This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.

Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.

Two months on, I’m wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I’m just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?

  • antik@lemmy.world@lemm.ee
    69·
    1 year ago

    Hi,

    I’m speaking on behalf of the admin team of Lemmy World - we feel like we have to step in here and give some feedback to the things being said in this thread and give our perspective.

    About “Supporting nazi’s”:

    So we support nazi’s because it took us ‘long’ to defederate from exploding heads? That’s straight up false. We were one of the first instances to defederate with them and advocated heavily to have them defederated on other instances. FYI Lemmy World as a whole is just over 2 months old and so is this post: https://lemmy.world/post/747912

    There was an issue early on with the original moderator of the Lemmy World https://lemmy.world/c/conservative community which was handled instantly:

    1. The problematic moderator https://lemmy.world/u/OptionHome that was posting misinformation (and worse) was banned
    2. The https://lemmy.world/c/conservative community was given to other moderators.
    3. We asked people to stop bombaring the /c/conservative community with anti-conservative posts as to allow civil discourse. https://lemmy.world/post/149519
    4. The https://lemmy.world/c/maga community was also banned

    We take a hard stance on extremism from both sides of the political spectrum, and we believe that civil discourse should always be the first option. We ban hate communities on sight no matter whose side they are on, and we work hard to resolve the hundreds of reports we receive each day. As of today, 3733 users were banned from Lemmy.World, and that number will probably have gone up by the time you read this comment. We follow-up on moderation teams if we see reports that stay open for too long and if communities are abandoned we actively look to replace the moderation team.

    So we ask everyone to keep sending in reports when you see any post that breaks the Lemmy World rules which can be found here: https://lemmy.world/legal.

    About Beehaw’s decision to defederate with us: Even though we don’t agree with it, we have always been supportive of Beehaw and their choice to defederate with us until the mod tools improve. Even when the question gets posted in our community we defended the decision: https://lemmy.world/post/895811.

    But wether or not Beehaw will refederate with us is ofcourse 100% your decision.

    • prd@beehaw.org
      111·
      1 year ago

      We ban hate communities on sight no matter whose side they are on

      Can you please give examples of liberal or left-leaning hate groups you have had to ban?

    • TechieDamien@lemmy.ml
      3·
      1 year ago

      Here are my two cents as an outsider looking in. I spend ~15-30 mins a day on Lemmy (usually while doing other things), so I see a decent amount of content but I am not at the leading edge of posts. When I look at posts, I rarely, if ever see spam. For the most part there is civil conversations and those that attempt to derail them are downvoted and, in some cases, banned.

      Does this mean that moderation isn’t a problem? No, I am but one user. However, it does indicate it is not a chronic issue. Personally I would like to see you guys refederate, as that could only increase the quality of discussions throughout the fediverse.