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.
What I don’t get is that they’d probably need to create their own platform. Their main issue is about mod tools, so they’d need to create their own mod tools. Why not just add those to Lemmy? It’s open source. If they’re capable of creating their own platform, they’re capable of adding what they need to Lemmy.
Getting mod tools added to Lemmy is low priority for the Lemmy devs. Rust, while being a very hyped language, has many fewer people who can work with it at the scale than other main stream languages.
The issue also extends to moderated content that has been federated out to other instances that don’t share the moderation ideals that Beehaw has. (The Lemmy software is an awkward fit for their ideals, and federation is something that doesn’t match their ideals at all - less of an issue when there were only a handful of instances that were mostly defederated - but with new ones coming online for the past 3 months and federation by default this made things awkward).
There are other open source alternatives that have better moderation tooling. For what it’s worth, here’s an old version of Reddit - https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit (the language is Python and JavaScript - see the bit about Rust above).
For Beehaw, spinning up an instance of old reddit and growing that to be their own community is probably an easier task than fixing federation and moderation in Lemmy to what suits their needs.
You pose a good question. Here are a couple reasons:
Not quite. When you are on a non federated community, with accounts that require approval, the ability to ban trouble makers solves most things, and doesn’t leave them with an easy way back in.
Moderation requirements on lemmy are very different though, because federation introduces communities and users from instances that have different rules.
No need to create their own platform, they can use phpBB!
The technology ever!1! And a good old MySQL with apache!
I thought you can turn off federation.