hey folks, here's a quick update on our decision to defederate from sh.itjust.works! (and here's sh.itjust.works's side of this update)
we got in touch with the head admin over there, The Dude, and we had a pretty good chat about our concerns and reason for defederating. while immediate re-federation is just bluntly off the table with the rudimentary state of Lemmy's moderation tools, we now have a pretty good idea of the roadmap to refederating with them. we think we'll eventually be able to do this, although we don't have a timetable on when yet.
we're also now collaborating with him on how to move forward--and in the weeks and months to come we'll be pushing to expedite the process of developing some of the necessary tools. this decision has really helped us make connections that can hopefully realize those tools both on the desktop side and in apps being developed for Lemmy. we're also hoping to collaborate with other Lemmy administrators who have needs like our own, or just generally want more granular tools at their disposal.
we did also get in touch with the lemmy.world owner prior to defederating to share the concerns that prompted us to defederate[^1]--but we have not received any communication from him since it was levied, so there's no roadmap at all there as of now. we're always open to reconsidering and collaborating to end the defederation with him, but for now the earliest i can give you is "when mod tools are in a better state".
that's all for now folks. if any new significant developments take place we'll announce them as needed.
[^1]: we're only bringing this up now because it was just not useful information in the context of our announcement. it almost certainly would have been interpreted as some sort of callousness and/or brought unnecessary sectarianism and grief to him. at the end of the day he has his reasons and desires for running lemmy.world how he does, and we have ours for running Beehaw as we do. because of social and technological circumstances those are just incompatible right now, and that's fine.
It's great how you're keeping us in the loop. I was really disappointed when I heard about the de-federation of specifically sh.itjust.works because it has some really good communities that I was missing from Reddit. I'm also really excited about the idea of different communities having different homes, but defederating too quickly can break that concept, and instead lead to only really having reliable access to communities on your local instance.
That's all to say this update has put my concerns to rest. I trust the admins on this site are doing their best to foster community with everyone possible, while also trying to keep the community here safe. I really appreciate the work you all are doing.
Hopefully you can link the Github issues created for the specific moderation tools you need, I'm excited to dig into the Lemmy codebase and hoping to contribute to the Beehaw community!
Honestly it'd be neat to have a local beehaw community for this dev related work, if one doesn't exist already
Yeah the transparency of the mod team is the number one reason I love this instance so. Completely understood all of their decisions and how they came to them and I don't think anyone can get mad about it, its a passion project for the fine folk that admin this instance its understandable you would take precautions. I mean if a certain instance is not moderating at all or only has a handful of people moderating that workload gets pushed off onto these guys when those instances interact here. And with them being open and transparent and willing to make changes as development unfolds, it makes me more confident in the whole project.
Here's a post I did on the moderation tools we need : https://discuss.online/post/12787