I’m not insulting anybody. I’m simply stating the fact that it’s smart to wear a helmet, because if you hit your head on the ground, you could die. That’s all.

Walking down the stairs is less dangerous than biking and you know it.

You make some good points.

I still wear one, but I don’t judge people who choose not to.

I don’t wear one and I judge myself for not doing so 🤷

Complicated issue.

Could be even lower if they wore helmets though. I don’t even wear a helmet myself, but it’s objectively smart to do so.

My friend got something caught in his front wheel and went over the handlebars at 20mph. Could have been turned into a vegetable if he wasn’t wearing a helmet.

Not really. Lemmy is filled with skeptics, rebels, and independent thinkers, and there are only like 50,000 monthly active users.

You know what’s a much better target for propaganda? Reddit or any corporate social media site. The users are simpleminded and easily manipulated and you don’t even have to worry about moderators, you can just pay to run ads.

Lemm.ee is actually bigger in terms of userbase now. And SJW is about the same size. But .ml still hosts a lot more communities so I guess that also counts for something

Why not provide it to everyone else?

Anytime I see a trash post that’s where it comes from 9/10.

It’s 40% of the whole Lemmy userbase and activity. They’ve got their fair share of trolls but come on, the worst? Have you forgotten about redditors?

It’s hard to be the biggest, and I think their admins are doing a pretty good job.

I saw a fellow mod outright nazi-ing about ( not “saying things I disagree with” but actual nazi fanboy-ing)

A claim like this typically requires evidence.

What a time to be alive

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to evangelize Lemmy on reddit, and one of the most common criticisms is the possibility of defederation and getting cut off from major communities. Most people who have been using Lemmy for a while understand that it’s way less of an issue than it sounds like, because there has to be a major reason for a defederation between servers and it doesn’t usually happen out of nowhere.

But in the case of Beehaw, it actually did happen quite abruptly, and it involved 3 of the largest servers at the time. We know that Lemmy slowly bled tens of thousands of users in the months following the reddit API exodus as users drifted back to reddit. Although it’s impossible to know how many of those users were annoyed by the defederation drama, I think it’s safe to say that the number wasn’t zero.

The steep decline in active users on Beehaw in the months following the decision is probably the best source of hard evidence supporting my claim.

The removal of downvotes is not something that I have any particular problem with, although I wouldn’t choose it for myself. I’m just pointing out that in this specific situation of wanting to mitigate tankie posts, the downvote is self-evidently an effective tool.

I think this goes back to a lack of moderation tools and poor moderation in other instances, not to Beehaw’s relatively smaller user base or defederation from other instances.

Can’t it be both? If certain moderation tools existed then you could use them to solve the problem. But they don’t exist, so other instances are currently using the strategies that I have mentioned in order to deal with the problem as best they can.

Sh.itjust.works does have open signups.

I totally understand and respect your perspective as a beehaw user, even as I obviously have a completely different perspective as someone who has never been a part of the beehaw community but instead has been observing from a distance.

Thanks for the response. I didn’t realize that you had conducted polls about refederation, that’s good to hear. I’m familiar with the situation with the Lemmy developers.

I understand why you have chosen this course of action and I don’t mean to say you’re responsible for the health of Lemmy. I was just pointing out that from my perspective, a rising tide lifts all boats, and it’s helpful to have a network of similar communities because it makes each one stronger.

For instance, if someone on SJW complains about us being defederated from lemmygrad and hexbear, I can simply tell them to make an account on lemm.ee, thus allowing them to remain a part of any communities on SJW but also allowing them to have the experience they wanted. And lemm.ee also gets a new user out of it. When you don’t have those options, the disgruntled user is much more likely to stop using the platform entirely.

However, you obviously already have plenty of experience cultivating and maintaining a community, so I have faith that you will be able to continue to do so regardless of the extent of federation that you deem appropriate or which platform you use, and I wish you luck going forward.

My experiences with beehaw users have also been largely positive, but I don’t really use my alt that much, so I don’t have many encounters.

Thank you. I don’t necessarily think beehaw is going to die and I agree that it doesn’t need to get bigger.

But this was just my perspective as a sh.itjust.works user and admin that I’ve been wanting to get off my chest. SJW got cut off from beehaw users and communities soon after I joined Lemmy and it’s been bothering me ever since and this seemed like a good opportunity to communicate my perspective.

Might as well take this opportunity to point out that beehaw is still defederated from sh.itjust.works. I thought it was a bizarre decision at the time and the fact that it hasn’t been reassessed after all this time is even more baffling. Beehaw and SJW are two of the best moderated instances on Lemmy, and yet we aren’t federated with each other.

You can view the original announcement from beehaw here and the reaction from SJW here. You’ll also note that beehaw has since refederated with lemmy.world.

I have been informed that beehaw is still defederated from lemmy.world, my mistake.

Nearly a year later, it’s obvious that the decisions of beehaw admins during that critical period of time when redditors were first trying Lemmy were highly disruptive towards the development of the platform as a whole. The first level of disruption came from the direct fragmentation of communities caused by that defederation decision.

The second and more devastating impact was the impact on the perceptions of new users, who were given a manifestation of their worst fears about Lemmy and it’s federated structure. Many potential users were turned off Lemmy because they didn’t like the fact that they could suddenly be blocked off from major communities on other servers due to arbitrary admin decisions, and beehaw essentially provided the perfect example of that at a critical growth phase.

At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.

With regard to lemmy.ml, I think the main issue is that beehaw has disabled downvotes. The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers. But because beehaw doesn’t allow downvotes, has dwindled to a small userbase, and has isolated itself from other non-extremist servers (SJW), you have been left much more exposed to the tankie propaganda, with your only recourse being the nuclear option of defederation.

Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

I don’t mean this to be an attack on the beehaw admins, because I think they have done a number of great things for Lemmy and the fediverse and I believe that our objectives are generally aligned. But I feel that I must express these frustrations, because as I have just explained, the actions of the beehaw admins also have direct consequences on fediverse users from other servers.

I think that beehaw admins, not dissimilarly to hexbear admins, tend to disregard how their actions impact the fediverse as a whole and focus solely on the proximate impact on their own userbase. This is a faulty mindset, because the fediverse is the ecosystem which we all share, and that ecosystem needs to be protected and maintained in order for all of the different organisms (instances) residing therein to thrive. Without our connection to the fediverse, all of our instances would simply wither away.

Nobody said the US doesn’t have a class system? Also the person you’re responding to appears to be a kiwi, not an American.

Non-Americans making fools out of themselves while trying to casually denigrate the US is one of my favorite internet traditions. It’s especially entertaining because there are plenty of valid criticisms, but people often seem to go for the most lazy, inaccurate generalizations and reveal their ignorance.

If you have any Lain/Lain-adjacent content feel free to post it over at !lain@sh.itjust.works

It is what it is. When the app is this good, the warning doesn’t matter all that much. You can tell by the activity on this community that Sync is one of the most popular apps anyway.

Btw, that’s the first time I’ve seen the redesigned join-lemmy site and it’s pretty slick imo. Not sure when they updated it, but it definitely didn’t look like that when I joined 😅

This website is very helpful for finding communities and instances

You could also try the Scaled algorithm, which was recently added with the new update. It’s supposed to adjust for the size of the community so that the posts from large communities don’t overwhelm your feed

Yeah for sure, we have a lot of growing ahead of us before Lemmy truly establishes its own culture.

I would say that my personal experience has been that there is a significantly higher proportion of non-American Lemmings, as opposed to redditors. Like if reddit is 50% American, my feeling is that Lemmy is closer to 30% American. You can even tell when the Europeans wake up and are active, because they comprise such a large portion of the userbase.

It’s hard for me to assess if that is reflected in the political content, because I always mostly ignored communities of that type, both on reddit and here.