A few days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their Chat community about the challenges of content moderation and the possibility of leaving Lemmy. That post was eventually locked.
Then, about two days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their support community that they aren’t confident about the long-term use of Lemmy, due to so-called concerns about Lemmy.
If you currently use Beehaw and want to stay on the federated Lemmy network, consider migrating your account to another instance like lemm.ee.
Personally I think federation is overrated, and that the server > community model Lemmy adopted is not ideal. I used to think federation was the solution to Reddit, and that being able to post on disparate forums with one account was the way to go. I still see benefits to it, but I don’t think it’s right for every community.
Ultimately all federation has done is create a bunch of empty spaces.
It’s cool in theory for everybody to be able to host and join but ultimately all that it’s done is create these void-like dead communities. More and more frequently I’ve been seeing people attempt to redirect from the dead zones into more active communities, but even “active” is pretty relative on the fediverse.
I feel like every time I click on some new community I don’t want to deal with (usually sports) it’s always on some new domain with 1 subscriber and 2 viewers. It’s not even exclusive to sports, it’s basically just all the communities I generally see outside of the major established servers.
I just don’t get the appeal for federation. I like it here because the community is small enough to not have succumbed to the major general toxicity that pervades every online platform eventually when it reaches massive sizes. I like the niche tech discussions - this is the same vibe reddit used to have before the digg migration. There are just a lot of dead, redundant spaces across the entire fediverse and it the decentralization makes it worse.
I feel a major problem was just people’s hurry to recreate a quantity of communities. I was seeing a number of sports teams communities being created, when a single community for the entire league would be a better call. Then multiply that by those same communities being created in multiple servers, and it gets out of hand.
These do seem solvable though, even just letting community admins “peer” with similar communities in other servers could solve this problem.
I’m not sure that’s a property of the fediverse. You’d have that same issue with similarly themed subreddits for example. And 99.99% of subreddits were also dead spaces.
I believe it’s just as simple as the quantity of users, and has nothing to do with federated or not.
The point of federation is that you don’t have one central entity that controls the whole thing and can do whatever they want. Like Reddit.
The emptiness is due to the number of users instead of federation. There just aren’t enough people creating content to sustain smaller communities.
I don’t think more users would fill out more of the same communities. There needs to be some kind of central way of syncing topics together so you don’t literally have fifteen of the same community over fifteen different servers. It’s not necessary, and at best it fragments the conversation because nobody knows where to go unless they default to the larger instances.
This is the biggest issue. So many of the same communities spread across the different servers.
I’ve seen people suggest banding communities together. Seems like something to explore.
Aggregate meta communities. Not sure what sort of can of worms that is tho.