SteelBeardYSK: If you're on Lemmy.World or Sh.itjust.works you should not subscribe to any Beehaw communities
BiTIs there any reason for them defederating?
Abreus96Beehaw.org is a highly maintained instance with careful moderation and rules for their instance and communities.
The explosion of new users this month has overwhelmed their moderation team with having to keep up with now moderating new huge user bases from large instances like sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world.
These instances in particular it seems had lots of bad actors causing issues in their communities.
There are plans for them to re-federate at some point with the advent of new modding tools and updates to Lemmy
That honestly does not sound like the worst way to curb the increase in traffic. It’s understandable for communities to “get their house in order”.
But it does put a damper on the growth of every instance. The second people hear one of the biggest instances has cut off from the other biggest instances, they go "this fediverse thing is just too complicated!" and go to one of the centralized replacements.
The issue is the the growth could literally kill the underlying servers. Imagine running an instance on a raspberry pi and all the sudden see a hundred thousand users start hitting your server.
If that was Beehaw’s issue, I’d be more sympathetic, but it isn’t. They are using it as an incredibly crude moderation tool, not because of some technical limitation.
AdaThey have defederated as a moderation step, not as a technical step. Large instances with open registrations were the source of several trolls that would spew hate, get banned and then simply re-register.
There is no moderation tool to deal with that aside from limiting sign-ups, which the instances in question were unwilling to do (which I get, because manual approval creates a huge workload).
In order to keep their community as safe as possible, Beehaw defederated, because they prioritise community safety advice community reach.