Most people access the Fediverse through one of the large instances: lemmy.world, kbin, or beehaw. New or small instances of Lemmy have no content by default, and can most easily get content by linking to larger Lemmy instances. This is done manually one “Community” at a time (I spent 15 minutes doing this yesterday). Meanwhile, on larger instances, content naturally aggregates as a result of the sheer number of users. Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it’s inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances. It is probable that these instances follow in the footsteps of Reddit- the cycle repeats.
I actually think the Fediverse is in the beginning the process of fragmenting into siloed smaller, centralized instances. Beehaw, which is on the list of top instances, just blacklisted everyone from lemmy.world. Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other. It is possible that this fragmentation and instability? of Lemmy instances will kill the viability of Federated Reddit altogether, but hopefully not.
These are my main takeaways from my three days on the Fediverse. I will stick around to see if the Fediverse can sustain itself after the end of the Reddit blackouts.
It sounds like you are describing new user experience.
And I understand, coming from Reddit, how this can be a shock.
However, that’s how Lemmy works.
Similar to how twitter users got a shock moving (or trying to move) to mastadon.
The very nature of the fediverse works better with more instances, where a single instance has fewer users and the communities are more focussed.
Beehaw hasn’t “blacklisted everyone from…”. They’ve defederated. Whilst it may seem similar, it’s more nuanced. And that’s what a lot of people don’t understand.
Block-listing all users from lemmy.world from interacting with beehaw would be an amazing ability. That would put beehaw in a read-only state for users on lemmy.world, whilst still allowing beehaw users access to lemmy.world.
Unfortunately, the current admin/mod tools do not allow for that. And manually dealing with the huge influx of toxic users (posting death threats, illegal porn or trolling) was taking too much time.
Besides, the lemmy.world admin is working on custom tooling to deal with this issue. Because it is their users causing this issue, and it is their problem. And there is no higher authority - there are no Reddit admins to say “stop brigading”.
Shitjustworks, last I heard, weren’t responding to communication.
I have no doubts that beehaw will refederate as soon as Lemmy.world sorts their mod issues, or the Lemmy framework allows for more nuanced mod tools.
You have to remember that Lemmy is young.
It’s been around for a few years, but the shear scale of what is happening now is less than 2 weeks old
It’s unfortunate if the sh.itjust.works folks aren’t speaking, their listed rules seem pretty reasonable and the problem users appear to be breaking the rules of that instance too.
We have talked with them and will work with other instances to push for better moderation tool. We have nothing against individual people or their communities. Let’s keep that in mind.
This copy-and-pasted reply doesn’t actually address what I was talking about.
The people who have a problem here aren’t lemmy.world, it’s beehaw. So while it’s understandably polite for lemmy.world to moderate themselves, ultimately the tools you’re going to need will be on beehaw’s side, because even if lemmy.world does everything you could possibly desire there’s going to be many other instances that allow open subscription in the future and you can’t expect them all to do your policing for you.
This message was not copy-pasted nor was it addressed to you, I’m kinda confused why you think that.
But yes, beehaw needs moderations tools - we are working with other instances so that Lemmy - for everyone - can have better tools.
Also, we don’t expect other instances to do policing for us, this is why we want better federation options so that people using Beehaw can interact with the outside but those that do not cultivate a culture that matches with what we want would not be able to interact on Beehaw.
Very weird, there appears to be a bug in kbin. I’m seeing your “We have talked with them…” comment as a response to dozens of different comments here, including one that I made, and now when I look through the thread my response to your comment is replicated in all those dozens of places as well. My apologies, that would explain why your response seemed like such a non-sequitur to me. I’ll see if I can file a bug report about this.
Edit: here’s the bug report.
Edit 2: I missed a duplicate bug report that was already filed for this issue
Thank you for filing the bug report - that is really weird… I hope kbin fixes that issue quickly because that’s definitely gonna lead to some very off interpretations.