Yanno what? Good for them! Not only for swiftly defederating at their discretion (which I support, full stop) but also this open dialogue that is happening.
People forget that defederating can be reversed, but it requires communication and cooperation for that to be an option.
When I first read about the defederation I had a knee jerk angry response but after thinking about it I really feel like it makes sense for them. They want to have a heavily moderated space and it's hard to do that when you integrate with the other communities. It seems to me they have a level head and are approaching this carefully. I hope that they end out being in the minority but I can understand having a few relatively solitary groups with a focused goal.
Great to hear that there is a dialog open between the admins. Hopefully it is all sorted swiftly. Federating with all of the large instances is important for the continued growth of the platform.
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.
Since lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works didn't have any restrictions on making accounts they were getting a lot of trolls coming from those 2 instances so they defederated from them until the moderation tools become more advanced.