Seems like beehaw is doing everything they can to isolate themselves from the community. They seem to have good intentions but they are way too uptight.
Less than an hour ago, I was reporting some pretty vile shit that was being spammed on some of their places I was subscribed to. It was a lot, all at the exact same time. If they are getting coordinated attacks like that regularly, I’m not sure I can really blame them for wanting to wait for the tools they need to keep it in check.
I saw the same thing, lots of slurs being thrown around. I blocked the individual users. I’m not on either instance so I can still see both
The stuff I saw was worse than just slurs. One was a meme about murdering drag performers. Really hateful shit.
Have these instances blocked the known shit lists yet? There are some well known block lists on mastodon that every admin should have here
Lemmy and Kbin should ship with these nazi block lists built in
We need to crowd source a common list of instances to block from users and mods across the network for instances to use, like people on Mastodon started doing. It was really effective. Defederation is really the only way to deal with / only check on users that sign up on instances that don’t moderate them at all in order to harass others with impunity, since moderators can’t effect users on s different instance and so it basically gives such users free reign. That’s why IMHO defederation is a REALLY crucial tool to make this place livable, otherwise it’d be filled with trolls doing their thing with absolute impunity and there would be nothing mods, who are supposed to be the first line of defense for that kind of thing, could do,
Beehaw has good intentions, but I don’t know if those intentions are entirely compatible with the fundamental architecture of Lemmy.
They literally are because being able to defederate is part of the fundamental architecture of fediverse apps. And defederating from instances that are putting the kind of content into your community that you don’t want is… like, that ability is one of the core selling points of fediverse apps.
Yes, but in their post they wrote about how the large influx of users from other instances made their specific goals too hard to accomplish.
It wasn’t a philosophical difference with lemmy.world, which is a case that federation would have worked well with, it was simply that there were enough new users that they couldn’t maintain the tighter moderation that they want. And that’s fine, they have the right to administer their instance however they’d like, but if they are having trouble with new users from lemmy.world then they’re going to have trouble with any federation with enough cumulative users.
From a purely operational standpoint, rapid growth stresses a network service not only in its technical capacity, but also in the ability of the service’s operators to keep up with fighting fires. Engineering capacity to work on a service is itself a limiting factor on healthy growth.
If the tools aren’t yet there to mitigate a rapid growth in abuse problems, then it just makes sense for them to limit their exposure to the rapid-growth part of the network. It takes time to write those tools.
The main issue with an instance such as lemmy.world is that they don’t vet people at all. Beehawk manually approves their users, but that becomes kinda pointless when anyone can just create an account on lemmy.world and then go post on beehawk.
Yeah, but then is Beehaw just going to defederate with every instance that has open registration or limited vetting, past a certain user threshold?
That includes lots of instances. Kbin.social has open registration and is growing, for example.
At that point, is a federated social network really what served their goals?
Writing a paragraph about why you want to join isn’t necessarily a great vetting process though
But isn’t that true of many more smaller instances as well? Will Beehaw defederate from everyone?
Sure, there are smaller instances that don’t vet, but according to the beehawk admins, they aren’t an issue in terms of moderation, probably because of their small size. If other instances were to cause an immense need for increased moderation, I’m sure they will defederate from them as well.
Also the admins made it clear that this is supposed to be a temporary action until they are able to effectively moderate their community according to their rules and goals.
I disagree with that assessment, and it doesn’t match with what they said in the post. 4 bullets justified the decision, all of which outlined philosophical differences to my eyes.
It’s true that in the future, they may have sufficient mod tools/capacity to overcome these philosophical differences with brute force. But at minimum, it is a union of both practical ability and philosophical differences that led to this decision and that is totally in line with the decentralized nature of the fediverse.
I don’t know if it was the right decision for them. Time will tell. But being able to make those decisions on their own judgment is crucial to the longterm health of the system. We’re two outsiders to Beehaw. I can’t speak for you, but personally, I chose not to register at Beehaw because I didn’t like the sound of a more curated safe space. I also chose not to register at Lemmy.world, because there are things about it that rubbed me the wrong way, too. That’s a crucial part of how the fediverse is supposed to work.
What about lemmy.world rubbed you the wrong way?
Hard to say since it’s totally subjective. I’m not in love with Lemmy as an ActivityPub service to start with. Devs have enough closet skeletons and the UX just seemed… not my style. Lemmy World, at least from the join list, had zero personality. It also expanded incredibly quickly, to the point that I truly am skeptical any kind of local moderation is going to be possible for a while. I have a feeling I am going to have to start filtering content from it myself – my front page is being absolutely assblasted with porn, stupid memes, and low-effort posts all coming in from LW already.
Long term? Probably not a big deal. But in these early days, it is a turnoff. LW is a firehose right now, and the mod tools available are not yet up to that task.
None of these issues are fundamental. They stem from poor planning from the mod team. You cannot moderate all of the largest communities with four mods for ALL communities.
they are way too uptight.
I don’t get why people have such a hard time seeing how hard effective moderation of 100’000s of people is… The people running lemmy aren’t companies or businesses, they are hobbyists… They do all the administration and moderation in their spare time… Taking care of the server cost is one thing, but moderation is no joke… Especially when the tools provided are also build by hobbyists who have been building this in their spare time as well…
And it’s better to act when you notice that you cannot effectively moderate when things are relatively harmless… Because what happens when trolls notice that they cannot moderate effectively and actually post harmful content, like threats, cp, etc?
*> *- -
Gotta say this being one of my first impressions of lemmy… Its not great. Beehaw had a large tech and gaming section that I literally only just subbed too.
Welcome to human nature.
It’s easy to look at Reddit or any other communities and pin the blame all the bad things on mods, admins, or whoever in charge. However, the truth is, anyone who gets in any position of power will make decisions that may not benefit the larger whole or reflect the community at large. Lemmy will deal with this, just as Reddit dealt with it (and succeeded in spite of it).
Yea I mean I get it. It just sucks that this is the first real experience I am having with this system. Would have been nice to get a little more experience under my feet before having to deal with this. I suppose this should be expected. Lemmy is likely experiencing some extreme growing pains unlike anything it has seen before.
I totally understand that while this is an annoyance at the end of the day this is likely still a more desirable outcome then what is happening with Reddit. At least here that set of admins can only do so much damage to the overall system while the Reddit admins have total control over the whole system.
This seems to be new frontier for a lot of users. Lemmy is like Reddit in a lot of ways but so much different in so many more ways. As new users, we’re pretty much guinea pigs (or lemmings, I guess) and I imagine there’s going to be a lot of this in the weeks to come.
Would have been nice to get a little more experience under my feet before having to deal with this
This is experience! If Lemmy works out, we’ll be able to say we helped pave the way!
Hmm.
Consider that Beehaw is more comparable to a major subreddit already. Lets say /r/wsb was having issues with new trolling users and they decide to go private for a week to preserve their culture (and have done in the past before).
Now instead of “just” one subreddit making that decision, the entire alignment of Beehaw (including all their communities) made a decision in one fell swoop.
No matter how you look at it, this is better for the Beehaw community already than what we’ve had in Reddit. And yeah, it sucks for us here in lemmy.world to not talk with Beehaw and for those users to not talk with us for now, but like /r/wsb, there’s no reason why this has to be a permanent defederation. They can refederate after this “Reddit Boom” and when traffic slows down maybe a week or two from now and their moderators/admins can keep up with the new influx of users.
From the perspective of “What Lemmy-software needs to do”, perhaps a “super-moderator”, below Admin but above moderator who has access to user-bans and/or user-vetting is what’s needed for this community. That way, Beehaw and Lemmy.world can re-federate, Beehaw can appoint community leaders who can perform user-vetting (Gmail-like invitations), but Beehaw admins remain the admins. And they get to have tight control over poorly-behaving users from other instances (ie: blocking them out entirely until they’re vetted or invited in).
Isn’t that a bit entitled? Reddit was a company who made money with their users, but Lemmy isn’t run by a company, it’s run by volunteers. Running a small server is one thing, but who is going to moderate content from 100’000s of users, content generated by an instance that doesn’t even have any basic restrictions on it’s userbase? What if a large group of people start spamming illegal shit? What if there is suddenly cp showing up on your server instance? Who is going to deal with that, what are the legal implications for that?
One might assume they quit their server, but they didn’t… They just temporarily disabled federation because they feel that they don’t have the capabilities to moderate that many users… You can still apply for a local account on their instance, you can still browse their content without an account…
EDIT: You can even still browse content from beehawk and comment on it, but comments made from lemmy.world will not be visible by beehawk.
Excuse me? I support the beehawk admin’s decisions, it’s a very sensible decision that I suspect other instances will have to seriously consider soon as well because moderation will be an important issue very soon.
My point is that the commenter I replied to and many users who are complaining about this decision, about how “it splits the community in two” and about how “this is classic reddit behaviour” are acting a bit entitled as they don’t seem to be aware of the immense problems that come with moderation, especially when you do it as a hobby…
@aski3252 I understand after I read the reason why they defedersted. Up to them. I bet people will leave over there also because of that. They where told ehrnt hry come to lemmy that they can see all post and commryfeom every instant. S popular defederates.snd that makes people wonder. Admins have a lot of power. But also ok the flip side Reddit mods can ban people and make the sub private and no one can do anything about it… I guess it’s just life
They where told ehrnt hry come to lemmy that they can see all post and commryfeom every instant.
An important part of federation is that you can freely choose who you want to federate with and who not.
S popular defederates.snd that makes people wonder.
Why does it make people wonder when they did a great job explaining why they made their decision and even made a post warning people that they might have to defederate?
But also ok the flip side Reddit mods can ban people and make the sub private and no one can do anything about it…
And that’s the entire point of the whole thing… The entire point is that anyone can create a community that they can run however they want (as long as it doesn’t impact other communities)… Moderation isn’t a bad thing, it’s a necessary thing… Nobody wants illegal pornography and harmful material on their servers…
And beehawk is and always has been very open about them wanting to be a safe space community with strong moderation… They openly state that their entire motivation for creating their community is to have much stronger moderation than in other social media sites…
Yes, if my instance unfederated with beehaw I’d have to find a new instance, those two !communities are too large a portion of the current fediverse activity.
This is bad for fediverse adoption, even if there is merit to the behavioural issues.
It would be good if Lemmy server tools allowed admins to remove an instance from their front-page without stopping user access.
I think the general perspective on beehaw needs to change. There’s no way they can realistically continue to maintain the largest communities on the threadiverse with only four mods and this is exactly why they should have never let themselves get in that position in the first place.
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Yeah whitelist feels like the best option for them and the larger threadiverse community.
I think a whitelist is worse. While it gives them more control, it also essentially shuts out smaller instances and can lead to the existing instances becoming entrenched and hard to replace. I’m also not sure if would be a good move ‘politically’ for the admins. People are going to treat whatever is whitelisted as being endorsed by them.
The main advantage that I see is that they will almost certainly fall out of favor with the majority of the larger threadiverse community. They cannot continue to operate all of the largest communities with a mod team of 4 but seemingly have no plans to change it. They need to be ok with changing their stated relation to the larger threadiverse or they will be doing real damage to the larger community.
Allowing instances to use a whitelist instead of a blacklist is actually a really bad idea. It makes the default not being federated with anything, which makes it far easier to create centralized isolated silos that it’s hard to move off of while staying in contact with, and in general would just destroy the interconnected nature of the fediverse
If you care about these sorts of things, Allowlist and Blocklist are the preferred terms these days.
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I really don’t think it’s a power grab thing. Just a lack of forethought.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25114
Called this becoming an issue on my first day here. Beehaw seems like a very sensitive group of people. Which is fine but just means we need to restart some of the popular communities they had on more open-minded servers.
I feel that I should also mention that I understand and respect the rationale given by the beehaw admins for defederation. I think they made the correct decision for their community. Just kinda sucks for us.
Well I’ll take this opportunity to invite everyone over to The Garden : a bed for gardeners and everyone else to grow their roots and thrive. We have open registration and community creation.
Awesome. Love to see new instances with a wholesome theme. General purpose servers are nice, but I’m really excited for the possibilities of servers with better defined userbases built around certain locations, interests, or ideologies. That would really unlock the possibilities of federation
None of these issues are fundamental. They stem from poor planning from the mod team. You cannot moderate most of the largest communities on the threadiverse with four mods for ALL communities.
That… didn’t last long. It’s a shame as a lot of the communities I subscribe to are there, but I don’t have an interest in joining a restrictive instance like theirs. This really highlights the fragility of these self-hosted instances and the platform in general.
I’m hoping someone builds a client that lets you transparently log in to multiple users and get a mixed feed from all of their sources.
There’s the potential to do that. But at that point you’re essentially a full blown lemmy instance, minus publishing. I’m hosting my own because I’m a masochist/interested in the tech, and going out and finding groups to add to mine is essentially what I’ve done all evening. Limited registration and I’m getting feeds from both of these servers on my client.
As they mentioned their decision is effective immediately and it looks like their users can’t interact with the defederated ones but the instances that federate with them can interact there. Isn’t this just a win-win for everybody?
I think this is going to produce some interesting results, which will likely help progress Lemmy as a whole.
One of the regular topics coming up is users not knowing which instance they should create a user on, and what the implications of being a user on a particular instance are. This change by the Beehaw is going to clarify some of the implications and help drive people towards one instance or another, or even to have multiple accounts on different instances.
I think this will increase the adoption of Beehaw for users that the Beehaw admins are looking for in their community, which benefits the Beehaw instance. Conversely, I think the more general communities on Beehaw that aren’t there specifically for the community Beehaw is trying to foster will likely migrate to the equivalent communities on other instances and settle there. While Beehaw was popular and federated it made sense to subscribe to technology@beehaw.org, but now it’s defederated I’d expect an equivalent community on a more permissive and widely federated instance to gain traction.
Right now it feels pretty disruptive. Arguably this occurring now with a relatively small number of users (thousands rather than millions) affected is preferable and will help shake out these issues, which will make it smoother for future users.
It will help Lemmy become more resilient. The tooling to help manage an instance defederating is also likely to be useful for instances going offline, or otherwise disconnecting from the fediverse. Better that that tooling is in place early.
Arguably this occurring now with a relatively small number of users (thousands rather than millions) affected is preferable and will help shake out these issues, which will make it smoother for future users.
I disagree, lemmy is seeing a temporary boost from all of us reddit refugees. We need content and a welcoming community for everyone to stay. This sort of infighting and politicking is going to come across as toxic and exactly the sort of thing redditors wanted to get away from.
If it were done later when the fediverse is bigger and more stable with enough critical mass of content, separating will affect more users but it will be least disruptive to the fediverse as a whole.
I can see your point and do agree that it’s disruptive now. It also exacerbates the difficulty of learning a new platform. Despite that though I think the early adopters are best equipped to cope with that. They’re already dealing with rough tooling and little documentation, official or social.
In terms of it happening when Lemmy, or even the fediverse as a whole, is bigger, if there aren’t tools and practices in place to manage it I think the impact would be significantly more detrimental. Without it happening in ‘the early days’ those tools and practices are a lot less likely to be developed.
We need content and a welcoming community for everyone to stay.
I think that idea is exactly what both Beehaw and lemmy.world are trying to do. I don’t know all the thinking of the instance admins, but from my observations I see Beehaw prioritising their community and lemmy.world prioritising federation and availability. I don’t see it as ‘infighting and politicking’, just co-existing view points for managing instances. To put it in terms of popular monolithic platforms, I’d imagine there would be a bit of a shakedown if 4chan, reddit, slashdot, digg, et al. started federating. I’ll not attempt to draw parallels between lemmy instances and other platforms, that’s above my pay grade :)
I imagine we’ll end up with a spectrum of instances with varying degrees of federation and permisiveness, and that the directory services that are popping up will continue to improve to help you find and instance that works for you.
I think one of the challenges with migration is that reddit doesn’t map one-to-one with Lemmy. With a monolithic platform, centralised admin can enforce the types of things I think your hoping for. On Lemmy I think inter-instance differences are inevitable, while on reddit the concepts didn’t exist for it to become possible. Working through how those are handled will result in Lemmy as a whole improving.
I’m pretty optimistic about it.
As a redditor it seems like scary infighting
As a lemmonereringer it seems intriguing, im interested where this goes and i will follow up on the development
As a drun,k im drunk👍
“subreddit drama” on steroids. The politics of federation might take substantial airtime in lemmy
Sounds like you had a fun evening!
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I know we can have multiple accounts (and I am sure apps will help the experience), but I almost signed up for Beehaw as it was big and chose here
I am glad I didn’t sign up and will probably unsubscribe to anything I was subbed to there as I can’t post, maybe I’ll signup so I can just in case there’s anything interesting…
I was thinking about the multiple accounts thing. Maybe the concept of an “instance” needs to be separate from the concept of an account? Like, it doesn’t matter what service you choose for your email account; you can email anyone from Gmail, and anyone can send email to you. The only real difference is that your email address end in “@gmail.com” instead of “@comcast.net”.
On Lemmy, though, the place you make your account matters a whole lot. It determines what content you’re allowed to see, and who you’re allowed to interact with. If the instance you’re on gets federated, you need to migrate to a different account on a different instance. That never happens with email!
A lot of users have been managing this by creating their own instance, with the sole purpose of hosting their account and nothing else. Maybe that’s what we need: a set of “instances” that only host accounts, and a set of “instances” that only host communities. You could then use that account to subscribe to communities from any instance. That way, Beehaw could block content from instances they don’t like, without cutting off all of the users who happened to choose the wrong place to sign up.
Actually, under that system, there wouldn’t be a need for instances to federate content with each other at all. Users could just subscribe to communities with their account, and then the users would be the ones in charge of what they see, instead of their instance choosing for them.
I think it’ll take a little while to settle down, but I’d expect the communities to congregate on more permissive, well federated servers. In the short term I’m doing similar to you what you proposed, e.g. having accounts on various servers, but I expect the need for this to go away as things settle down. I already focus on a couple of instances more than others.
I do think that less permissive instances will still thrive though, although maybe not so much for general content. That may change as more granular controls and better tools emerge so it’s less of an ‘all or nothing’ approach to federating.
Mod heavy people always talk about this supposedly huge influx of trolls, toxicity, spam that they have to moderate, but I just don’t see it. I’m not sure that I have seen even a single post that obviously needed to be moderated this week. Maybe I’m just not looking in the right communities?
There are a few other commenters on this post that mention seeing mass spamming of slurs and a meme about killing drag performers. I see no reason to doubt the explanation given by the mods. Of course trolls would target beehaw, because that community made such a big deal of being nice and positive. It’s just a shitty situation all around.
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Enabling downvotes is specific to the instance’s own communities, no?
i think they’re anticipating it.
also, there’s a false accusation there. i had to register my email with lemmy world
The modlog is public at /modlog/ on the server if you’re interested enough to review it.
approx 25% of the banned posts are deserved
As I was posting in the other thread, they are blocking almost 300 communities and the reason for these last two is that having four mods they can’t keep up with the huge influx of users. What is worse, they call it temporary until there are better moderation tools, but reading further what they hope for is the ability to block external users while allowing theirs to browse other communities
There’s no way they can reasonably continue to host the largest threadiverse instances with this plan.
The solution is easy, the other lemmy instances can simple defederate beehaw in return and create new communities.
For real, fuck 'em they clearly want some setup where they are the center of the fediverse that benefits only their users and be an exclusive club. They want their cake and eat it too, but also force everyone else to watch. Then did this at a pretty crucial point in Lemmy’s growth
Sounds kinda like they are trying to grab “power” aka. growing their community more than others through exclusivity.
Well if that turns out to be the case other communities can probably just block them in return, but still not a fan of that development
I got that vibe when I saw that they intentionally keep their rules vague, to make them harder to evade. That just sounded to me like a recipe for power tripping.
Isn’t federation symmetrical? So if they defederate most of the Fediverse, they will not be able to interact with it?
I think it’s logical to keep it that way.
They’re prompting the devs to make defederation one way. So they can block the fediverse at large from interacting with them but their users still have access to everything. Sets a bad example. The pitch is a pooled community. Not a series of tiny insulated Reddits using the same software
I agree. It makes it cost a bit more to defederate and therefore more valuable to keep everything open and available. The best thing with reddit was that it was a one-stop shop while it’s a bit more confusing with this federation stuff. If this defederation wasn’t a two-way street, it would make for weird exclusive instances that could thrive on others content without contributing.
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That’s pretty big. I wasn’t a huge fan of everything they were doing, though. From all the communities I saw from Beehaw, they were all generic, cookie cutter ones that seemed to be trying to fill the default subs from Reddit. Gaming, Politics, Space, etc. All simple ones with the same icons and everything. I assume they were all ran by the same group of people, which loses the community feel I appreciate about most other instances.
I assume they were all ran by the same group of people
Yup, that’s correct. Beehaw’s 4 admins run every communty on there
Hot take — maybe it was Beehaw that was getting too big too quickly, then?
They decided to take on an enormous workload, running so many communities, communities that then became the defacto standard communities for those topics.
The thing that makes this notable is that those beehaw communities were the largest and therefore defacto defaults.
Yeah, I do appreciate what they were trying, but making communities with the purpose of being popular default ones and then giving up as soon as the site starts to grow is not great.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Like “oh, no, we made popular communities and now we have too many people”. Like, idk t they expected.
Interested to see what they mean by bad behavior? Also, what a terrible, dumb decision. Beehaw always seemed like it was ran by uptight former big subreddit mods.
This is the downside of federated sites like this. While one person can’t take the whole thing down, there’s lots of small groups that can do stuff like this. Beehaw has dome of the biggest communities, and a small group just shut them down for a lot of people. And you can’t sign up to their community, without a completely opaque sign up process that barely works.
They lay it out very clearly in their long-winded “philosophy of beehaw” post (which you must read prior to application): anyone being a jerk because of bigotry or because the people in charge don’t like them or are having a bad day or feel like exercising their power or they are not sufficiently singing along.
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I see several comments talking about this being a wrong decision, or Beehaw needing to change its attitude etc. I think these opinions come from a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of federation. Federation is not about all the instances coming together to cater to our needs. It’s about each instance doing its own thing, and communities will form around the ones that cater to them. In other words, we don’t need Beehaw to budge on its decision, we need to build the community we want without Beehaw, while Beehaw caters to the users who aren’t in this with us.
As long as beehaw is only de-linking these instances rather than actually blocking them, doesn’t that still allow them to pull new posts and comments from beehaw? It’s like the no-participation mode that r/bestof uses.
Federation works in the opposite direction. It’s push-based rather than pull-based. To get posts from Beehaw, Beehaw has to actively push those posts to your instance. With this move, Beehaw is choosing to no longer push posts to lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
Got it, this makes sense now. So in the case where I setup myownlemmy.com, I actually won’t be able to get any content to my Lemmy unless I tell other instance admins I exist and they push their content to me. But then let’s say lemmygrad starts pushing me their stuff and I’m like whoa don’t want all that, blocked.
So i guess that this solves the big problem short term. The influx has been the first growing pain. But long term it does nothing. They will get caught defederating from smaller instances over and over. Anyone that jumps in from smaller instances will be able to carry on, at least how i understand it. The cream will rise to the top eventually, but such a strong declaration so early isnt a good sign. If the mods from any large instance decide that “this is too much, ban them” is the best response, the lemmy community is destined to be a fractured mess, rather than a reddit killer or a reddit refugee state.
I guess, imo, i get it. 100% understand from a moderation point of view. But im frustrated that there is this big of a fold the first week of real volume. The cesspool will exist in any instance. But going thermobaric this early leads to nukes next week. And it may be a sign of why a strong corporate arm and direction, as much as we hate it, is currently the winning scenario. Unfederated control is powerful. The hydra has been unleashed, but for each head you cut off, three more appear.
IDK, the creator of that instance just started it as a little side project. I don’t get the sense they ever really expected for it to blow up or were trying to make it a “main instance”.
If anything this is just a reminder that instances aren’t nodes in the same service. They will all have their own culture, goals and philosophy.
Is there a summary somewhere of each instance’s “reputations”? Most descriptions I see are just things like “A place for everyone”. It’s kind of frustrating that new users are told to join any server, because it’s all federated, and then go oops sorry you joined the Nazi server, sucks for you.
Well, to be fair. If you join the nazi server and stick around, i dont have much sympathy. Lets be honest, there will be hints.
It’s the internet. Make a new account on a better place. For fucks sake you can probably keep the same username with zero repercussions. It isnt really a loss.
It took me all of 15 minutes to repopulate my subscribed list when i picked a dead end community. And when my current one fails, i can literally do the same again. It isnt a loss. My goal at a certain point is to maintain some semblance of anonymity anyways. I had countless reddit accounts over the past 12 years. Why would i be worried now?
I used an extreme example, but it’s not always that obvious that you’re on a server that’s going to offend the wrong instance admin. Some don’t want to associate with porn, others “tankies”. In this case, lemmy.world’s offense was simply being “too big”.
I get that a lot of redditors are used to creating alts and throwaway accounts. I just don’t want to have to do that constantly as a workaround for communities disappearing from my feed due to defederation.
How much effort did you have to put into Reddit to prevent subreddits from disappearing due to going private?
In the Fediverse, there’s one more layer of indirection. The instance. For better or worse, Beehaw controls some of the largest groups, whether or not that’s due to their moderators or whatever that’s on them.
I imagine that we’re mostly Reddit refugees right now, this concept of “instance” is alien to all of us. But its really not much different than a “group of subreddits” that somehow got a magic wand and was able to go private together (or share users, etc. etc.).
I remember in Reddit, tons of communities would go private all the time, mostly because they got trolled so hard by other invaders that they had to do so to protect their culture. Whether that’s the “trolls fault” or the “community’s fault” depends on the instance. But it looks like Lemmy / Fediverse has new tools to deal with this age old issue.
I get that it’s very similar to subreddits going private, and that we have no control over that when it happens. I just find it very disruptive to lose 1/3 of my communities all at once due these events.
The draw of the fediverse is all this interconnectedness. But with people being so divisive these days, it just feels like the end will be siloed walled gardens everywhere. If I need a dozen logins to participate in the communities I want, it just defeats the whole purpose, and we might as well go back to old school single-topic forums.
I just find it very disruptive to lose 1/3 of my communities all at once due these events.
I think that’s fair. And I think those communities aren’t 100% sure what they signed up for when they planted themselves in Beehaw.org.
The draw of the fediverse is all this interconnectedness. But with people being so divisive these days, it just feels like the end will be siloed walled gardens everywhere. If I need a dozen logins to participate in the communities I want, it just defeats the whole purpose, and we might as well go back to old school single-topic forums.
Yes and no. We’re obviously in the learning stages of the Fediverse (at least, in regards to Reddit-like community building). I don’t think its quite time to toss up our hands and give up on it yet.
What does Beehaw teach us? Like, what does it really teach us?
It means that large coalitions of communities are important. That they hold power, that they move as a bloc and that they have influence upon other instances. Is this a bad thing? Will this doom us to single-topic forums?
No. I argue not. What Beehaw wants here is a curated list of users who won’t post pornographic memes to their servers. And lemmy.world, being a de-facto Reddit Refugee site, has a lot of users who will post troll-memes explicitly to piss off people like Beehaw.
From Beehaw’s perspective, they’re trying to experiment with the Fediverse in a way that makes no sense to Reddit users. But… I think I can get behind this. Beehaw wants Fediverse instances to not only be collections of communities, but also of curated, trusted users.
Maybe it works out for them, maybe it doesn’t. But everyone is pretty open about this discussion. I’m not entirely sure if Beehaw’s perspective is in the wrong, even if I don’t plan on joining their server any time soon. I do think it was unfair for the trolls to coordinate a porn-meme-NSFW attack upon them.
But where as in Reddit we would have tossed up our hands and said “Well, the Admins don’t care, this is Reddit, can’t do anything about it but grow thicker skin”… this is the Fediverse now. New options are available, and it makes sense to experiment with them to see if it works.
What’s the ideal future? Well, what if we curated users a bit better? What if user-curation became the norm? Is that too bad to ask for? Why do we have to be stuck in Reddit’s troll-friendly ruleset?
There’s other solutions. Beehaw is saying that if moderation tools got better, maybe they can open back up and reunite with everyone. I dunno what the Lemmy programmers think of that, but maybe that’s solvable on Beehaw’s side with their moderators.
Maybe none of this works out and Beehaw is forced into a private instance (or tightly curated list of isolated Lemmy instances). Is that so bad? No. In this case, a hypothetical “ImNotAnAsshole.org” Lemmy instance may open up that can Federate to both Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org, and one login at “ImNotAnAsshole.org” can serve everybody and keep you united.
I wonder if, in a way, this a phenomenon of perceived scarcity? Unlike the dominant social media platforms, the fediverse isn’t one thing. As you said, the worst that need happen is a shifting of activity congregation. And the more familiar the fediverse becomes, the easier that will be to do.
Reddit refugees are already fracturing between Tildes, Squabbles.io, Lemmy etc.
Tildes? Got any pointers to that one?
An invitation only community https://tildes.net/
Seems weird to me they’re de-federating from world but not from the very problematic ml.
They said it’s mostly about the amount of moderation action they’ve had to take against users from those instances. Maybe lemmy.ml has less users who behave badly outside their server?
I could also see there being a reticence to defederate from the “canonical” instance so to speak.
It could also be that their definition of “bad behavior” is overly broad and thin-skinned. Which fits with everything I’ve seen from there so far.
lemmy.ml is significantly smaller because they chose to point users to other instances and even closed registration at one point to ensure that they could continue to keep up with demand.
This was my first thought, as well.
