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, Iām 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. Iām 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 donāt moderate them at all in order to harass others with impunity, since moderators canāt effect users on s different instance and so it basically gives such users free reign. Thatās why IMHO defederation is a REALLY crucial tool to make this place livable, otherwise itād 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 donāt 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 donāt want isā¦ 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 wasnāt 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 couldnāt maintain the tighter moderation that they want. And thatās fine, they have the right to administer their instance however theyād like, but if they are having trouble with new users from lemmy.world then theyāre 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 serviceās 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 arenāt 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 donāt 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 isnāt necessarily a great vetting process though
But isnāt that true of many more smaller instances as well? Will Beehaw defederate from everyone?
Sure, there are smaller instances that donāt vet, but according to the beehawk admins, they arenāt an issue in terms of moderation, probably because of their small size. If other instances were to cause an immense need for increased moderation, Iām 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 doesnāt match with what they said in the post. 4 bullets justified the decision, all of which outlined philosophical differences to my eyes.
Itās 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 donāt 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. Weāre two outsiders to Beehaw. I canāt speak for you, but personally, I chose not to register at Beehaw because I didnāt 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. Thatās a crucial part of how the fediverse is supposed to work.
What about lemmy.world rubbed you the wrong way?
Hard to say since itās totally subjective. Iām not in love with Lemmy as an ActivityPub service to start with. Devs have enough closet skeletons and the UX just seemedā¦ 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 ā 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 donāt get why people have such a hard time seeing how hard effective moderation of 100ā000s of people isā¦ The people running lemmy arenāt companies or businesses, they are hobbyistsā¦ They do all the administration and moderation in their spare timeā¦ Taking care of the server cost is one thing, but moderation is no jokeā¦ Especially when the tools provided are also build by hobbyists who have been building this in their spare time as wellā¦
And itās better to act when you notice that you cannot effectively moderate when things are relatively harmlessā¦ 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 lemmyā¦ Its not great. Beehaw had a large tech and gaming section that I literally only just subbed too.
Welcome to human nature.
Itās 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, weāre pretty much guinea pigs (or lemmings, I guess) and I imagine thereās 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, weāll 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 ājustā 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 weāve 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, thereās no reason why this has to be a permanent defederation. They can refederate after this āReddit Boomā 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 āWhat Lemmy-software needs to doā, perhaps a āsuper-moderatorā, below Admin but above moderator who has access to user-bans and/or user-vetting is whatās 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 theyāre vetted or invited in).
Isnāt that a bit entitled? Reddit was a company who made money with their users, but Lemmy isnāt run by a company, itās run by volunteers. Running a small server is one thing, but who is going to moderate content from 100ā000s of users, content generated by an instance that doesnāt even have any basic restrictions on itās 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 didnātā¦ They just temporarily disabled federation because they feel that they donāt have the capabilities to moderate that many usersā¦ You can still apply for a local account on their instance, you can still browse their content without an accountā¦
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 adminās decisions, itās 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 āit splits the community in twoā and about how āthis is classic reddit behaviourā are acting a bit entitled as they donāt seem to be aware of the immense problems that come with moderation, especially when you do it as a hobbyā¦
@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 itā¦ I guess itās 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 itā¦
And thatās the entire point of the whole thingā¦ The entire point is that anyone can create a community that they can run however they want (as long as it doesnāt impact other communities)ā¦ Moderation isnāt a bad thing, itās a necessary thingā¦ Nobody wants illegal pornography and harmful material on their serversā¦
And beehawk is and always has been very open about them wanting to be a safe space community with strong moderationā¦ They openly state that their entire motivation for creating their community is to have much stronger moderation than in other social media sitesā¦
Yes, if my instance unfederated with beehaw Iād 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. Thereās 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. Iām also not sure if would be a good move āpoliticallyā 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 itās 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 donāt think itās 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 Iāll 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 Iām 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.
Thatā¦ didnāt last long. Itās a shame as a lot of the communities I subscribe to are there, but I donāt 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.
Iām hoping someone builds a client that lets you transparently log in to multiple users and get a mixed feed from all of their sources.
Thereās the potential to do that. But at that point youāre essentially a full blown lemmy instance, minus publishing. Iām hosting my own because Iām a masochist/interested in the tech, and going out and finding groups to add to mine is essentially what Iāve done all evening. Limited registration and Iām getting feeds from both of these servers on my client.
As they mentioned their decision is effective immediately and it looks like their users canāt interact with the defederated ones but the instances that federate with them can interact there. Isnāt 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 arenāt 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 itās defederated Iād 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 itās 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. Theyāre 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 arenāt tools and practices in place to manage it I think the impact would be significantly more detrimental. Without it happening in āthe early daysā 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 donāt 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 donāt see it as āinfighting and politickingā, just co-existing view points for managing instances. To put it in terms of popular monolithic platforms, Iād imagine there would be a bit of a shakedown if 4chan, reddit, slashdot, digg, et al. started federating. Iāll not attempt to draw parallels between lemmy instances and other platforms, thatās above my pay grade :)
I imagine weāll 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 doesnāt 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 didnāt exist for it to become possible. Working through how those are handled will result in Lemmy as a whole improving.
Iām 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 drunkš
āsubreddit dramaā on steroids. The politics of federation might take substantial airtime in lemmy
Sounds like you had a fun evening!
.
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 didnāt sign up and will probably unsubscribe to anything I was subbed to there as I canāt post, maybe Iāll signup so I can just in case thereās anything interestingā¦
I was thinking about the multiple accounts thing. Maybe the concept of an āinstanceā needs to be separate from the concept of an account? Like, it doesnāt 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 ā@gmail.comā instead of ā@comcast.netā.
On Lemmy, though, the place you make your account matters a whole lot. It determines what content youāre allowed to see, and who youāre allowed to interact with. If the instance youāre 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 thatās what we need: a set of āinstancesā that only host accounts, and a set of āinstancesā 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 donāt like, without cutting off all of the users who happened to choose the wrong place to sign up.
Actually, under that system, there wouldnāt 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 itāll take a little while to settle down, but Iād expect the communities to congregate on more permissive, well federated servers. In the short term Iām 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 itās less of an āall or nothingā 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 donāt see it. Iām not sure that I have seen even a single post that obviously needed to be moderated this week. Maybe Iām 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. Itās just a shitty situation all around.
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Enabling downvotes is specific to the instanceās own communities, no?
i think theyāre anticipating it.
also, thereās a false accusation there. i had to register my email with lemmy world
The modlog is public at /modlog/ on the server if youāre 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 canāt 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
Thereās 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 Lemmyās growth
Sounds kinda like they are trying to grab āpowerā 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.
Isnāt federation symmetrical? So if they defederate most of the Fediverse, they will not be able to interact with it?
I think itās logical to keep it that way.
Theyāre 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 itās a bit more confusing with this federation stuff. If this defederation wasnāt a two-way street, it would make for weird exclusive instances that could thrive on others content without contributing.
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Thatās pretty big. I wasnāt 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, thatās correct. Beehawās 4 admins run every communty on there
Hot take ā 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, thatās a good point. Like āoh, no, we made popular communities and now we have too many peopleā. 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 canāt take the whole thing down, thereās 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 canāt 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 āphilosophy of beehawā post (which you must read prior to application): anyone being a jerk because of bigotry or because the people in charge donāt 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. Itās about each instance doing its own thing, and communities will form around the ones that cater to them. In other words, we donāt need Beehaw to budge on its decision, we need to build the community we want without Beehaw, while Beehaw caters to the users who arenāt in this with us.
As long as beehaw is only de-linking these instances rather than actually blocking them, doesnāt that still allow them to pull new posts and comments from beehaw? Itās like the no-participation mode that r/bestof uses.
Federation works in the opposite direction. Itās 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 wonāt 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 letās say lemmygrad starts pushing me their stuff and Iām like whoa donāt 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 āthis is too much, ban themā 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 donāt get the sense they ever really expected for it to blow up or were trying to make it a āmain instanceā.
If anything this is just a reminder that instances arenāt nodes in the same service. They will all have their own culture, goals and philosophy.
Is there a summary somewhere of each instanceās āreputationsā? Most descriptions I see are just things like āA place for everyoneā. Itās kind of frustrating that new users are told to join any server, because itās 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.
Itās 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 itās not always that obvious that youāre on a server thatās going to offend the wrong instance admin. Some donāt want to associate with porn, others ātankiesā. In this case, lemmy.worldās offense was simply being ātoo bigā.
I get that a lot of redditors are used to creating alts and throwaway accounts. I just donāt 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, thereās one more layer of indirection. The instance. For better or worse, Beehaw controls some of the largest groups, whether or not thatās due to their moderators or whatever thatās on them.
I imagine that weāre mostly Reddit refugees right now, this concept of āinstanceā is alien to all of us. But its really not much different than a āgroup of subredditsā 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 thatās the ātrolls faultā or the ācommunityās faultā depends on the instance. But it looks like Lemmy / Fediverse has new tools to deal with this age old issue.
I get that itās 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 thatās fair. And I think those communities arenāt 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. Weāre obviously in the learning stages of the Fediverse (at least, in regards to Reddit-like community building). I donāt 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 wonāt 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 Beehawās perspective, theyāre trying to experiment with the Fediverse in a way that makes no sense to Reddit users. Butā¦ 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 doesnāt. But everyone is pretty open about this discussion. Iām not entirely sure if Beehawās perspective is in the wrong, even if I donāt 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 āWell, the Admins donāt care, this is Reddit, canāt do anything about it but grow thicker skināā¦ this is the Fediverse now. New options are available, and it makes sense to experiment with them to see if it works.
Whatās 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 Redditās troll-friendly ruleset?
Thereās 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 thatās solvable on Beehawās 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 āImNotAnAsshole.orgā Lemmy instance may open up that can Federate to both Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org, and one login at āImNotAnAsshole.orgā 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 isnāt 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 theyāre de-federating from world but not from the very problematic ml.
They said itās mostly about the amount of moderation action theyāve 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 ācanonicalā instance so to speak.
It could also be that their definition of ābad behaviorā is overly broad and thin-skinned. Which fits with everything Iāve 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.
