I find this news disconcerting coming from such a large instance so early on. Many of the criticisms of Lemmy I’ve been fighting against on Reddit have had to do with defederation and the possibility of getting cut off from your favorite communities on your main account. I handwaved that away as being extremely unlikely save for the exception of NSFW or extreme political content. But this news has taken me quite by surprise. Perhaps I should have seen it coming given the community Beehaw is trying to foster.
This really makes me wonder what will happen to instances that make this decision. Will their communities diminish in favor of the more accessible ones? Will this decision hurt Beehaw in the long run? What does this mean for the Fediverse in the near future when fighting against its detractors has been such an uphill battle?
Thoughts?
That’s valid. The news worries me in terms of Lemmy’s growth and success, but simultaneously it’s exactly what the Fediverse was designed for. Communities are able to determine what their boundaries are. I guess my issue is that Beehaw had the largest communities for many different topics and now they’ve cut the second largest instance off from those communities. In the long run what that means is that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works are probably going to recreate those communities themselves. Since those are going to end up invariably being larger communities, it means beehaw’s versions of those communities are probably going to empty out and become ghost towns comparatively.
Possibly and that’s the beauty of it. People will stay for different reasons and it seems that the standard of good-faith interactions on Beehaw will make a certain demographic stay. It’s not so difficult to exist in two different instances anyway especially because those two that you mentioned have open registration. We’ll just have to see how it goes moving forward
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Whenever I hear about such decisions, I fear we might end up with a “netsplit” like event in the Fediverse at one point.
This is that event. Lemmy, Beehaw, and Works represent ~50% of the active lemmy userbase right now… all of which are experiencing a service disruption. The network is functionally broken.