I think it’s easy to take this personally but I think it’s more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user’s bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.
I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit.
Agreed. They do deserve their own points if they want to be that type of community. I’d say for instance if places like AskHistorians arise within lemmy or kbin, federating with just those would be interesting.
There are always going to be more exclusive communities. Humans just work like that. I say we ride with it for now.
Federation should be a gradient. If they want to close themselves off why is it using ActivityPub to begin with?
I ate soup with a fork once. Was it the smartest choice…absolutely not. Did it work… sort of.
its _ federation._ Some communities only want certain people. Once mod tools are better we will see changes. Let it grow.
I think it’s also important to note, beehaw has the largest amount of blocked communities
Reading through the comments in their post I’m losing the little sympathy I was feeling. It looks like the moderation tool they are hoping for is one that allows their users to access other communities while preventing the other communities from accessing beehaw. That feels shortsighted and selfish, and I would think most communities on that end on the block would block them reciprocally.
It looks like the moderation tool they are hoping for is one that allows their users to access other communities while preventing the other communities from accessing beehaw.
Was this in the comments of the defederation post or one of the other ones? I’m just curious to read it myself.
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https://lemmy.one/comment/177082
~~https://beehaw.org/comment/177082~~
I believe this is the comment being referenced
Edit: They both link to the same comment, take your pickI think the comment they were referring to is this one: #264724
BTW FYI the two links you posted are not to the same comment. The second one is from a total different discussion too.
The comment id varies from instance to instance.
Jerboa doesn’t take me to the comment directly but I’m going to assume this is the one lol
It was part of the annoucement .
After reading many comments I think my ‘outrage’ came, as it often does, from misunderstanding. Also, because when singing up most people say don’t overthink it, it doesn’t matter much. But now I’m seeing that it does matter to sign up for an instance with like minded people. As I see more of what seems to be the drive behind beehaw, it doesn’t really resonate with what I want, but that doesn’t make it wrong. It is ok for that group of people. We just need to make sure that communities of general interest that were taking off there because they were one of the largest instances are also present in a more open and accessible place, so we are not restricted to collaborate.
Oh, wow…
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many of those are imported from the tier0 Fediblock list, which includes all the instances any decent human being would want to block as well. I don’t see myself wanting any content from pedo dot school or teenagegirls dot biz.
or youjo.love, for that matter
many of those are imported from the tier0 Fediblock list, which includes all the instances any decent human being would want to block as well. I don’t see myself wanting any content from pedo dot school or teenagegirls dot biz.
They are actively trying to be as clean and friendly as possible, and that’s admirable but the tools don’t exist for them to maintain that if they are fully federated. they are woefully undermoderated for how much traffic they are having to filter.
Once better mod tools arrive they may be able to re-open to other large instances.
Perhaps an option in the future would be for them to remain federated but somehow implement post/comment restrictions on outside instances to keep it under control.
But that is an issue too. Why would other instances allow them full access while being prevented from collaborating in theirs ?
That’s each instances choice to make I guess, and it’s part of the freedom of the platform.
beehaw would be within their rights to do it (effectively going read only to the outside, not currently possible but a requested feature is to have private or invite only communities), and if they are intending to be the clean family friendly option, it would be a valid choice to make if it were possible.
I’m not really keen on their reasons for defederating, but this makes no sense to me. What do I care if a beehaw user is posting good content on my community but I can’t go to their instance? It’s still more content and engagement for my community.
I’m just worried they are block happy. I’m assuming some are bad and have some issues, which make it reasonable for them to be blocked. But 350 blocked? That’s a high number. I’m scared to click just in case they blocked illegal instances with troublesome material.
I don’t know maybe I’m weird but I just find the arguments for blocking Lemmy.world and Shitjustworks not great. There’s a slur filter right?? Shouldn’t that block most trolls?
problem is you don’t have to start slinging slurs to troll people. People can still be nuisances and say bigoted things.
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I see your point. I was seeing it from the perspective of discouraging stuff to be shared on other communities because it’s already in beehaw, but you’d need an account to participate there.
But I see what you say, allowing them to contribute to other instances isn’t bad even if they don’t allow those instances to contribute on theirs.
beehaw are trying to be a perfectly moderated and “high quality” community and they are struggling to keep up with it when federated to other large instances.
I think they might need to change their methods because it is inevitable that some crap is going to be going on in low effort posts and comments, but defederating one very large instance from other very large instances is against the whole idea the movement.
It was inevitable, though. Hopefully we see instances segregate nicely into tiers of lawlessness rather than just chaos.
I can see why they need to do it, they apparently only have 4 main mods for the entire server. with the limited mod tools available at the moment that is completely impossible to manage.
I hope they can get past this hurdle.
I’ve got to learn Rust like a madman so I can help implement mod tools. That’s honestly the main bottleneck alongside discoverability.
Elsewhere in the thread right now there’s an open troll. On Reddit you get silenced at -100 karma. What happens on Lemmy? Anything?
It doesn’t help that notifications are pretty nonexistent at times. You have to actively go to an instance via browser, or open jerboa to find out anything is going on. Well, I haven’t found any other way to get mod notifications, and I’ve tried a couple of times.
So, for non admin mods to help out there, they’d have to commit to a higher degree of focus than what most people can offer.
As far as I know there are no automod functions currently, so until a human mod manually deletes or bans that user, it will just stay there.
Tools will come, the code for the platform is fully open and the API well documented, so it wont be long before large communities can function fully federated with reasonable moderation.
I can see why they need to do it, they apparently only have 4 main mods for the entire server
Why would they think that would be enough to withstand the waves from reddit? That was just a disaster waiting to happen.
happened too fast for them I guess.
once better mod tools or possibly an invite only read-only sort of solution is available they would re-open to other large instances.
I honestly doubt they’ll open again, they’ll get so used to their safe-space that they won’t be able to handle all the shitposting.
And we know mod tools can only do so much, if they couldn’t handle it with not so many users, I don’t know what are they going to do later if more instances keep appearing and growing.
Yeah. In the explanation they say that four people are taking the load of moderation, that can’t scale. If the rest of the communities keep growing they may end up isolating themselves for not being able to adapt.
I honestly think it’s somewhat irresponsible to have allowed themselves to grow as they did with only four moderators. Other instances have closed registration to maintain healthy growth. That should’ve happened long before this point.
Yeah, like the only reason Lemmy.world is so big is cus the og lemmy instance stopped registration cus of server issues.
Exactly. Moderation abilities are just as important as hardware requirements.
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They also spend more time chatting on discord rather than modding lol
yea, four people is not enough for even the smallest community.
Glancing at my one-member Poetry community here:
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I posted this there, but since you can’t see it
“I wonder if the type of community you’re trying to build wouldn’t be easier with a more traditional forum software like discourse. The infrastructure and moderation tools there have had much longer to mature.”
I think they’ve picked the wrong tool for what they’re trying to do.
I’m just some dude observing this space and migrating from reddit - but I looked at Beehaw when all of this started and I immediately thought it was an idea begging to turn into the internet version of Animal Farm. If the goal is to moderate and ban based not on what is said, but on the interpretation of what someone thinks was said or implied…in a straight text based communication medium…?
That’s a problem waiting to happen.
If there are interesting things happening there - and I never tried to join so I couldn’t say - I think they may well become an echo chamber full of cliques.
I don’t know what this space will turn into, but I personally like the idea of a semi open ended reboot.
It’s a recurring fediverse issue - Mastodon has it too. Basically, there are levels of blocking at various points in the hierarchy and you block or get blocked to your tolerance zone. This means that certain norms get squashed(and there are some reasonable concerns about who this helps), but it also tends to self-moderate to the conversations people want to engage with. The “invasive free-speech” instances of Mastodon tend to end up isolated, but it can also be hard to get situated and find an instance and follows you’re happy with.
Something I’m looking forward to with the forum model being added to the mix is a greater ability to browse for organized discussions.
eh I just read through the post over there, I suppose their concerns are somewhat valid, to a point, but there really isnt a “safe space” anywhere except between your ears.
really just reads like excuses to being lazy.
Totally unfiltered internet trash is just about as useful as being alone, though.
disagree - if there’s “trash” coming in then you know you’re not alone, just awash in detritus.
Either way you’re not usefully communicating, though.
You’ve got to strike a balance where you’re getting information just filtered enough you can usefully digest it, but no more.
i suppose that’s true - i guess the main concern that I have with the top-tier instances defederating is that each instance becomes its own insular echo chamber - lemmygrad is a good example of this.
We’ll see, I guess. It’s very early days. Reddit could be like that in places already. On the other hand, there were subs that were pretty open-ended, like r/askreddit (although I’m bummed they’re not blacking out).
I suspect users will flock to instances that are more trusted if given the choice, since nobody wants to be left out.
That’s one of the main points of federation, if you as an admin don’t like an instance you block them, if as an user you don’t like the instance you’re in you go to another one.
There are some key features missing here, the ability to silence entire instances so you don’t have to defederate completely and account migration so you can just pick up your stuff and leave.
My problem with Beehaw in general is it reeks of overzealous and manipulative mods. The internet is full of awful people but to pretend you can make an island of purity where you get to decide what is pure is going to be a worse idea in the long run.
I find it ironic that they say fake niceness will only scare people off, but all the “ethos engineering” only promotes a culture of fake niceness. I don’t buy all this “walled utopia” idealism, especially since this place isn’t like Discord with private servers, but a public interconnected forum. Why choose to set up on the Fediverse if you’re not open to ”strangers” accessing your community? But oh well, I think they’ll probably defederate more and more over time (or switch to whitelist).
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Reminds me a bit of parents who want the benefit of just putting their kid on the internet so they don’t have to entertain the kid themselves but then try to censor everyone when the kid finds anything online they didn’t want the kid to see.
Yeah, somewhat agree (they only had 4 main mods, that’s rediculous) but they do raise a good point in the difficulty of maintaining a friendly and safe community with limited moderation possible.
What we need isn’t large instances splitting off and defederating, it’s better moderation tools and more volunteers.
I’m on a smaller instance and am still fully federated with all three instances involved, so it doesn’t affect me, but that also means if I chose to be a dick and spam/troll on beehaw communities they would have to moderate me manually, or defederate from my instance too.
I suspect this will be reversed when better moderation is possible, or perhaps they will eventually be able to block posts and comments from other instances without defederating entirely if they want to remain as clean and high quality as they are attempting to be.
I understand why they did it, four mods is not enough for the traffic. However, I think they could’ve anticipated this better than just removing one of the largest instances. Hire more mods. It seems beehaw has banned so much that I am honestly unsure why they want to be federated. I like the idea of beehaw, some things, like limited communities and no downvotes are really smart. But the closed community mindset may kill it.
They do want to refederate when they get more granular options, but the federation options for lemmy right now is basically federate or not, which is kind of sucky, also I don’t think reports bubble up to the origin server like they do on mastodon, I’m sure it will get there in time, but for now there isn’t that many.
I specifically just deleted my beehaw account and created one here because of this… This move makes me reconsider this whole lemmy thing.
yeah, was starting to like it here, but honestly if any instance will just defederate the second something inconvenient happens… we won’t have a site with good content that will keep people around
My thoughts exactly
I find it really frustrating to build up a feed of content, only to lose it when moderator fights begin. What servers are next? Which one do I join to get the most content?
I want this to succeed but I don’t know how I can recommend it to people today, since they’re going to ask the same questions.
Power tripping as always. Give mods a little power and this is what you get. What they want 24/7
Exactly! And the idea that I fully cannot see other servers, or never interact with them anymore feels like wasted time.
Yeah, me as well. Seems kbin has a way more open minded view on things. They don’t defederate from anyone, which suits me just fine. I wouldn’t like to defederated from anyone, including lemmygrad. There are some interesting reads over there (at least for me).
But isn’t that good? It means you have much more freedom now, you can make communities, post more stuff, don’t have to follow a non existant set of rules.
That’s true but there are nuanced social consequences for the entire group because of the actions one or a few individuals. The moderation model of Lemmy will be different and needs to start at the home instance. Because all it takes is a few people to act up and suddenly your instance has no content.
But muh freedoms
To an extend. It’s more concerning that I can build up my user, interacting with other communities, building my network and suddenly I loose all that because my server suddenly decides it no longer want to interact with other servers.
hate to say that’s on you, dude. You should look at how that instance works with others.
Apparently migration is in the works, so you should be able to keep your beehaw account.
Can’t predict the future. Can’t control where new communities end up growing organically.
Sure is on me for choosing poorly. However I’m happy to hear that migration is in the works.
Migration is in the works, but it’s not a priority.
I think this is pretty unreasonable. They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with the existing moderation team. That was never going to work. Placing the blame on the open registration instances and mod tools seems silly. That said I hope this does lead to an improvement in mod tooling.
They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with only FOUR moderators. That was never going to work.
might be a dumb question, but how could’ve they prevented this?
They’ve existed as a small community for a year and a half. In all that time, surely they have met/interacted with some people they trust enough to delegate mod duties to.
And if they haven’t…well, that’s telling on it’s own, too.
I think they should have made a deliberate attempt to remain outside of the top three biggest instances like lemmy.ml. Considering the conscious decision to only have the admins be the only mods (that is there are four mods site-wide that moderate ALL communities) these issues were easily foreseen and they should have accepted that they could not realistically compete for the largest instance while maintaining their moderation goals.
It‘s the bubble concept I already curated for myself on Reddit by filtering out what feels like half the website. Except now I can sort of choose my pre-made bubble, which is more effort to be certain (have to research the admins of a chosen instance a bit and understand their rules and values), but I don‘t mind that.
So, different communities will just be made on federated servers?
Who else here is chilling on their own instance watching this shit unfold with some popcorn 😂
Is there a SubRedditDrama community equivalent here?
There is a fediverse drama sub in lemmy.ca
I am a lurker over there so this decision literally changes nothing about how I use beehaw and my community is still awesome so I’m all good👍
Shh 🤫 they might defederate us too if we say too much
I’m on midwest.social and I’m a lurker so I got nothing to lose DEFERATE ME DEFERATE DIZ NUTS
Exactly the reason why Lemmy at scale will never work, since most people won’t run their own instance.
I don’t think running your own instance is required, just that the user base needs to be distributed across more instances. The happy median lies somewhere between “uber” instances and self-hosted.
Yes, but the common user would just register on the most popular instance. It will take a lot of effort to change that mindset.
raises hand
Yet another reason why it’s great to be Canadian.
Sh.itjustworks is Canadian lol
Oh, that’s cool! Didn’t know.
Not cool actually 😂, but whatever 😂.
The TL;DR of this is that the admins of Beehaw are extremely sensitive and their “safe space” isn’t virtuous enough for them. Nothing of value was lost.
Nothing of value was lost.
Is that your position based on the actual content over there, or is that just a reaction to an instance (any instance) defederating? Because that would feel like a pessimistic carryover attitude from reddit.
Lemmy isn’t reddit. Everyone, including mods who have been doing this for more than the past week, is adjusting to the reddit migration & inpouring of users who expect it to function the same as reddit, and may be frustrated that it doesn’t. /edit
I don’t quite vibe with the comments in the thread that seem to say Beehaw’s four mods should have had server structure and manpower “long before now” just because the instance has been around for 18mos. That’s a stupidly brief period to try and evaluate through the lens of a flood of new users.
I’m not sure I blame anybody who wants to hit the panic button this week. None of us know what the traffic in any instance will look like in another seven days.
//
And the announcement is hardly a novel.
Nothing of value was lost.
Is that your position based on the actual content over there, or is that just a reaction to an instance (any instance) defederating?
I take that to mean “mingling with the minds of those who are ok with such an action is not worthwhile anyway”.
Then again, the original comment is deleted by creator, so what do I know. Looks like the entire account is gone, dude left.
Oh? No surprise I guess. But I took that to be their meaning, yeah lol.
I was nearing the end of my rope that day with reddit evacuees, 48 hours into their acquaintance with Lemmy and dropping reactionary snark at the Beehaw thing instead of listening and learning about what the Fediverse is.
The Beehaw threads felt like they disproportionately full of day-old accounts saying “good riddance,” and I was annoyed.
Well here’s an account equal to yours in age saying good riddance.
I think you may be misunderstanding me, edit: or I may be misunderstanding you, but if you’re actually that juiced up about the Beehaw mods then I won’t get in your way :)
Ideally the community of instances would take action against beehaw and defederate them en masse, strengthening the wall they decided to erect. Until they write up an apology letter.
But hey, that ain’t gonna happen.
I’m not juiced up, I’m just watching the drama, and honestly, this is nothing unexpected. The type of people who like to suppress any deviation from the party line just can’t act otherwise.
I need more popcorn.
You’re right, the Beehaw post of is more of a compendium. Your comment is a novel.
Let’s not create an instance war already…
Looking at the blocked instance list of beehaw, they blocked mostly just tankie, rightwing and porn related instances. Far from being extremely sensitive IMO.
Look again, they are also blocking us and lemmy.world.
You mean they are blocking you and lemmy.world. I am on feddit.de.
And beehaw is blocking you, because your easy registration process allowed a bunch of trolls to wreak havoc. A better vetting process could prevent future instances of defederation.
Check where you are posting. “Us” is sh.itjust.works.
And beehaw is blocking you, because your easy registration process allowed a bunch of trolls to wreak havoc.
Thanks captain obvious.
A better vetting process could prevent future instances of defederation.
I don’t want a curated space with a vetting process. Those that do can join those spaces, better off that way.
You can tell from that novel they wrote what their true intentions are. Read between the lines and pay attention.
I was never able to sign up or log into Beehaw. It’s very limited in terms of who it allows to sign up, and the waitlist is probably incredibly long.
This cutoff means that I’ll have to live without being able to participate in a lot of discussions, which defeats the purpose of joining the fediverse entirely.
It’s just as useful to me as using Reddit right now, even less so with how much less popular Lemmy instances are currently.I was able to sign up. I am still not able to log in. None of the lemmy style sites work for me. Account created, go there to login and when I do it just sits there with the green button spinning forever. Same with sh.itjust.works which is ironic.
as someone who just joined, and is still trying to understand “federated” can someone give me an ELI5 rundown of what this means? I thought it didn’t matter which instance you joined because they were all connected, does this mean that other instances can just… block an entire instance?
Ok so which instance is not slow and still has access to most content?
https://fedia.io does.
But bear in mind that this is just the knee-jerk reaction of the admins at Beehaw; they will likely defederate with any community that has open sign-ups.
Beehaw wants to promote a certain culture within their instance. That’s well within their prerogative - but I think they’re beginning to understand why the fediverse may not be the place to do such things.
The fediverse is designed to link instances with niche communities together. If I had an instance about model-making, there’d be communities for model trains and model rockets and dioramas and Warhammer blah blah blah. These would be a bunch of separate - but related - topics, held under one instance.
That’s how the fediverse is designed to work. You have a bunch of people who share a specific interest on a “home” instance, and if they wish to talk about other things then they connect to other instances and grab communities to assemble their custom homepage. Great examples of this are lemmy.blahaj.zone (LGBTQ-focused instance), rblind.com (accessibility-focused instance), and even the much-maligned Lemmygrad (tankie instance).
You focus on the communities you want and block the ones you are opposed to. Each instance has a discrete subject matter and specialty. You could have an instance which only allows verified scientists and historians to replicate AskScience and AskHistorians, and people who are “verified” will have it as their home instance.
What has actually happened is people want to make Reddit 2. And this isn’t the fault of the users; indeed, I’d say the fact that lemmy.ml exists as a dev-run general-purpose instance violates this very philosophy the fediverse has.
Beehaw wants to operate under the way the fediverse “should” work; i.e. Beehaw.org is a small community dedicated to a certain mission, with subjects that relate to that mission. The issue is that their mission is very close (but not quite) to being “be Reddit 2”.
They want to have a tight-knit community where everyone knows each other and everyone can look at all sorts of content, with strict moderation to prevent the worst of social media showing up on a platform. They want to be a “hub” where people make a home, and their users would be able to dip in to more specific instances if they needed something.
The issue is that the fediverse is a two-way street. I think Beehaw is just now realizing that. They set themselves up as a “general instance” and found wild success. But the “tight-knit community” part is hard when any rando can make an account on another instance and talk to them.
I think Beehaw mostly wants it to be a one-way interaction - their users can participate in other instances, but outside users can’t directly talk to their instance. That’s the only reasonable way for them to accomplish their goals, but that’s not how Lemmy really works, at least not right now.
Add to this that people are flooding in constantly. They want to be in “Reddit 2”. The fediverse supports such things - lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, fedia.io, kbin.social, etc. are all great examples - but that’s not how it was designed to be used. Beehaw is an older community, one founded with thoughts of the “ideal” fediverse… but it’s becoming obvious that (like Mastodon) users are going to gravitate towards the familiar and make everything general-purpose.
Lemmy.fmhy.ml is pretty open and no silly essay to sign up
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.
It is confusing to create an entire instance that is devoted to one thing. I would much prefer joining The Garden as a community @ whatever instance you choose. I think you are going against the basic design intentions of the fediverse. All the best.
I think this is actually a great way to use the fediverse. At least from what I understand, a major principle of the fediverse is to give instances the freedom to build their communities in a way that fits the creators’ visions.
I was just thinking that it’d be interesting to see a whole Lemmy instance dedicated to one community, and here it is!
I love gardening. Thanks.
Do you have a list of instance rules?
