What defederating would mean:
- We won’t see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.
Pros:
- There is less confusion, you can’t respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.
Cons:
- We won’t be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won’t see any of our content.
Summary
Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our ‘front page’).
beehaw.org users already can’t see our posts/comments anywhere so it’s not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn’t really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.
What do you think?
My gut feeling is that defederation should be done as little as possible. I’m quite new to all this, but to me, it feels like it should be user preference instead of admin/mod preference. I have no clue whether that is even possible though. Perhaps there should be more filters than just Subscribed, Local and All to alleviate certain issues.
One problem atm is that a user can’t block by instance, just by community or individual users. It seems a lot of people are requesting this ability though so hopefully it gets added in the future.
I think that would be great feature. Do I understand correctly that if a user would want to do that now that they have to set up their own instance and determine what to federate and what not?
Yeah, I’m not sure how complicated it is. With the cloud, getting a server is pretty cheap and easy nowadays and maybe someone already has a Docker image set up to make it as simple as possible. There are step-by-step instructions somewhere.
Yes, that would be perfect and could have avoided beehaw’s decision.
Please don’t defederate. Just have it reserved for actually intentionally malicious or negligent instances.
My choice as well. Take this with a grain of salt tho as I’m new to lemmy so have little history to go on.
I just like it here a lot, and I’m saddened to think that some of my fellow newcomers have crossed the line.
Lets avoid defederating. I am not to sure why beehaw.org defederated Lemmy.world, i understand it’s not a final decision but more of a quick mitigation to deal with de difficulty related to the reddit exodus. Right?
I think we need to avoid defederating as well, should only be used for the most problematic, habitual cases of malicious intent imo.
We need to let this grow and solidify a bit more before we start to really get in the weeds as far as our identity as a community.
But surely we hope that this level of users is permanent? I think it’ll be in place until lemmy has better moderation tools, which could be quite some time. It has the benefit that it is Open Source though so anyone can help.
the level of users is hopefully permanent, but the lack of moderation to adequately deal with it, both from beehaw and lemmy.world, is not
its also a cultural problem, at the moment the culture of the fediverse is still settling and folks are poking and prodding and seeing how much they can get away with
They are waiting for better moderation tools yeah :)
The problem is mainly that open registration allows quick ban evasion, making it very hard to remove bad actors that are using instances with open registration (without admin approval).
But admin approval just slows it down right? Like how is the admin going to know you aren’t a bad actor?
It also really slows down the sign-up process which will cripple the growth of the Fediverse.
Yeah, it’s a pity, this is the worst time for defederation, when the userbase is seeing a boom in growth.
Yeah, it seems some are happy to burn down the whole thing if it means they can rule over the ashes.
What happened? Why are they making this move? I think it’s a bad idea to start defederating, especially this early.
Edit: How effective or practical, for lemmy.world in the future, would a voting system be for defederating? In case it comes to that for us.
Cause it seems like a very dramatic approach, with only a few people making the decision to drop a ton of content yknow.
Not sure if it’s possible even, I know it comes down to our admin, but they seem pretty cool. I dunno just thinking aloud.
They said they couldn’t deal with the level of abuse and spam that came from lemmy.world users. They have a much more restrictive content policy and smaller, centralised moderation team than most other instances which exacerbated the problem.
What’s dumb is that if someone wanted to troll them they could just make an account on any number of smaller instances that they federate with. I mean, eventually they will have to be completely siloed off to prevent outside trolling.
Yeah, I suspect they will move to a whitelist the moment that functionality becomes available. Or just defederate entirely from everything and become a walled garden.
I hope they ran this defederation thing by their users first.
They did not. It was just dumped on everyone earlier today
I’m all for protecting users from bigoted assholes, but I would be very unhappy as one of the users they aim to protect due to feeling as tho they believe they know how to act in the best interest of their users, when they don’t give their community a seat at the grown-ups’ table to make the decision.
I’d rather not be part of an instance in which drastic, sweeping actions are taken without consideration or feedback from their userbase. I’m not even arguing that they are wrong in doing what they did; just that I wouldn’t appreciate being treated like they know what’s best for me. Feels like being treated like a child.
I don’t want to be part of an instance in which I’ll suddenly lose access to content across Lemmy because it’s ‘in my best interest’ according to internet strangers.
With that said, hopefully we stop accruing bigoted assholes here, we get better mod tools, and things can be refederated.
I had an account on beehaw and once I saw the post I immediately created a new account on lemmy.world for the exact reason you described. I don’t want to be cut off or told what I can and can’t see.
That was my thought as well. Seems like a bad idea this early in the social experiment.
Well, we’re the new ones to the social experiment, they were here first :) Disappointing decision though.
That’s fair. Need to check my reddit privilege lol.
So I have an account on beehaw and pointed this out earlier to the admins. Got snapped at because how dare I try and say what they will do in the future. I was also told if they were going to defederate from everyone they already would have. Didn’t really get a response as to what they would do once people start to trolling from other instances. They don’t think it’ll be a problem from what I gathered
If anything this is just going to make them an even larger target for trolling. I don’t have a good solution for what they should do. But it seems that fediverse is antithetical to their goals.
I know. It’s not hard to lie your way into their instance if you really wanted to or one that has criteria to join. I really don’t think they know what they got themselves into with this decision because you’re right, they put a huge target on their backs.
Tbh, that’s kinda hard to believe. I have seen zero malicious activity in my 4 days here. Maybe their standards are just higher than mine, not sure that’s a good thing in this case but whatever. Damn that sucks, beehaw had some good stuff.
Same, I’ve found the attitude really positive here. It reminds me of early Reddit in like 2008.
Yea I’m having quality discussions, the kind that get zero traction on reddit.
Exactly. Relevant discussion has continued to decline and be suppressed by stupid memes and puns. Can barely find any relevant discussion in comments anymore.
On reddit, it wouldn’t be unusual that someone would talk shit to me for having a thought-out, long reply to someone.
It feels like 60% of the users are pissy teenagers spreading anti-intellectualism and another 30% are bots. Aside from a specific few niche subreddits, I don’t miss reddit at all…
One sub I was subbed to literally turned into memes, where even the comments were just links to memes and people carrying out full length discussions that way.
I sort of missed the meme culture period. And I always enjoyed writing, so it’s pretty nice here.
I went and checked reddit for first time today since the 11th and I left right away.
From what I saw on their post, it seems there are bad faith actors registering in lemmy.world just to harass beehaw.org.
Sigh.
Who tf comes online just to troll “beehaw” some obscure instance on an obscure platform? That’s crazy to me lol.
Alt-righters and 4-chan users. They often feel justified thru their delusions and rationalizations.
“Who tf are these people?” Is a question I find myself asking quite often lol.
I mean, there are trolls on Reddit to be fair, it’s not terribly surprising that if a lot of Reddit users move to some place, a bunch of trolls will come with, either because they too don’t like reddit’s changes, or because they see new communities to mess with. And I can imagine that, if someone is a troll and gets enjoyment out of bothering people and causing anger, that a community that is pretty restrictive in it’s rules and tries to maintain a “calm” and “safe” sort of vibe is probably going to be a more satisfying target?
Beyond that, I do think I recall seeing one of the beehaw admins saying something about not wanting theirs to be the place all the redditors move to, because they don’t want keeping the community run and moderated to be a full time thing and because they want quality over quantity, in terms of their community. If they feel like they’re reaching the limit of how big a community they can comfortably handle and dont want it getting much bigger, then a controversial move like this that might lose them some users isn’t going to be a problem for them.
I’m not saying I like this move, I don’t personally have any real stake in it obviously not being hosted on either instance involved but I worry that fragmentation like this while people are starting to really look into the platform as a whole isn’t a great look for lemmy, -but I do get where they are coming from.
Just like kbin, on beehaw the communities are fixed, and only admins can create communities, right?
Yep. It has the benefit that it concentrates the userbase in the existing communities. But it also creates a really static site and is at more risk of moderator abuse.
If reddit taught me anything, it’s a question of when; not if.
What happened? Why are they making this move? I think it’s a bad idea to start defederating, especially this early.
- Beehaw admins explained the move in this post: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
- This post explains what it means for
lemmy.worldandsh.itjust.worksusers: https://lemmy.world/post/149743.
Yea I understand now. Makes sense. They’re trying to curate their own thing. All good. Thanks
Not all good. We should temporarily defederate them until they come to their senses, in fact most instances should do it together. Let them have their walled garden.
All good as in not my thing. I don’t care what they do as a collective, I do know that I wouldn’t want to be apart of some weird spin cycle over there, so I kinda just feel pity for the members tbh.
I want to be in the midst of human suffering, experiencing everything.
Honestly I think this is an interesting real-world experiment in the entire federation paradigm. It’s going to happen again and again, there’s no escaping it. How does the ecosystem work when two large instances can’t communicate directly? We’re going to find out.
It was an issue in Mastodon originally too, but Mastodon added more flexibility to the platform and the nuke option wasn’t the only option.
So we’ll still see posts from beehaw users on other instances that beehaw still federates with?
Will we be able to interact with the above posts (vote / comment)? I’m guessing yes, because the posts would be hosted on those 3rd party instances still federating with beeehaw, not beehaw.
If I inderstand correctly, I’d be in favor of keeping the federation, which in short means “keep interaction with beehaw users through other instances”, even if we lost sync and interaction with “communities / posts in those communities. hosted by beehaw”
Yeah, we can see them and interact with them. But the beehaw users won’t see our comments, the other users on the instance will. So it could be confusing if you were expecting a reply from a beehaw user - as they won’t even be able to see your reply.
I’m not sure how voting works, I guess our votes would count? As the copy is held on the instance? But maybe beehaw users wouldn’t see them.
This is still confusing though. Ideally there’d at least be a warning in the UI that you are replying to a user who won’t see your comment.
Yeah, Lemmy is open source so maybe this will get added. This was meant to be quite a rare edge case unless you were like from some Nazi/racist instance or something though.
Work with the other instances first. Try to find a compromise. This should be done as a very, very last resort. And that’s not the impression I’m getting at all. Just a pain in the ass for users, and barely a hurdle for troll, which I’ve not seen much of on the first place.
I’m not sure we will be able to read beehaw comments & posts, see :
https://lemmy.world/post/149743
or :
https://kbin.social/m/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/t/24341/How-the-beehaw-defederation-affects-us
We see them on other instances, from that post:
Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?
That’s because the “true” version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn’t defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.
The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.
so, if I understand correctly, we wont see them on their own instance, but elsewhere
Yes. We won’t see their own instance at all. What we see from beehaw atm is the outdated copies we have from prior to defederation.
So what happens to the major communities like technology? Are we creating a new one here, or subscribing to a different instance version?
I join the largest existing alternative - for example for technology the lemmy.ml one is already very large so I just join that.
The problem is that since beehaw was the second largest instance before the reddit wave they had quite large communities already. So they naturally will attract subs. In fact they probably attracted quite a few from the two instances that now can’t access them and probably can’t actually unsub from.
With lenny.ml and other instances able to access them it’s likely they will be the community for at least some topics. Which we won’t be able to access. So it’s not as simple as let them do their own thing and we do ours.
This could lead to people leaving the blocked instances for others with access to the big communities. Till those instances run afoul of beehaws sensibilities. With lemmy as a whole losing users each time.
Edit: I think I might be wrong here
They might also remove the block again in the future when moderation tools have improved and/or lemmy.world does a better job at vetting users, and then it would work better to have never blocked them.
That’s basically what they said they’d do
Except their perspective of “when moderation tools have improved” is “when our users can use other instances but their users aren’t allowed here”
This keeps coming up but like… So? If beehaw users are putting good content up on a sh.itjust.works community, and making good replies and stuff, who cares if I can’t go do the same on their semiprivate instance? I’m just happy to have the user.
I don’t see any problem with that. They want their own little community.
Then they could have that but still contribute to the wider “threadiverse”.
This whole defederation situation seems like putting the power in the hands of the wrong people.
Users should choose what they want to see/interact with. Maybe subs/mods. Not entire servers imho.
If certain subs on beehaw want to restrict access, fine because users choose to participate. If users want to restrict themselves or control their own experience, fine because it only impacts them. But when it’s done at a server level you have given too much power to people that aren’t part of your community.
Or maybe I’m wrong… I’m new
users do have that choice, by making a new account on any other instance or maintaining multiple
Yeah, Beehaw administrators said in their post that this was not really on moral or ethical grounds but just about it being really hard to moderate an influx of users from another instance. They have their registration behind an application for a reason, after all. Having a giant instance with open registration have free reign on their community kind of defeats that purpose. They also said the defederation isn’t meant to be permanent, but rather it’s a stop gap solution until there’s better moderation tools.
To simplify it as much as i can, defederation should be read only. Not if(in our group/(then)they have access
The instance itself shoud be able to say it does not want content created from a subset of the internet. (Personally Its not my first choice as a freedom of speech advocate. But for them to delcare who is welcome to talk in their house is a decent compromise.)
To benefit the federation as a whole, the information and conversations taken place there should be available to the whole of the hive.
The mods could have their pie not needing more hands to manage the influx, the fediverse would have their pie with more content as a whole. ie more information available to more people at a loss of fewer availible accounts with acces to comment within restricted instances.
Defederation to me == we cant moderate the collective to our standards.
We cant moderate the collective to our standards =/= IF Y’ALL BADDIES FUCKING READ OUR SECRETS WE’LL DO SOMETHING NAUGHTY
We have the technology to find a middle ground.
I still don’t understand the decision beehaw made
They circled their wagons due a perceived threat to a small population of their user base, of which they feel is their responsibility to protect.
I constantly shit on Beehaw, however I can’t blame them for this. There is a huge influx of random people joining all these federated sites and high potential for pieces of shit coming in to troll sensitive individuals.
I’ve seen people make analogies between Lemmy instances and email servers, but I don’t think it’s a great comparison. I think a better one would be ports on a trade route in the old sailing ship days. People are from different port cities, but they get on a ship and go to other ports and trade/interact with the people there.
So with that analogy, the port city of Beehaw is one with more restrictive laws about behavior: if you aren’t generally respectful of others, they toss you out. There was a sudden influx at Beehaw of crowded ships from the ports of Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works, both ports with less restrictive, more wild west attitudes. They found that their sheriffs were spending all their time tossing people who came from ships with one of those two flags, so they decided not to let those ships dock at their port anymore, or let their ships dock at those ports, for now.
That’s not half bad
Now im sitting here wondering if I offended anyone over there lol. It’s hard to imagine, but since I’ve seen no bad actors myself, I’m starting to think that it’s possible I did, unknowingly, with zero intent to do so, and they just have a really strict thing going on. I doubt it’s the case, or I hope not at least.
No it wasn’t you. There were a couple of accounts that went in and spammed a whole bunch of bigoted posts.
Ahh whew. Lol. Ya that’s messed up. 😕
It isn’t the case.
The first problem was actual trolls using were using lemmy.world’s open and automated registration (beehaw makes you write why you want to join and manually approves registrations based on that) to troll Beehaw.
The second problem was that the moderation tools aren’t mature enough yet to deal with problem one with anything between manually banning every troll (which will immediately come back by creating another lemmy.world account) and total defederation from the instances most of those trolls are coming from.
Because Beehaw’s mission statement is to be a safe space, it was decided to go with the defederation option.
However, the defederation isn’t planned to be permanent. Improvements in mod tools and/or maturing of communities are said to be reasons to refederate again.
Edit: spelling
Thanks for the info. I can see the logic on their part.
Doubtful you offended anyone. I think beehaw was seeing serious things like child porn and anti-LGBT posts, and traced them back to lemmy.world or the other one.
OK thanks for reassuring me, I know people are pretty sensitive anymore, and I’m out of the loop ftmp on PC culture, and while I’m extremely progressive in every facet of my life, I still worry…but I think that’s just a me problem tbh.
I don’t either.
They were struggling with moderation, and a disproportionate number of people they were addressing were coming from those two instances, which happen to have open registration.
Not sure I agree or not, but thats what they said
What’s the deal with beehaw? Can anyone Eli5?
The main thing is that beehaw has an application process for creating a new account, while most lemmy instances do not. They defederated because they were struggling to keep troublesome people out since banned users could just create a new account on another instance and get back in.
Their moderation/admin policy is very strict, and they only have a few admins to manage it.
Beehaw mods want more curation of users and content on their instance and they think the mod tools available to them are not sufficient to handle users coming from other instances so they decided to defederate a couple of instances, from which, they say, too many trolls are coming due to their open registration policy.
Or… here’s a wild idea… let instances do what they want?
If an instance wants to act the fool or allow trolls to overrun their space, then another instance can choose to not want anything to do with it.
They can do what they want though. But so can lemmy.world
Hey, I agree with you BTW. That’s kinda how the Fediverse works. I don’t need access to everything and everything doesn’t need access to me-- and that’s true for everybody.
That’s why I stuck around, I guess. If I really want to access an instance that badly, there’s always RSS.
