Heya! It’s gabe here. The database is 100% restorable, so we will be back sometime. Hopefully sooner rather than later. It’s just been a hell of a time trying to wrangle the instance back online for so many reasons. Each reason just getting more annoying than that last. Doesn’t help I’ve likely been getting sick off and on all week and had a headache and a fever today. I don’t know if the VM was actually hacked or if it was the VPS provider being fucky (probably the VPS hosting provider, they were going up and down like a bouncy ball all week) but I will make a more explaining post as to what exactly happened with the limited info I have. I basically logged in and UFW and fail2ban were simply uninstalled and logs were basically showing nonstop VPS up and down time and I completely panicked. I’m treating it as it if was a hack just to be safe and locking as much as I can down further, but it’s been extra frustrating due to catching what is likely some sort of illness this past week long. At this point the only thing that’s needed from people is just do the usual and change passwords if you used the same password on there as other sites and to be extra safe changing your password when we go back online. I am setting up with a different hosting provider this time and trying my best to fix things back up. I have others I am troubleshooting it with at least.

I honestly feel really shitty about all of it. Not as awful and personally hurt as before, but it still sucks so much and I’m hoping to bring it back up this weekend at the very latest. I’m really sorry :(

If you wanna follow updates I am posting them here: https://sleepy.ink

His comment base seems to be populated en masse by hardcore antisemites even off odysee, which he has literally never addresses. His content is cool sometimes, but it’s just… uhhhh. yeah…

Cautiously optimistic. His community and comments tends to be a mixed bag.

I think the biggest issue they had highlighted (that I witnessed myself, unfortunately) mainly was people with clear bad faith intentions entering beehaw’s spaces designated for discussions of and about vulnerable communities and individuals that beehaw wants to make sure to protect as part of their community ethos. Discussions that were calm and respectful and didn’t devolve into chaos previously due to the barrier blocks in their community quickly fell apart due to large swaths of users who were able to enter the community without any barriers that would have been stopped quickly if they had tried to sign up to beehaw. Like, a lot of it was really was the lack of post restrictions within their local communities. An example off the top of my head, beehaw requires you to fill out a form to basically make sure you are wanting to join in line with their community policies. For those that get the false impression that they are asking for a large essay or were asking for censorship and get dissuaded because of that, beehaws admin seem to feel that is a good deterrent to those who wouldn’t engage in good faith within their community anyway. And it seemed to work on its own, but it quickly fell apart as huge amounts of signups began the surge across the two instances they defederated. Individuals who began to cause problems and enter the communities to troll, were almost all from those instances. It was a matter of they literally can only ban and delete, and with how the modding system in lemmy current system is, it was a losing game of whack a mole they currently cannot win.

A big one is probably mods being able to mark posts as nsfw, ability to set posting restrictions for users with new accounts, less buggy mod queue. As of right now it’s not really feasible for a small team to moderate a large community on lemmy. There was a multitude of tools on Reddit that existed that made larger communities run smoothly, nearly all of which just don’t exist here yet. Just general growing pains of a new platform I think.

They might have implied as such (I don’t personally think they did, but such an observation is objective.), but I myself didn’t in the post above, and to say I did is dishonest. For the record, I believe they did what they had to do with the limited options they currently have. And I did not like it. Hence why I made an account on here as well. It’s not a fascist regime, and I was pointing out the fact that the people acting like it is are being ridiculous. I directly witnessed the reasons why they defederated and quite ironically, an immense rise of interactions escalating precisely like this causing issues in their own communities and limited staffing to address such (especially towards the vulnerable minority communities beehaw wants to protect in ways reddit did not) in a short amount of time is quite exactly why they chose to defederate. Have a lovely day.

Where did I say it was unsafe? I was pointing out the dishonesty people have been showing in regards to discussing the reason why beehaw chose to defederate.

They defederated with the some of the largest instances that have open registration due to the influx of people causing issues in their own communities and the lack of mod tools to address the issue. People are still pissy about it despite beehaw admins stating they will lift the defederation once lemmy mod tools improve…