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.
Being here from kbin.social, none of this directly impacts me, but I am more than interested in seeing how this all plays out. This is a whole new dynamic, and getting to see how it develops is fascinating.
It seems to me that the whole point of a fediverse-based system is that different instances should defederate, if that serves the purposes and desires of the admins of a particular instance. I know that user accounts and their various configurations are currently locked to a single instance. (If you're from the Microsoft world, think of old NT4 domains where the PDC controlled everything, in comparison to Active Directory with multimastering.) At some point, tools will emerge to import/export your user configuration, making it easier to switch from one instance to another to suit your own personal needs better. And maybe a multimastering kind of thing can happen eventually, too, so you could take your ActivityPub-based account and log in with it to any instance.
Exactly. One is not better or worse than the other, they're just different, in some incompatible ways.
Appreciate your input, some of the comments on the shitjustworks thread were kinda wild, people absolutely have been assuming the worst when the mods here have been wholly open and transparent which is absolutely what I look for in a lemmy instance. Make sure your values are in line with the moderators running the instance. Because in the end that's what will affect your user experience the most and if you don't like that there's always the option to run your own instance so you can see all the federated networks you want and none that you don't. Ideally everyone would be running their own personalized instance where they can see everything and then go to a couple different silo instances where people go to post their content.