Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
I’m sorry, but no. The point of the fediverse is not to spin up niche communities, since we already have forums. You want to be part of a niche small forum, go spin up your own bb instance and run a niche small forum.
The point of the fediverse is to recreate the global social networks that are twitter / Reddit / etc, but to do so using open source servers that are decentralized and anyone can host.
Again, federation is not a user facing feature, it’s an architecture / implementation detail. Fediverse enthusiasts are like train enthusiasts who love every detail of how they’re built and their history and how much philosophically better they are than cars, but none of that matters and train networks will fail if they don’t provide quick and convenient transportation to their users.
If that were true, then the software wouldn’t have the ability to defederate built directly into it in the admin panel. You could write software in a way where defederating from a specific instance is hard to do.
IMO the point of any open source software is the noone really has ownership over what “the point” of it is. Anyone can take that software and use it how they see fit.
A setting in an admin panel is not a user facing feature.
In broad strokes yes, but in more specific and relevant strokes, the point of social networking software is for users to use it to engage with each other, not concern themselves with how it’s servers are administrated.
Admins are users too from a developer’s point of view.
No, they’re not. They’re admins.
I develop software for a living. If someone is using my software in any capacity, they are a user from my point of view, even if they have admin privileges.
Oh wow congrats, like half the world writes software, I also write software for a living, but I don’t confuse the admins running my software and using my admin portals with the primary users of my software who will determine whether or not it will be popular or a success.
Back up and examine the context of the conversation and then stop with this pointless semantic distinction. In the context of whether or not your social network software will be successful, an admin setting that allows one instance to connect to other is not a user facing feature.
People do not open Reddit to examine how the Reddit admins configured their kubernetes clusters, so stop with this dumb bullshit pretending like users care about federation. They want somewhere to come have a discussion with everyone else interested in the same thing. That’s it.
First off, cool your jets; you’re being kinda rude for no reason here. Just because we disagree doesn’t mean either of us is an idiot.
My point is just that you still develop features specifically for your admin-privileged users right? That’s the only thing I’m trying to say by calling admins users, that they still belong to the bucket of people you consider when adding features to your software, even if they are only admin-facing features. You’re right that it’s just a semantic difference, so let me rephrase using your terminology then;
Admins may want to create and promote their own private sites – using the lemmy software – that federate with only a subset of other lemmy instances. For instance, a network of ‘academic’ lemmy instances run by universities – with high moderation requirements – that do not federate with the ‘popular’ fedeverse.
In that sense federation is a feature, to admins.
I’m also not 100% sold on it not mattering to end-users. Like I’m a user by your metric, and I like that Kbin can de-federate from extremist instances or instances run by corporations like Meta, and will likely move homes if it doesn’t and I start seeing too much content from those instances. It’s a feature I specifically appreciate about this platform.