Hey kbinMeta.
Given the news that beehaw.org are defederating from two of the largest Lemmy instances due to issues with moderation, I thought it may be worth @ernest considering closing registrations here, for a while at least.
I’ve seen that a handful of other kbin instances have been spun up, however, kbin.social currently dwarfs their user numbers. kbin.social is currently sat at over 28,000 registered users, with the next highest, fedia.io sitting at around 3,000 users. I may be incorrect on this, but as far as I’m currently aware, @ernest is the only admin, I believe he may have mentioned that he’s taken a couple of additional trusted users on board, but at this time, I can’t find receipts to back that up, however, I am aware of the immense pressure that @ernest is in to keep things not only running smoothly, but also moving forward.
The workload overwhelmed me, and I couldn’t read all your messages.
This is in relation to account deletion requests alone, and understandably, this explosion in popularity and userbase was not only unexpected for @ernest, but possibly also for the platform itself:
Apparently fedia.io have already disabled open resgistrations due to usercount, (although that may be unverified, as this post from the fedia.io admin doesn’t suggest that, but still food for thought.). This is not the case, they just aren’t federating, as confirmed by Jerry, thanks! I think Jerry’s comment is still very relevant to the topic at hand, however.
Now, I’ve already seen a handful of comments denigrating beehaw.org from some of the defederated site users, as well as users local to kbin.social whose accounts were made after the defederation. This is more than likely to result in kbin.social also being defederated from beehaw.org, if not others. I completely understand that this is the nature of the fediverse, and that no one instance is going to be completely open with every other instance, however, I think it’s worth considering that we “have our own house in order”, namely in the shape of more site-wide moderation, instead of keeping the floodgates open for every reddit refugee or otherwise.
I’m well aware that many may disagree with this, but I think it’s something to consider.
Edit: Edited title of post. I just want to clarify, I don’t mean close registrations for good, just while things calm down a little bit / ernest has chance to get a solid moderation / admin team in place.
If those bad actors in sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world are willing to make an account at a new instance just to send hateful messages on beehaw communities, then it wouldn’t matter if kbin.social closes new registrations because they can just go to any other instance that has open registration to send those messages to beehaw communities.
if the issue is popular instances having higher numbers of bad actors, then thats an issue for beehaw/other safe spaces. Rather than an issue for kbin (at least right now). Either way, Kbin is not advertised nor planned to be a safe space (from my understanding of ernest’s posts). if there are bad actors then they can voice their hate/opinions and get downvoted/reduced. I don’t think anyone on kbin.social cares if there’s a minority of bad actors that might “color the site in a bad light”. Especially since those bad actors aren’t here as of right now.
The solution is for safe spaces like beehaw to continue defederating from popular instances to keep their space “safe”. This will continue to happen whether kbin.social closes registration or not.