I can completely understand why they did but it really sucks that it had to happen. Hopefully, as the Fediverse grows, better tools are made available so instances don't need to defederate from each other.
With that said, I think it's a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I also wasn't aware that other instances vetted their users? This was the first one I picked. Is there a plan to address the issues beehaw brought up?
With that said, I think it’s a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I've been calling it a double-edged sword from the moment I knew that could happen in Mastodon and after I joined Lemmy, we see as normal to block lemmygrad from the beginning and that's understandable, but if an owner goes block-happy they could leave a lot of people stranded and inside their echo-chamber.
They'd be losing everything then and would be forced to migrate to other instance or create their own which may be too much as time goes by and people post more and more.I said this from the beginning but until we get migration tools to carry our content with us to other instance, think of your account as disposable.
If we look at a similar but much more mature tech, email accounts either require something traceable to meatspace or another email account to set up.
Maybe it won't go that far, I don't know. We'll have to see how much fuckery the Fediverse attracts.
lots take issue w/ that due to the whole decentralized, free vibes thing, but I think people will largely not want illegal content so communities will probably take federation as a very serious thing as we grow.
This is surfacing a fundamental division between mindsets in federation: the people who say don't worry about which instance you're on are bought into the promise that federation can "just work" like email. But the reality is that if you care about moderation at all (like, even to the extent of being for or against having any of it) then sooner or later you're going to have to make harder decisions about instances.
It's pretty normal for long-term fediverse users to change instances several times over the course of however long this stuff has been around. It's unclear to me whether any existing Lemmy instances would be a good fit for me in the long term TBH and I would expect that to be true for some time, as so many instances are still figuring things out internally.
Defederation decisions like beehaw made are extremely normal and rational. With their level of moderation staffing and for their user base, they determined it was unsustainable to remain federated with instances that were generating more moderation workload. If it wasn't them today it would be another instance tomorrow; this will keep happening.
Also, I see a lot of folks saying this is lazy for beehaw, but it's important to understand that from their perspective, this problem wouldn't arise if moderators here were keeping a cleaner house and preventing bad actors from using the platform. (Not saying either take is entirely correct.)
In a sense, moderation best practices on the fediverse are inimically hostile to scaling the fediverse up to new users. (And if you ask folks with smaller but prosperous instances that have healthy internal vibes, they'll probably tell you this is good.)
This is much more fraught on Lemmy than it is on Mastodon, because you're building communities hosted on a particular instance and there's not currently a way to move the community. So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Similarly, to avoid endless duplication of communities, folks have been encouraged to participate with existing communities instead of starting a new one on their own instance everytime. But anyone here who has gotten involved with communities on Beehaw will now no longer be able to do so unless they move to a different instance. (Which may be hard, as open instances that are easy to join are the ones that are harder for small instances to handle, which is what caused this in the first place.)
Some of those folks are going to create their own alternative communities on their servers, which to any third-party servers not in the loop on the defederation drama will be potentially confusing. This has the potential to create a cultural tend toward polarization of community norms between everything goes and what we see on Mastodon as content warning policing, but of which are, to me, undesirable.
The best case scenario is that the majority of large communities end up being hosted on instances that have sufficiently rigorous moderation standards and sufficiently robust moderation staff to not impose an unsustainable workload on smaller instances. Then as long as everyone who's not a nazi federates with those instances, things should go smoothly...ish. But that's hard both because "sufficiently rigorous" is different for everyone and because moderation labor doesn't grow on trees.
Very cogent writeup, seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw's decision in my eyes. People are getting really angry, and I wonder if those were the same people who bought into the whole "lemmys great because no one has 100% control" idea, only to be upset when the person in control of a slice they like decides they want to do something disagreeable with it. In the first place, one community shouldn't have carried the burden of the entire content and community of the "Gaming" or "Technology" sphere, it just kind of turned out that way because once they gained momentum, everybody else just flocked to it. And you can't blame them, that's where the content is, and the content is why they're here.
On the whole, though the software doesn't really restrict you to one or the other, instances are very quickly separating into two camps - viewer and host. Viewer instances are instances like mine, where the majority of users are consumers and not creators. Yeah, I like to run my mouth around these parts but most of the content on my instance doesn't originate from it. The host instances host communities, and so they carry the burden of having to moderate those communities and the servers/sysadmins carry the burden of having to relay all that communication to all the other instances. I think it's this part that needs work as we grow, because the best analogy for a Lemmy community is an email group. Can you imagine an email group with tens of thousands of subscribers all just emailing each other over and over again? Lemmy is pretty much just that, but displayed differently.
seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw’s decision in my eyes
I think people have a right to be upset when they feel unfairly banned from communities for no fault of their own.
The part where things get tricky is that beehaw currently has ~15 of the top 50 communities across the entire fediverse and has become the defacto discussion grounds for gaming/tech/news/etc.
One could argue this goes against the whole concept of decentralized communication in the first place, and this may be a position beehaw doesn’t want to be in.
Beehaw has every right to foster a tight-knit community that adheres to its desires.
But there also is a level of responsibility and custodianship over these large communities they foster for the betterment and adoption of the fediverse.
I guess the others will need to work with them to fix the issues that resulted in this decision.
It's all about teamwork across the verse and we'll have to see if they can manage it.
Extremely well put. Community migration should be something that would definitely be needed.
So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Maybe moving a community to another instance will be possible at some point in the future. Who knows?
Moving communities is tricky (even assuming the technical side is implemented) since you would need to figure out how many of your subscribers are on instances who are blocked by your community's new home before picking one.
This may be the most well thought out response I've seen yet.
This is a very good write up. I think there is a big difference in responsiblilty between community hosting instances and viewing instances, and I believe that we will see issues like this more often as community size is ballooning due to the reddit issues. I do believe, or maybe it's more of a hope, that over time larger communities will bounce around instances until they land on an instance that can better handle the responsibility of moderation, and eventually we'll end up with a few large instances that host popular communities, and smaller instance that host more niche communities.
I feel that this is the growing pains stage of Lemmy, and if a few QoL features like community migration get worked in, this platform will stabilize into something great.
btw, e-mail servers regularly defederate/block domains that allow a lot of spam...
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?
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.
Not a good look. I get its the admins choice and all but it just wiped out a lot of my subscriptions. Its not a good look from the perspective of new users and increases the number of duplicate communities across instances.
I had hopes for it but I guess I'm one of the lucky ones who signed up for lemmy.world.
I think they should just ban problematic users not the whole instance.
Yeah, I can get their desire to vet users before they can join their instance, but for me (and I suspect a lot of other people who are just starting with Lemmy, or just shy people) the effort of making a social interaction with a stranger was enough of a turn off that I went elsewhere. Beehaw still seems nice, I may still make an account there at some point. But, to figure out if a place suits me, first I lurk, then I engage by voting, then I engage by commenting, and eventually I may eventually post. I get applications, but they feel intrusive to how I use the internet.
I also get why they defederated, frankly there’s a tonne of low effort from the big new instances. However, everyone should expect low effort right now because users are antsy from having left reddit, and the low effort posts are the anxious laughter of people new to the party who don’t know anyone yet. So the defederation isn’t a good look, and will cause bad feeling with and within beehaw, so their mods have my sympathy. Better to have enabled downvoting and let the community handle the low effort posts.
Exactly, they got rid of actual voting in order to power moderate. This is all on them, users could also block whatever communities they didn't like.
I think they should just ban problematic users not the whole instance.
When the vast majority of the problematic users come from 2 instances with open registration, trying to do that is like stopping a flood with a bucket. I think theirs is a perfectly reasonable response to the troll attack they were just subjected to.
They could also just use a whitelist of users who are allowed to comment/post on there. I have suggested as much but we will see how they respond. I might try and contact a mod over there if that's possible.
Edit: I've been told by another user that this isn't currently supported. I think it would be a good feature to add to lemmy.
Their post explains why your suggestions are not actionable.
But why would it disrupt your subscriptions if lemmy.world and SJW are still federating beehaw? Can't one instance federate another without it being mutual? Is that the difference between a non-federated instance and a blocked instances, where blocked instances cannot even read your content?
Edit: Actually I think I understand. I checked the blocked instances and they are not blocked just delinked. So in that case, you must be a beehaw user who lost your subscriptions to communities on lemmy.world and SJW.
I just unsubbed from anything that was with them. Fuck em.
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
Exactly the reason why Lemmy at scale will never work, since most people won't run their own instance.
raises hand
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?
its _ federation._ Some communities only want certain people. Once mod tools are better we will see changes. Let it grow.
I ate soup with a fork once. Was it the smartest choice...absolutely not. Did it work... sort of.
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.
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.
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.
It was inevitable, though. Hopefully we see instances segregate nicely into tiers of lawlessness rather than just chaos.
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.
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).
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 wouldn't take this too seriously. If they can't handle the amount of new users then so be it, and the whole point is to not rely on a single instance. I could see the larger instances becoming closed safe spaces over time, in which case people will just leave them for other instances anyway. Nothing is constant but change.
There should be a way to export and import your subscriptions and saved posts so that you can easily transfer accounts to different instances.
Agreed. I'm not excited to have my history tied to one instance.
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.
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.
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.
Read access should be managed on the user level, not the instance level imo. I don't want to inherit some collective blacklist, I want my own.
For write access, it's more complicated and I'm not sure what to think.
When an instance has a specific rule, no NSFW for instance, it can't be receiving that content from other instances and serving it to its users because it breaks its own rules. You might want NSFW content but your instance's users agreed to that rule, probably because that's what they wanted out of the instance.
Kbin (I'm on kbin.social) allows users to block entire instances, rather than leaving that entirely up to admins.
The problem is that read access for a user means the content is cached on the instance of that user, making the instance owner potentially liable if we are talking about content illegal in their jurisdiction.
Good point, I hadn't considered that. But an instance can still strive to keep its blocklist as small as legally possible. This wouldn't be a big issue in most liberal countries anyway I think.
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.
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.
liked beehaw but didn't join because they seemed overloaded and now I cant interact :/ shame on anyone from here that was heading into their communities and being assholes.
I think it's totally fine for instances that want to be small and community-focused to not be federated with the greater pool of the internet. Especially when, as they've said, the moderation manpower and tooling isn't there to handle the extra users.
Personally, I wouldn't want to join a place like that (I've never been a fan of message boards or other niche communities), but it's their place and their rules.
Their biggest complaint was something I found odd as a new user to the fediverse too. When I was looking for a home instance, I saw that beehaw required an application, but I could just create an account elsewhere and interact that way, skipping it.
It seems like (at least one of) the tools they want is to allow federation to other instances, but external accounts must still "apply" before being able to comment or post. That'd allow users on both instances to still view each other's content, but it's not as cut-and-dry as blocking all posts from external accounts like limiting would (if implemented) or worse, defederating and siloing from all.
Lemmy does not seem to include any kind of authentication on the user level (such as a user keypair and signatures using that on their posts and comments client-side) so allowing one user from a remote instance would at least trust the owner of that instance to not impersonate the user who is allowed to post.
In fact, how does ActivityPub in the threadiverse even ensure that the instance is who they say they are? The W3C document on it seems to indicate that there is no standardized way to authenticate servers to other servers yet.
That's a good point about the user authentication, but I'm not quite sure we'd need it quite yet to reduce spam in this way. It is absolutely something to keep in mind though.
I think the other instances allowing federation in the first place grants "I trust the owner to not impersonate users" part of the chain. In Reddit there's that trust too, the whole "I trust the admins to NOT edit my comments silently at the database level"...
Can someone ELI5 what happens when another instance defederate us? None of those are my main instance, so nothing has changed on my end with them...
In a nutshell, beehaw's server and the servers of the other listed instances are not talking to each other anymore. If new posts are made from either one, beehaw won't see them and vice versa. You can still pull up older, non-updated versions of beehaw communities/posts from before they defederated, but you won't be seeing any more beehaw-related activity on them. You might even be able to comment there(?), but no one on their side will see it.
Until they decide to refederate, any further communication is cut off.
Until they decide to refederate, any further communication is cut off.
And what happens when they refederate??? all the backlog of comments/posts will spam them?
See https://lemmy.world/post/149743 for the dirty details about how asymmetric defederation impacts us. It's stupid complicated.
Yeah, I read that thread, it helped me a lot!
If you're not signed up to any of these you may actually be in the best position because as long as your instance isn't defederated by any of them you can view it all.
Ironically enough I had just added several communities from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works to my feed on Beehaw. Luckily I can still see them on my "Subscribed" list - not the content, the community names - so I'm adding them to my kbin subscriptions instead.
I'm glad to see that kbin has gotten stable. I'd been trying to use it for days, but it kept freezing and crashing!
I specifically just deleted my beehaw account and created one here because of this... This move makes me reconsider this whole lemmy thing.
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.
Exactly! And the idea that I fully cannot see other servers, or never interact with them anymore feels like wasted time.
Power tripping as always. Give mods a little power and this is what you get. What they want 24/7
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
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
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).
Well, look at the bright side: the evolution of descentralized federation now depends on the moderation topic. I wouldn't be surprised if someone takes federation to the next level and creates a moderation tool which would work out of the box for the fediverse, at the technology level (e.g. ActivityPub).
If and when this happens, federation has a bigger chance in replacing current centralized social networks.
I've been kicking around an idea in my head of making a Lemmy fork that has Tildes' ideas about modding baked in. (I would fork Kbin but I don't know PHP.)
In my experience, it's always been the best approach to select new moderators from the people known as active, high-quality members of the community. My goal with the trust system on Tildes is to turn this process of discovering the best members and granting them more influence into a natural, automatic one.
...
Trusting someone is a gradual process that comes from seeing how they behave over time. This can be reflected in the site's mechanics—for example, if a user consistently reports posts correctly for breaking the rules, eventually it should be safe to just trust that user's reports without preemptive review. Other users that aren't as consistent can be given less weight—perhaps it takes three reports from lower-trust users to trigger an action, but only one report from a very high-trust user.
This approach can be applied to other, individual mechanics as well. For example, a user could gain (or lose) access to particular abilities depending on whether they use them responsibly. If done carefully, this could even apply to voting—just as you'd value the recommendation of a trusted friend more than one from a random stranger, we should be able to give more weight to the votes of users that consistently vote for high-quality posts.
...
Another important factor will be having trust decay if the user stops participating in a community for a long period of time. Communities are always evolving, and if a user has been absent for months or years, it's very likely that they no longer have a solid understanding of the community's current norms. Perhaps users that previously had a high level of trust should be able to build it back up more quickly, but they shouldn't indefinitely retain it when they stop being involved.
Between these two factors, we should be able to ensure that communities end up being managed by members that actively contribute to them, not just people that want to be a moderator for its own sake.
Combine that with things like AutoModerator (the person behind Tildes is the one who built AutoMod on Reddit) and it seems like a reasonable way for a platform to promote good stuff and cut down on bad.
You'll have to deal with per-community "power users" with a lot of power, but the alternative is unelected mods who can be just as bad.
I don't know if I'm ever going to get around to making that fork. But I think taking Tildes' approach to mods is novel and fresh, and I quite like it.
That's also how it works on StackOverflow and HN. The more karma you have the more access to moderation tools.
Disappointing but I understand it in the sense that their goal has always been "safe, controlled community" way before they accidentally became one of the largest instances.
I had an account there first, and then made one on kbin since the federation issues with kbin could have potentially lasted awhile, but after this I think it's best to leave beehaw behind if this if going to be any indication of how they're handling their inability to properly moderate at scale. Big red flag IMO.
I actually am a little curious what TheDude’s opinion is on open vs closed registration policy. If having a closed registration policy is all that is needed for beehaw to refederate then perhaps that is an option, otherwise let us just hope the necessary mod tools (or more than 4 beehaw mods) happen to allow for refederation. It’s a shame since I feel like this is a really important / formative time and I do not think larger instances defederating is productive.
But that’s just my uneducated 2 cents :p
I don’t think we should reevaluate our policy just to get 1 specific instance to refederate us…. Anyway, Beehaw’s mindset has always been exclusive and restrictive, despite being a larger instance. Even if we switch to closed registration, they may disagree with our vetting process. It’s just part of their community ideals of creating a “safe space” aligned with their “community values”. I completely disagree with their course, but it’s their instance, so whatever, their call.
Beehaws just weird honestly, at that point they would be running this instance and how we accept and moderate users. I agree it's a very poor time and I bet reddit admins and redditors are laughing at us struggling to form a community.
From a user perspective (who've been active on Masto for a while)
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Closed registration because it's what the instance can handle : Fine and part of the fediverse.
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Moderated registration : How do you define who can join ? It's fine and even intended to have small instances for the admin and their friends, but if you go bigger, how do you deal with a real newcomer, not someone who's been on slashdot/reddit/mastodon for decades and just have to send a couple of DM to get an invite ?
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I do find it a bit odd that they didn't defederate from all open ones, if the problem is ban evasion then people can just change. I don't think their ban evasion preventative plan is going to work at all. Some of the "restricted" registrations are really just delayed and some are more gatekeepy so it's not really a solution for them
They made the users suffer for their unwillingness to cope with their situation.
Instead of planning ahead and only accepting a limited amount of users, which would have severed only a fraction of users from us, they decided to grow to become one of the biggest instances, and now took some interesting communities with them, along with cutting off their own users from communities here.
I hope their user base migrates to other, more open instances, and the communities lost will spring into existence elsewhere.
Wow... I'm new here so I'm still learning how all this works but I tried to apply to beehaw at first and they were having severe issues with their approval system so I either got denied or, most likely, got stuck in application purgatory.
Honestly, with how Lemmy is set up, it seems like it makes more sense to cater your instance to a more niche crowd than "all nice people" like beehaw was attempting to do.
What's most regrettable is the timing. Just when Lemmy had a big growth spurt, they cut off a big part of the community. We'll likely see this happen again in 2 weeks, when Reddit shuts down all 3rd party mobile apps, and again when they close old.reddit. I hope that some of the issues Lemmy currently faces will be fixed by then.
Wait, I'm confused, it's beehaw that defederated with us?
this is also not a permanent judgement. 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.
This is c/[email protected] federated onto Kbin. Beehaw is defedding from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
Edit: So that is how you make a working link across the fediverse.
Good. Beehaw sucks
I agree. While they might have the larger communities (for now), they seem to have also absorbed the worst kind of judgmental pricks from Reddit. I was just thinking to myself earlier that Lemmy needs a way to block instances at the user level.
🤣
lol
this is why y'all got defederated lol
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.
I am out of the loop. Is there a specific reason why? I thought the whole point was that it is a "fediverse"?
beehaw has a really insular culture that's strictly moderated. they have invite-only signups, are quick to remove things that are "off-brand", etc. their complaint here is basically: the amount of ex-redditors flooding lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works basically makes it difficult for them to moderate the way they want (cracking down on content that doesn't match their community), so they defederated, which removes those posts from their site.
Indeed the point of the "fediverse" is to have content between sites shared. but beehaw is a bit... special. and I have a feeling they'll defederate more and more instances as the fediverse grows, because their ethos is pretty much the opposite of it.
mod tools arent adequate (for now) to handle the influx of users basically, i believe. this comment about it is great: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/22433/Beehaw-defederated-us#entry-comment-90015
Would this mean that there'll be no access to communities on Beehaw?
Could someone list the popular communities in Beehaw and their alternatives on other instances?
I think that'd be useful.only to people on the instances they are defederating from, so smaller instances and selfhosters will be unaffected.
Gotta wait for better modding tools and scripts to become available, wont take long.
but I can still access beehaw from lemmy.world and post on beehaw - so it has yet to occur or something's fucky
Maybe making an account in a big instance is not that great of an idea after all. What benefit does it actually have?
100%. The best instance to be on is actually your own. Failing that, a small one where the admins are easy to get a hold of.
Big ones that offer extra goodies might become a thing ala Gmail, but I expect they will vet and monitor their users so nobody has to block them.
Edit: Annoyingly, I can't respond to Kbin users,
Hard disagree. You're stating a subjective opinion about the experience you want to have as a hard fact about the experience everyone else should have. You don't get to tell other people what they like.
Being on an instance that is well-moderated without you having to do that work yourself is one of the selling points of fedi apps. I am sure a huge number of people who signed up on Beehaw wanted exactly this.
There's a possible future where major fediverse sites switch to whitelisted federation to deal with spam etc. At that point, your small instance would have to petition all the major players to be let in. That would probably kill off most small instances.
I can imagine that something like approval instances make sense. Larger instances could connect to these to automatically federate with all the small instances that get approved by them. If an approval instance doesn't handle spam well, large instances could still defedarate.
big instances are more likely to stay up. smaller instances may just be some random user who might not be as interested in maintaining the site and may end up closing it. this happened to me when I used mastodon, I joined a smaller instance and they ended up shutting down.
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it's extremely useful to newbies and less tech-savvy people who don't know how to find communities on other instances
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at the current moment when federation is still a bit wonky due to the influx of new members, it's good to have the bulk of content you want to see be on your own instance. I can't login to lemmy.world, but I can log into kbin. But until recently I was only able to see posts 5 hours old on other instances from kbin.
True. The larger the instance the more likely some other user has already searched a community that you’re interested in, so the more results you’ll probably get through your instance’s native search. One way I’ve found to get around it is sites like lemmyverse.net, but it can be a bit inconvenient to use a separate site for your search engine, then paste the link back in to the native search feature.
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Can't bothered beehaw users just simply block the instances they don't like by themselfes? Does this have to be instance-wide?
The issue they stated wasn't with other federated communities, but with the users from those federated instances spamming their communities. Beehaw has a strict account policy and only want users they've personally vetted commenting and posting in their communities. So in effect they are blocking instances they've determined to be problematic by defederating them. At least that's my understanding of it.
The issue they stated wasn't with other federated communities, but with the users from those federated instances spamming their communities.
Yes, I understand that, but this seems to be effectively the same. Why not leave the decision to the individual users?
Beehaw has a strict account policy and only want users they've personally vetted commenting and posting in their communities.
Well, the fediverse kind of seems to be the wrong choice for them, then. It lives from the federation. If you want to be isolated it's just a plain old forum.
They wana make a forum like community. Just look at the icons of all of their communities, they're tailor made and themed.
Do subscribed users from the blocked instances still count against their communities' totals?
My understanding is that the subscriber count shown for a community is always exclusive to your own instance. Like if I go to [email protected] I only see subscribers from midwest.social. But I still see posts and comments from lemmy.world users because my instance federates with both lemmy.world and beehaw.org.
The home instance for the community shows all the local and remote subscribers. Subscribing instance only show their own subscribers. It's moderately confusing.
I don't know if the home instance updates its subscriber count on defederation. It certainly should.
That would limit the issue, I thought the different sub counts was the instances not being up to date.
Good question
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.
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.
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.
I love gardening. Thanks.
Do you have a list of instance rules?
Lemmy.fmhy.ml is pretty open and no silly essay to sign up
I was really enjoying some of Beehaw's communities... Can TheDude request a re-federation?
Potentially. The did say they don't intend it to be permenant. Til then though you may want to register at a smaller instance that is federated with both us and them.
Or maybe make a kbin instance account.
It's what I did. I like the atmosphere of beehaw but I wanted to be able to use all of those communities outside them, so I came to lemm.ee instead. Also made a kbin account because I hope their thing takes off, their model is potentially better than Lemmy while still being able to interact with Lemmy.
I think it's actually Beehaw
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?
It's essentially like email. If you have a gmail, you can communicate with anyone on any other email service. If gmail determines that spamsite.xyz, you won't send or recieve any emails from that domain. Same thing here. You're using lemmy.world. If lemmy.world defederates with my server sh.itjust.works, you won't see my messages. We will just never cross paths.
What if someone from lemmy.world makes a comment, and someone from lemmy.ca replies to the comment?
Would someone from sh.itjust.works see the reply to the original comment but not the original comment? Or is the whole thread after that point non-existent after that point?
Why is this happening?
Here's the announcement link viewable on kbin
Essentially the influx of users able to register without an application process is too much to moderate for them rght now.
Thanks for the quick explanation.
Read the post at c/[email protected].
Edit: Oh shit, I forgot. Go the instance itself over normal internet if they've pulled the trigger by when you read this.
Oh well
rip guys. not surprising though given how they are over there.
So, different communities will just be made on federated servers?
What do you mean?
Seems well justified based on the announcement post
Correct me if I am wrong.
A "federation" is a form of state structure in which parts of a state are state entities with legally defined political autonomy within a federation.
Federation, in contrast to confederation, provides for a certain coordinating administration. That is, you still have no freedom here, and you don't even know who pays the electric bill in your new entity.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
You’re right, the Beehaw post of is more of a compendium. Your comment is a novel.
I like how lemmy wanted to replace Reddit, but within days it's starting to completely crumble.
Beehaw seems like they're trying to be something different than a reddit replacement
I mean, they said it in their post, they want to be a safe space so... VERY different from what reddit was, someone else already said it, but they'd be better using a forum than the fediverse (specially with so little mods).
Admittedly, it was a knee jerk reaction. I was annoyed since I had just read a bunch of comments/articles that basically said Reddit had completely reverted to normal. Once I really read what they said and poked around, yeah, no big loss there.
Meanwhile, the protest is not even done and Reddit is already booting out mods that have shutdown their subreddit. So Reddit is crumbling too.
But for the average person, would new mods opening everything up be worse than staying shut down? The average person doesn't inherently care about mods.
And from comments here, people have either turned against the blackouts, Reddit brass has fixed commenting to seem that way, and/or bots have made it seem that way.
Sounds like the issue is too many users for beehaw specifically to handle — doesn't seem to be an issue for other servers, comparatively. All things considered, this is going really well!
I'm on antemeridiem, a smaller instance in comparison. Because neither beehaw nor sh.itjust.works have de-federated with my instance, I can access both to my liking.
That attitude on a three day old account surely isn't engaging with a sense of longevity.
Touche. I explained elsewhere, but I was frustrated after hearing that everyone in Reddit had turned against the blackouts. There were a few other reasons, but none worth getting into.
For what it's worth, while I haven't deleted my main Reddit account, I currently have no plans to go back. I've always been a proponent of having multiple options, so everything being at Reddit alone never sat well with me. I had tried lemmy and a few other things some time ago - usually when everyone protested Reddit - hoping something caught on. It usually ended up the same way - influx of people, fighting due to old vs new members, fracturing, quick abandonment, and everyone leaving.
I'm really hoping that doesn't happen in this case, even if Reddit goes back to normal.
🤣
