, online spaces seem to overwhelmingly tend toward being more reactionary and more permissive of bad social behavior because there's no deterrent for it (and by the time there is one, often the culture is set and really hard to undo).
I think it's a lot less nefarious. About every post or article about Lemmy that links to Lemmy instances has links to (in this order in almost every article I remember) lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and beehaw.org. Of these 3 only lemmy.world accepts new users without vetting. Lemmy.ml doesn't accept new users at all and beehaw doesn't really look that welcoming to someone who knows they might stir some shit up in the future and also getting into beehaw requires more effort. So with lemmy.world usually being the first on the list and additionally requires the least effort to join, this is where all the world and their uncle end up on. They just get the biggest unfiltered influx and with that the biggest amount of toxic people. (I want to make sure that I'm not calling lemmy.world users lazy or toxic or anything like or that this is their target audience. It's just a fact fact that someone who can't be bothered to do research and/or "write an essay" as someone called it, will most likely end up on lemmy.world)
A lot of that can also be said about sh.itjust.works, which is the fascination I have in this. There's communal divergence between sh.irjust.works and lemmy.world that I would not have immediately anticipated
The main difference between these two instances as I see it is that lemmy.world gets a whole lot more media coverage, attention and direct links than sh.itjust.works. You have to do research or visit join-lemmy.org to find a link to sh.itjust.works and then their tagline starting with "A bilingual (EN/FR) general-purpose instance located in eastern Canada! Powered by 99% renewal energy!" might just keep some uniformed (as in how this federation-thingy works) non-canadians from joining (yes, I left out the second part of the tagline, assuming most people who'd be put off by the beginning wouldn't read any further).
That's interesting! I wasn't aware of any media coverage. Where should I be looking for that?
I used "meadia coverage" in a very broad sense here (as in online articles by magazines, blogposts and such)...
I honestly didn't keep track I just noticed this during the last few days that if there were instanced that were mentioned or linked it was usually these three, but it might also be confimation bias.
shit.just.works seemed nice but then i saw some anti-china and other about of aggressivenesss about defederation