What defederating would mean:
- We won’t see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.
Pros:
- There is less confusion, you can’t respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.
Cons:
- We won’t be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won’t see any of our content.
Summary
Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our ‘front page’).
beehaw.org users already can’t see our posts/comments anywhere so it’s not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn’t really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.
What do you think?
Lemmy currently has several hundred instances, and Beehaw defederated from two of them. They said in their post that they were spending a lot of time dealing with problem posts, and almost all came from those two instances.
And what’s the problem? I personally think trying to make a troll -free place on the Internet is doomed to failure unless they close the whole world out, but it’s their goal and I certainly support them giving it a shot.
This is all a big experiment, and it’s wonderful that different approaches are being tried. We should support that, not piss on it.