hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one:
we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.
we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).
an unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.
aside from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:
- these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
- the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
- our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
- and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for
as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:
There’s a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it’s not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can’t even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.
Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.
and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.
this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.
thanks for using our site folks.
Thank you.
I know what it’s like to try to build up something good only to have trolls try to take it over. It’s nice to think that kindness and guidance can make everything shiny and happy, but the reality is that sometimes you just have to shut the door to bad actors and lock it behind them.
Some people have a need to try to ruin things for others. There’s no reason to give them a platform. Actions have consequences.
Yeah, I’m perfectly fine with this decision. And if I want to see content from and interact on those instances, I can (and have already) create accounts on those instances. No harm no foul.
Commenting sure. But until some instance agnostic subscription feed comes out it looks like there is no reddit alternative to a reliable subscription feed right now.
Having to juggle multiple accounts to keep track of subscription feeds instead of one unified feed is a pretty big con. Not so much on the commenting end since that I do understand the reasons for.
it looks like there is no reddit alternative to a reliable subscription feed right now.
Lemmy was not built for scale, and the everything from large-community moderation to federation message copying is going through problem identification and optimization.
The Beehaw.org website is regularly malfunctions for me, showing the Lemmy 0.17.x problem of getting the wrong voting data on postings. Hopefully the forthcoming 0.18 removal of websockets will eliminate a lot of that.
Lemmy, as it stands today, really isn’t ready for anything near like the activity of from page /r/all community on Reddit.
I don’t mean so much in activity. Just the subscription to communities part.
Like knowing I could subscribe to like gamedeals and pcgaming and knowing that I can rely on my feed to contain posts from those communities as opposed one of them defeding from each so now having to subscribe to separate instances of pcgaming and gamedeals to see activity from those communities in my subscription feed. So now having two subscription feeds as opposed to one unified one to keep track of.
I think you might just not be interested in federated services. The whole point is that it’s a network of independent services, not a single unified platform. For some people that works well and for others it doesn’t. The fediverse solution would be to create a new account on an instance that federates with both instances, but you’re probably going to end up playing whack-a-mole until things settle down and I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to do that.
I wish we could federate our own user accounts on unrelated instances with each other, separate from the instance federation? So beehaw and lemmy.world can be unfederated, but if I have an account on beehaw and another account on lemmy.world, then I can connect those two accounts so that I can see the posts from both accounts in each one? Is something like this possible?
That way individual users wouldn’t be so inconvenienced, but beehaw would still be isolated from lemmy.world’s unrestricted signups/different culture in the same way.
I’ve been seeing a lot of low-effort content lately, and I suspect it’s coming from users who want their Reddit alternative, and they want it now. So, they see that Beehaw has a large community, and decide it’s a perfect place to start content-barfing.
I think the admins have been clear that they’re not trying to create a replacement for Reddit here, though. Everything under the sun does not have to be re-posted, just content that you actually want to discuss with this community specifically. When I see five posts created by one user in under a minute, I can’t help but think that the intent there is not to spark discussion. And, of course, the volume is problematic for the mods when they don’t have the tools they need to manage it.
A few years back, there was a short-lived site that attempted to be a better site like Reddit. Unfortunately, they started up around the time that The_Dipsht and alt-reich subreddits were starting to get quarantined. Amusingly, many of them tried to move to Voat, who by then had become so toxic that they were called poseurs and told to go away.
So they showed up at the door of the new site - who handled them very gracefully. There were suddenly a pile of alt-reich white supremacy communities on the site. The admins basically told them and their creators, “Gee, thanks for stopping by. We’re so glad you thought of us. Here’s your hat. Sorry you can’t stay longer. Bye now, have a nice day!” and deleted all the communities, the people who created them, and those who had subscribed. And that was that.
Unfortunately, people weren’t yet fed up enough with Reddit and the new site didn’t get enough people to stick around. It was a lovely little place, not unlike what Beehaw is trying to do.
Dang this really sucks :/ i understand why it’s important from a modding perspective. I guess I’ll need to open an account elsewhere and get a client with multi account support
Yea. I’m going to be honest, I disagree with this decision immensely. There just aren’t enough posts and comments here alone to really keep my whole lemmy experience here.
The whole point of federation is to be able to branch out as I see it. Half of the communities I’m subbed to are on the places being banned, so it sorta breaks the whole point of federation to me at least. I get why mods are doing it and think it’s definitely their right to do so, but as an end user, it reaaaally sucks and will likely make me make an account elsewhere as my primary.
There are a lot of assholes on the internet, and I get wanting to have a space free of that. As a trans woman of 10 years now, trust me, I have gotten harassment online and off it. For me at least, I personally err on the side of having more freedom to look into places even if that means dealing with a couple of assholes. The mods say that strangers don’t walk in off the street and start trolling - from experience, I can say that is just not quite true. At some point, people really have to just roll with it and keep a positive attitude in the face of it. It’s better to deal with assholes from time to time to go out and have fun rather than sit at home.
I worry that a space like this can stifle a good thing by wanting to be too thorough. Shit always slips thru cracks, and while I get that it can suck for some, heavy restriction just kills the whole thing. In some ways, it just feels like some of the decisions here are very kid-glovey. Like, at least in subs like asktrans or mtf or other parts on reddit where trolls loved to comgregate, downvotes were how the community itself self regulated trolls - we don’t even have that option here. I’m not sure how I feel about such hands on moderation - it doesn’t give good faith users a ton of freedom
They have the right to do so, but it probably shows I don’t quite fit with the ethos of the instance.
As a temporary solution de-federation is a fine idea. Permanently, I fear you guys may be shooting yourself in the foot. I joined a few days ago after seeing you were federated with most of the larger instances, and you had a decent number of communities similar to subreddits. Again, I understand how you can see this as necessary to maintain a safe space, but it will most definitely be the death of Beehaw in the long run. I’ll probably swap to another instance for now.
This is going to be a learning process I think for a lot of people. Not just on federation, but on community building as well. You all seem to be trying to build something here, and I am willing to be patient and participate while it grows. If we get down the road and it just isn’t working, I have faith that there will be open discussion on how to make this community grow while maintaining its ethos and we’ll be here to figure out what is best for each of us individually.
Good on you for taking decisive action at these early stages while we figure out what we want, where we want to go, and how we want to get there on this relatively new platform.
I agree, at first my knee-jerk reaction was against defederation, but I think actually this is one of the cool things about Lemmy and the way it works; you can have relatively isolated pockets and very open spaces, and users can move between them freely. It’s not like leaving Reddit and coming to Lemmy, for example. You can use Beehaw and other instances, and both can serve a specific purpose. I really appreciate this write up because without it I would not have felt good about this decision, but after having read it I get it and I appreciate it.
users can move between them freely
but… they really cant though can they? atm, every community on beehaw just lost a massive chunk of their userbase, and they can’t even move to a diff instance. Masto allows you to automatically move your followers to a new account on a new instance, but there just isn’t that option on Lemmy
Who is “they”? The users, or the communities? Beehaw creates the communities, that’s why there are relatively few, so I don’t see that Beehaw communities would have much reason to move anyway. Beehaw has no create community button.
I mean, you can create two accounts. I have my Beehaw account as well as my startrek.website account, for example. I use them both for different things, and they both have different vibes. I quite like it tbh.
kinda defeats the purpose of federation though.
Does it, though? Federation is not aggregation. It’s a model of interaction in which a community can curate what other communities they interact with. It can be more nuanced with limiting, as mastodon does, but that’s not an option here yet. I think this is precisely what federation is at its core
agreed, as someone who’s used fediverse platforms for a few years & seen cases of large scale raiding as well as just general infestation between some normal & some pretty bad servers, defederation is one of the main pros of the fediverse. without effective moderation, a community like ours cannot exist for long, & the only way to effectively moderate a foreign server full of literal tens of thousands of users who abide to a completely different law is to cut them off. while having to make an alt can be slightly inconvenient to some, the only alternative for a popular server like ours is to count down until it becomes too large to effectively moderate
I think this is an important point to consider. For a long time, I kept thinking that the fediverse was going to be the answer to the problem of keeping separate accounts on every site (because most places are isolated/walled-in networks). It took me years to accept that “one account everywhere” isn’t what the federation model is about.
I wish there was such a thing, but that’s going to require portable identities/user accounts, and I don’t know why but that seems to be progressing at a snail’s pace with a bunch of stagnated RFCs everywhere (but please let me know if there is progress happening somewhere, I may be out of the loop). Once we have that, it’ll make the fediverse a lot more convenient, since then you should be able to log in to other instances with the same account.
I think that will be something that comes down the road, but for now, it seems like it’s more of an answer to the problem of website admins running their site in a way you don’t agree with. On the Fediverse you have more flexibility to pick administrators you agree with their management style or to host your community and decide yourself how you want things to be
Can someone explain like I’m 5 for the new folks here what this means in terms of the user experience?
What are the restrictions around viewing and commenting on posts?
Does this impact, for example, beehaw to lemmy.world the same way as lemmy.world to beehaw?
What mod tools would beehaw need to remain federated?
Can someone explain like I’m 5 for the new folks here what this means in terms of the user experience?
lemmy.world & sh.itjust.works are two huge (well, compared to many other lemmy instances) communities, so this effectively means being cut off from part of the lemmy fediverse.
What are the restrictions around viewing and commenting on posts?
the servers won’t be allowed to federate with us anymore. federation is the term for when an instance downloads posts, comments, profiles, upvotes, etc from another. this change means we simply won’t see posts & comments from those instances at all.
Does this impact, for example, beehaw to lemmy.world the same way as lemmy.world to beehaw?
not sure, but if i had to guess i’d say probably not, unless they also defederate. i’ll log into my lemmy.world backup account & test.EDIT: seems to affect them just the same actually, i can’t see any new posts or comments. i thought it’d only block them from posting but seems like it’s a total severance.
What mod tools would beehaw need to remain federated?
the admins & mods here can answer this much better than me, but from the post it seems like it’s more a problem of size & numbers than something a mod tool can solve.
Defederation completely cuts the ties between instances, so no connection in either direction: lemmy.world users can’t post here (which is why this was done), and beehaw users can’t post there. The latter is less than ideal, but it’s the only lever of control lemmy has at this point for inter-instance relations. Hopefully things will change as better tooling / more granular controls are implemented.
I think the mods want kind of a one way gate so since beehaw has more restrictions, beehaw users could venture out unhindered but the lemmy world users wouldn’t be able to post or comment here unrestricted. I dont know what will be possible but it would be nice to have some sort of whitelist where posters from other instances could be white listed. With no entry requirements, the two instances removed are really easy for trolls to create as many accounts as they would like to harass.
One way gate with at least an approval process would be good, since if someone can put in an application to make an account on beehaw then why can’t the same thing be offered the users from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works without them having to make a beehaw account one the tools are in place?
And why even block them off from seeing content and vice versa. You don’t even have to be logged in to see what is on beehaw, so why suddenly so restrictive from non lurkers. I really want a subscription feed that is reliable like reddit was and not so vulnerable to the defederation when it comes to at least having my subscribed feed populated with new content.
Sure control who can actually comment or whatever, but at least I’d like to be able to see.
Technically they still can view anything on beehaw in read-only mode by just going directly to beehaw, the same way a completely logged-out user does, that’s not blocked.
What’s blocked is just their ability to go to their own logged-in dashboard and click “all” and see beehaw posts
Good on ya. I’ve already blocked several communities from those instances simply due to the sheer volume of low effort content.
The 196 community on shit just works was literally like half of the posts on the all filter yesterday before I blocked it.
Also blocking communities RULES. What a great feature! Like regardless of why, there are tons of things on the internet that I just have no interest in whatsoever! It’s cool to be able to very easily filter that stuff out.
I know exactly how you feel — I installed an extension in Chrome the other day for the sole purpose of blocking Quora from Google Search results. Fantastic 👍
we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space
Fully agreed. I’d personally rather have less overall content, if it means that the sense of community remains strong.
I strongly disagree with this decision – as lemmy progresses and stabilizes, open registrations will become normal and just blocking open instances will not be a viable solution.
I can’t say if this is just a need for better mod tooling or a fundamental problem with federation, but it’s certainly concerning.
Ideally there’d be options other than what’s essentially a binary on/off for inter-instance relations. Something like mastodon has: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/#limit-server
There just isn’t an equivalent in lemmy yet. Hopefully that will change sooner than later
The decision is not an easy one - in large part this is due to the massive moderation overhead which federating with those two instances brought and the lack of tools available to address that. It’s an extreme maneuver, but it’s either that or nothing until Lemmy as a software improves.
Just a heads up so you can try to plan ahead: on Reddit one of the tactics used by those with hateful agendas was to shut down progressive threads by purposely creating drama in that thread to overwhelm the moderators so that they had to lock the thread thus stopping all discussion. Sometimes they did this by being awful and dragging in well meaning users into fights, other times I they’d drop a few “I’m just asking questions” comments focussing on hot-button ideas that they knew would rile up arguments. It was very deliberate tactic and one that I don’t think moderators ever figured out how to deal with effectively, because short of babysitting the thread with their full attention from start to finish there was no way to prevent entire threads from devolving into attacks and arguments.
The crazy thing was how effectively one or two people with hateful agendas could derail an entire comment section of well meaning people and, by getting the thread locked, shut down the discussion and spread of progressive ideas.
I bring this up because Beehaw is perhaps uniquely vulnerable to this sort of ‘attack’, and you should expect to see it in the future. By joining other federated instances and using these tactics to stir up drama in Beehaw threads they can, by forcing your hand to defederalize, restrict the access of those other communities to the progressive ideals and ideas posted on Beehaw. The end result is isolating progressive ideas inside our walled garden, while users of the rest of the Lemmy instances start to only see more right-wing extremist views, normalizing them to otherwise everyday people.
I don’t have a solution to this. But it’s something to be aware of in discussions with the moderators of other instances, that a handful of people with this exact agenda can make their community look bad in order to restrict their users’ access to progressive ideas.
This does much more harm than good IMO - splintering the community at such a sensitive time of growth is a bad idea.
Hopefully there’ll be the ability to block images in comments and posts, and better tools for blocking / detecting spammers, and cross-instance bans, auto-moderating hyperlinks, etc. soon.
But the demand for unilateral access to other communities’ content is disturbing. The Lemmy federation works because of reciprocity.
Definitely won’t be recommending beehaw for new users now.
Same I’m kinda disappointed. This feels to go against he whole point of having a federated ecosystem. I guess I’ll make an account elsewhere.
Well I won’t fault you but that seriously hampers my experience using Lemmy so guess I’ll go make another account on another instance.
Edit: the more I recreate my account the more annoyed I am by this, you literally have the communities everyone joined and just ripped them away from most of Lemmy’s user base. Not cool.
yeah ngl this is kind of a dick move. the fediverse is just starting out and the worst thing anyone can do is pull thousands of users out rn. admins should have asked for help with moderating instead of doing this.
I’m personally gonna block all beehaw communities. I want the fediverse as a whole to thrive.
Disappointing to see the largest lemmy instances fracturing so early. But this also confirms my decision to self host my own instance - to avoid this sort of thing.
I had missed that, and have been spending the past few days wondering why my feed got so serious (and, well, kinda boring). Beehaw has a lot of solid content to be proud of, but a number of the most interesting and thought-provoking subreddits were re-created on lemmy.world’s side. This is your prerogative of course, and I support every decision you take as an admin team, you can only do what you can do; but with this, it seems to me like having an account on Beehaw doesn’t seem to have much of a point anymore…
I just created my new account on lemmy.world, and I’ll keep this one around just in case the decision gets reverted, but this post also serves as my farewell and good luck to this community. 👋
This is really hard to process.
I came to beehaw because it seemed to very welcoming and the fediverse provided freedom which was excellent. It is difficult to process because now users on beehaw are being told “you can be open and welcoming as long as you don’t dare integrate your beehaw and lemmy world experience”. Hopefully the beehaw staff understand that ultimately, users desire freedom to choose how they want their online experience.
I can only see this hurting beehaw in the future and hopefully this is a short misstep and not a permanent decision. The only reason that beehaw has seen massive growth is because of the association with lemmy world and other popular instances. This fragmentation will only hurt Lemmy when Reddit was seen as a “one stop shop” for all posts.
@alyaza I think the “solution” here is worse than the problem.
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