How the beehaw defederation affects us
How the beehaw defederation affects us
ou might have seen that we've been defederated from beehaw.org. I think there's some necessary context to understand what this means to the users on this instance.
How federation works
The way federation works is that the community on beehaw.org is an organization of posts, and you're subscribed to it despite your account being on lemmy.world. Now someone posts on that community (created on beehaw.org), on which server is that post hosted?
It's hosted on both! It's hosted on any instance that has a subscriber. It's also hosted on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, etc. Every instance that has a subscriber is going to have a copy of this post. That's why if you host your own instance, you'll often get a ton of text data just in your own server.
And the copies all stay in sync with each other using ActivityPub. So you're reading the post that's host on lemmy.world, and someone with an account on beehaw.org is reading the same post on beehaw.org, and the posts are kept in sync via ActivityPub. Whenever someone posts to that community or comments on a post, that data is shared to all the versions across the fediverse, and these versions are kept in sync. So up until 5 hours ago, they were the same post!
"True"-ness
A key concept that will matter in the next section is the idea of a "true" version. Effectively, one version of these posts is the "true" version, that every other community reflects. The "true" version is the one hosted on the instance that hosts the community. So the "true" version of a beehaw.org community post is the one actually hosted on beehaw.org. We have a copy, but ours is only a copy. If you post to our copy, it updates the "true" version on beehaw.org, and then all the other instances look to the "true" version on beehaw to update themselves.
The same goes for communities hosted on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Defederation affects how information is shared between instances. If you keep track of where the "true" version is hosted, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on.
How defederation works
Now take that example post from earlier, the one on beehaw.org. The "true" version of the post is on beehaw.org but the post is still hosted on both instances (again, it has a copy hosted on all instances). Let's say someone with an account on beehaw.org comments on that post. That comment is going to be sent to every version of that post via ActivityPub, as the "true" version has been updated. That is, every version EXCEPT lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. So users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won't get that comment, because we've been defederated from beehaw.org. If we write a comment, it will only be visible from accounts on lemmy.world, because we posted to a copy, but our copy is now out of sync with the "true" version. So we can appear to interact with the post, but those interactions are ONLY visible by other lemmy.world accounts, since our comments aren't send to other versions. As the "true" version is hosted on beehaw, and we no longer get beehaw updates due to defederation, we will not see comments from ANY other community on those posts (including from other defederated instances like sh.itjust.works).
The same goes for posting to beehaw communities. We can still do that. However, the "true" version of those communities are the ones on beehaw, so our posts will not be shared to other instances via ActivityPub. And all of this is true for Beehaw users with our communities. Beehaw users can continue to see and interact with Lemmy.world communities, but those interactions are only visible to other Beehaw users, since the "true" versions of the Lemmy.world communities (the ones sent to/synced with every other instance) is the Lemmy.world one.
Communities on other instances, for example lemmy.ml, are unaffected by this. Lemmy.world and beehaw.org users will still be able to interact with those communities, but posts/comments from lemmy.world users won't be visible to beehaw.org users, as defederation prevents our posts/comments from being sent to the version of these posts hosted on beehaw.org. However, as the "true" version is the one on the third instance, we can still see everything from beehaw.org users. So we see a more filled in version than the beehaw users.
Why can I still see posts/comments from beehaw users?
Until they defederated us, posts/comments were being sent to lemmy.world, so we can see everything from before defederation. After defederation, we are no longer receiving or sending updates. So there are now multiple versions of those posts.
Why can I still interact with beehaw communities?
This won't ever stop. You'll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won't see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities.
Those communities will quickly suck for us, as we're only talking to other lemmy.world users. Your posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. I highly recommend just unsubscribing from those communities, since they're pretty pointless for us to be in right now.
Why do I still see comments from beehaw users on lemmy.world communities?
Again, comments from before defederation were still sent to us. After defederation, it will no longer be possible for beehaw users to interact with the "true" version of lemmy.world communities. Their posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. They also aren't getting updates from any other lemmy, as the "true" version of those communities is on our instance.
Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?
That's because the "true" version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn't defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.
The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.
This seems like it's worse for beehaw users than for us?
Yes. In my opinion, this is an extraordinarily dumb act by the beehaw instance owners. It's worse for beehaw users than for us, and will likely result in many beehaw users leaving that instance. They said in their post that this is a nuke, but I don't think they fully assessed the blast area. Based on their post, I don't think they fully understand what defederation does.
I can understand wanting to have a well-moderated community.
What I don't understand is how they expect to do that with a moderation team of just 4 people.
I guess now people will just leave Beehaw, its communities that were popular here will be replaced by others in the Fediverse and life will go on. The Fediverse is built to be resilient to such changes.
The crazy part is that they want to be able to view and comment on other instances' posts but not vice versa.
Like why should other instances agree to that?
Hopefully beehaw dies off quickly.
Yeah, the level of entitlement is insane.
Hopefully beehaw dies off quickly.
I don't get why you hope for this? Isn't the point of fediverse to have lot of different instances for different people?
Beehaw will continue existing as it chooses to exist, with or without lemmy.world. Isn't that a good thing? That's decentralization. That's what we want more of.
Oh I completely agree, there's nothing wrong with wanting well-moderated communities. But their way of going about doing it makes absolutely no sense.
I don't think you're technically wrong, but I think with the reddit migration it's overall damaging to the concept of a fediverse to have a large instance defederate with two huge instances.
There are people who are just getting settled only to find out they now have to use two accounts to access the content they needed one for yesterday.
Yeah, the solution is just to leave beehaw though. It takes a few minutes to make a new account on another instance. If they really want to access the beehaw stuff they could join an instance that is still federated with them, that way they could see the beehaw posts and the lemmy.world posts.
It's probably best just to abandon beehaw entirely though and use alternative communities in the Fediverse.
People really shouldn't see that as a bug, it's a feature. Reddit does something you don't like? Too bad. One instance in the fediverse does something you don't like? It's incredibly easy to leave. Maybe some day you'll be able to transfer accounts to other instances, that'd be neat.
I made a new account yesterday. The beehaw node was a choice but I did not take it. I won't be making two accounts to access "all of this content" and this little bit over here.
I'm not sure what would change my mind but it would need to be very enticing.
They are fine with being a small community. They aren't interested in growth for growth's sake. They existed for 18 months with around 200 members and were content with that continuing indefinitely. They aren't against growth, they simply don't value it highly.
Yeah having 4 mods for something this large isn't realistic, though I also understand they have problems with the moderation tools. Hopefully they can find more mods and lemmy can get better tools. I think once that happens they are considering refederation.
As much as it seems like a bone headed decision I can understand why they made it and that they probably didn't have much choice given the resources theu have. I suggested to them that they should consider a whitelist/invite only system of users from certain instances instead. I haven't heard back from the mods on that but another user has already tried to shoot me down.
Edit: I have been told a whitelist isn't currently supported by Lemmy.
The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users. And beehaw didn't have confidence in the moderation of shit just works and lemmy.world and couldn't keep up with banning them on their side. Thats why they defederated.
The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users.
It's correct what you say, but the idea bugs me the more I understand it.
It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance. These other users can have nothing in common with the causing users, or might have even opposed them in their wrongdoings.
There is also a level between users and instances; communities. Maybe the problem was with one specific community, yet all other communities who happen to live on the same instance feel the same consequences.
Defederating individual communities would feel better for me, but ultimately I think a problem caused by individuals should be solved with these individuals, not with groups which are more or less meaningfully associated with those individuals.
This makes perfect sense.
It won't. There will be likely lots of cases of mod abuse that ends up pushing users away. Moderation requires a healthy balance, not an extreme of either side. Lots of Reddit subs had similar issues, but they at least benefited from the overall growth of the platform itself to fill the previous slots with new users.
I saw on one of their post that they now have 36 mods
I guess that's an improvement. I mean their users seem to like the set-up. I just don't like not being able to create communities and having such a small group of users in control.
It just seems ripe for abuse like we saw in Reddit.
But that's the wonder of the Fediverse, each user can pick their instance.
A lot of people are missing the point of their defederation, which is a lack of proper moderation team and tools for the sudden scale they are exposed to as one of the most popular place of discussion with the rexxit with them harboring some of the most active communities around.
Their issue is mainly bad actors, trolls and harassers coming from those big instances and overwhelming them.
Defederation is the big-nuke symptom of a wider fediverse problem, a lack of moderation tools and readiness for scale, that I also saw happen a lot on Mastodon. I followed the infosec instance and they basically ended up having to defederate the biggest mastodon instances for a few days at a time when stuff like spam and cryptobro DMs ran rampant. I've received many of those so I can tell you that it's pretty real.
Construing their decision as a desire to fracture the community is missing the actual reason they've tried to articulate. It's a temporary stopgap for the 4 admins who just weren't expecting the sort of volume and associated misbehaving problems they are suddenly getting.
Overall, Lemmy is getting through a pretty intense "shit just got real" moment. Please bear with it, people are working really hard at solving this from what I can see.
This is the first time I've heard someone call the exodus from reddit "rexxit." I haven't been on lemmy too much yet so maybe it's a common term I I've just missed but I love it.
I'm by no means the one who coined it. I just read it someplace else, but I find it fitting too!
Construing their decision as a desire to fracture the community is missing the actual reason they’ve tried to articulate. It’s a temporary stopgap for the 4 admins who just weren’t expecting the sort of volume and associated misbehaving problems they are suddenly getting.
Thanks for this explanation, this makes a lot of sense and makes me less concerned about the whole thing.
Serious question though, if a server defederates, do the communities hosted on other servers just become completely un-moderated? This seems like a serious liability for the overall community.
Serious question though, if a server defederates, do the communities hosted on other servers just become completely un-moderated? This seems like a serious liability for the overall community.
I'm not the most savvy person there but it simply means to me that the defederated server cannot post or interact with the matching server. Moderation still works on both ends, enacted by their respective teams. This is akin to a server-wide "mute" button directed to content from another server.
Exactly. This is only a "stupid" decision if your only metrics for success are unmitigated growth and content/comment quantity.
Yes, for a community to thrive there needs to be some minimum viable threshold of active participants, but that threshold isn't "as many users as we can possibly get." Just like there's a bottom limit, there is a sort of carrying capacity as an upper limit. Out of control population growth will quickly make an ecosystem inhospitable which will kill a community just as surely as not having enough members to sustain itself.
There are plenty of instances that let you sign up instantly. To achieve that goal, they'd need de-federate with all such instances. Which they can, but I still think that's a bad idea.
I believed their intentions were good at first, until I've read/seen how they treat users who dissent at all, and even chastise and accuse users who ask for clarification of rules as outing themselves as a bigot. That includes admin responses to users there genuinely asking about rules with terribly vague wording...
That place is on a fast tract to becoming a shit reddit says clone; not a clone of reddit in general...
'Misbehaving ' that says a lot about what's really going on
Because they have community rules? It's pretty normal for communities and online spaces to have rules and moderate those rules and if you misbehave aka ignore said rules, you get either your comment deleted or banned. Just like in real life, if you are at my house and you don't follow my rules and just dig holes in my garden or destroy something because it's fun, I will show you the door. Same goes for online places. The server/instance owner/host etc makes the rules
It seems like Beehaw want to create a closed community they can moderate. That kind of makes sense for their aims but they will need to defederate from more and more services to maintain that over time.
It seems a bit of a kneejerk in reaction to the influx of new users but essentially it means they'll not be part of the fediverse, and they risk creating an echochamber. It's rather the opposite of their stated aim of creating a diverse community, and will probably stymie their growth going forward.
Hey I am just going to throw this out into the ether, I have been on the lemmy instances longer than beehaw, and I have yet to find an instance whos admin team I would trust less with their stated reasoning. I would not trust their stated reasoning and if I had to guess they are trying to get Lemmy.world to change something to come into line with them. if you ask me you have dodged a bullet. I hope lemmy.world stands strong
I came up with a list of examples to explain this, but I can't see to add them to the post. I'm having a really hard time posting today. So here they are in a comment. I think this helps show exactly what's going on.
Examples
If this still doesn't make sense, then try the following examples. I hope being able to see defederation in action makes this a little more clear.
Beehaw Communities
We're going to use [email protected] as an example of what happens to beehaw communities
Here are three links:
- https://beehaw.org/c/gaming/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
- https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
- https://lemmy.ml/c/[email protected]/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
The first link is the beehaw gaming community as hosted on beehaw. All of these are sorted by new, because it makes it very obvious when defederation went into effect. You can see that there are several new posts.
The second link is the beehaw gaming community as hosted on lemmy.world. You can see that all the posts before defederation (5 hours ago at time of writing) are the same as the beehaw one. But now, none of new posts are visible. We no longer get updates from the "true" version on beehaw. There are some new posts there, but all are posted by lemmy.world users. And the posts from lemmy.world users are not visible on beehaw.
The final link is to the beehaw gaming community as hosted on lemmy.ml. This is identical to the beehaw.org community, as the "true" version is on beehaw.org, the one that gets updated on other communities is the "true" version.
Lemmy.world communities
We'll use the lemmyworld base community as an example:
-
https://beehaw.org/c/[email protected]/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
-
https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
-
https://lemmy.ml/c/[email protected]/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
The first post is the version of this community as hosted on beehaw.org. You can see from 5 hours ago, there are no more posts. That's because they no longer receive the "true" version of this community. Someone on there could still post, but then it would only be visible to other people on beehaw.org.
The second shows it as hosted on lemmy.world. We can see all the posts. The last link shows it as hosted on lemmy.ml, and we can see it's the same as the lemmy.world version. The "true" version is on lemmy.world, so lemmy.ml keeps up with the updated version.
Third instance communities
Finally, we have the example of communities that are on instances that have not been defederated by beehaw.org.
-
https://beehaw.org/c/[email protected]/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
-
https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
We can see all three of these versions look pretty similar. That's because for the most part they are. We are identical with lemmy.ml, as lemmy.ml hosts the "true" version, and we get all updates from the "true" version. Beehaw.org will not get posts/comments from us, so beehaw actually doesn't have the most "true" version of this community.
Comment example
I found this one really entertaining:
This is the same post hosted on three different instances. Since the community is on lemmy.ml, the "true" version of this post is the lemmy.ml one.
It was posted by a beehaw.org user AFTER defederation, but it's still visible to lemmy.world users, since the community it was posted to is lemmy.ml, not beehaw.org. We can comment on it, and those comments are sent to the "true" version on lemmy.ml (and then shared to the wider fediverse). However, comments from lemmy.world are NOT sent to the version of this post on beehaw.org.
When I found this example, there were only two comments on this post, both from lemmy.world users. So the poster did not get an initial response because of defederation.
This makes it super confusing as to whether or not someone will actually be able to interact with your post/comment. You'd have to constantly check the user you are replying to is not @beehaw.org
Perhaps lemmy.world should defederate from beehaw.org? That would solve this UX problem?
We really shouldn't. That wouldn't actually solve any issues. It just means that the versions of posts we're looking at on other instances aren't "true".
Beehaw is defederating incorrectly. The best thing to do is to abandon them (considering the size of lemmy.world, that's what's likely to happen). It should not be common practice to retaliate with more defederation.
Just think how fun it will be with people telling you to "read the thread" when you can even see it and dont know it exists.
All I needed to know form this is that I can block and unsubscribe from all beehaw communities and look for new ones hosted on other instances. If I ever want to see beehaw stuff I will create an account there. For now, I am happy I am part of lemmy.world as I am not a fan of heavy moderation. As long as there is a way of downvoting, I have absolut trust in the community to regulate itself.
In fact, this is a big problem for me in beehaw. They took away the power for the community to self-regulate by removing downvoting and instead want a centrally moderated and controlled "safe space". Which is fine for some I guess but definitely not for me. If I see trolls, bigots, etc. I just downvote and move on. Some people get affected way more about it than others I guess.
This is what I did... I have an account on beehaw, but I had to unsubscribe to communities like [email protected] on my beehaw account because it is now unfederated... and I opened an account on lemmy.world and now subscribe to Futurama here.
But this means I have 2 accounts now, one on beehaw for general browsing and all communities from lemmy.ml or lemmy.ca etc, and an account on LW for a couple of communities...
I understand federation, but in a way it's not without problem.
**Thank you **for the excellent and detailed explanation in both post and this comment! This helped me so much to better understand how lemmy works and what the implications can be. It is especially useful and interesting to see it demonstrated on a current example, although that's a sad circumstance.
I have only one last question. What happens if they ever decide to re-federate? How will these desynced threads merge? Will votes merge? Will users know content is merged or will that be another cause for confusion?
Post saved, great resource. :)
On the bright side, at least I have drama content to read. Maybe this thing can replace reddit... lol
I've got to say I'm really frustrated with this. Beehaw ignored or denied my registration so I joined here, spent time curating a feed and now I guess I lose out on a substantial amount of that?
Which server is going to cut off my stuff next?
Profoundly frustrating and discouraging. I don't know what server to recommend to people so that they can get the most content.
I'm in the same boat. I really liked BeeHaw, but I couldn't get in. I joined .world instead, the largest, most stable alternative, and now I'm boned.
I think that as the fediverse grows, it might become common/necessary to have a few accounts in order to see everything you want to see. Honestly, if that's the price I have to pay to avoid centralization and enshittification, I'm ok with that.
undefined> I think that as the fediverse grows, it might become common/necessary to have a few accounts in order to see everything you want to see.
Exactly. And that's good, because that's how the internet is supposed to function in the first place.
(Plus, it helps against the enshittification and all that)
Looks pretty dumb to me, but hey if they want a walled community they have the right to have it.
It doesn't align with me and it makes me super happy of being here instead of there.
Thanks a lot for the explanation and also your other example comment, super useful!
As for me, I'll simply unjoin their communities and find the same somewhere else, I feel a bit sad tho for open users there that will have to create a new account somewhere else.
What they want is moderation. Unlike microblogging where you post to your followers, I think that running a public debate platform like Lemmy without controlling who enters is a horrible idea. That's why they posted a statement with the clarification that this defederation need not be permanent.
They have a right to build a walled community, but lemmy is a strange choice to do it. By connecting to a network known not to handle such disruptions well, (the OP is proof that it doesn't) and then disconnecting from it, seems like a small FU.
Well, they're not actually disconnecting from the network, just from some communities. Deferation should be indeed only be used as a last resort but I think it's a good feature to have.
Someone needs to make a regularly updated map of which instances are federated with which other instances.
Edit: Ok, apparently there's one here but there's over 600 instances and trying to show the connections between all of them destroys your browser.
This should be pinned IMO, it was confusing to see the announcement but still see the posts.
Hopefully we can re-create good Gaming and Technology communities here.
Not even a week on here and there's already fragmenting drama. Yikes.
People see more drama than it actually is. We all still come from Reddit mindset but fragmentation is a feature not a hindrance.
I am not here to show Reddit my middle-finger. I am hear because I like what fediverse stands for and if the price is smaller communities, so be it.
I mean, I came here to give Reddit the middle finger, but I also didn't know it existed before. Now that I do and I've been learning about the fediverse, I really like the idea. I think this concept is a good idea, and I'm actually glad to have joined the day before this whole separation drama thing kicked off. I've learned a lot about how this works, and can see the real world impact of an instance defederating.
I'm hoping for more diverse communities myself. Still have English as a barrier but those multilingual folk should have more options.
We live on internet drama. It is how I can survive the day 😁
I feel like I'm seeing the formation of the awful toxic shit reddit says community in beehaw and the donald type of toxic extremism in lemmygrad.
I feel like we're all in the primordial soup right now, watching offshoots of life begin (and hopefully end for some...).
Beehaw instance owners:
Huh, that didn't take long. Lemmy doesn't have legs if this is the start of things (community fragmentation).
There was a thread yesterday in kbin meta where there was overwhelming support for banning magazines (communities) which users didn't like. One user gave an example of kbin.social/m/antiwoke. It had two milquetoast submissions and nothing even remotely against any rules. I suggested they simply block the magazine and move on with their lives. I was heavily downvoted.
I fear that a large portion of the Lemmy community actually desires censorship. Now we see these same communities which desire censorship censoring each other. It's like a safe space arms race. I just want an instance where users welcome discussion - even when they don't agree with the person on the other side. I really don't think that is too much to ask for, even in 2023.
Let's not waste our breath pretending a place called "antiwoke" is anything but a racist right wing cesspool. There's literally no other purpose it could serve.
And of course you have censorship on the internet. You need to censor, literally every platform out there that has existed for a reasonable amount of time on the internet has to censor even if it's just to comply with local laws.
In other words, if you don't censor you open up your doors to hosting child porn, it's that simple. So I hope people can see that censorship is a necessary evil and not some binary choice you can make.
So the question is what you censor, not if you censor. And of course there will be things that people straight up don't want. You don't have to be accepting of everything. In fact it's actively detrimental to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I'm not gonna blame anyone if they want to kick out communities like "antiwoke" because it's quite clear what's gonna come out of them.
There's nothing wrong with an instance curating which communities they allow. If people want those communities they can create them on another instance. The thing about the Fediverse is that there's no one person/organization that decides what kinds of content are allowed, but that doesn't mean it needs to be a free-for-all.
I also support users blocking the communities/magazines they wish to, as long as the community isn't doing anything specifically illegal.
I came to lemmy to have some personal autonomy over my social media, I strongly dislike the types of toxic rhetoric that the above mention community push and my response would be to personally block them and move on.
There is merit to lawful freedom of speech, despite the abuse that we will naturally see in it's use. At some point our internet use will have to be understood as the same as the physical public.
The great thing that the fediverse can bring is that we can both have that freedom and personally block out the aggressors in a way that we couldn't in the physical public world.
The fediverse was designed for censorship that is what they want
Community fragmentation (hatred even) is a problem on reddit too, yet reddit as a whole lived pretty well regardless.
The same will happen here, when there are a lot of people some drama is bound to happen, a few communities will cut themselves out from the rest of the world, but it's ok, the rest will thrive nonetheless.
I think fragmentation is more susceptible on Lemmy due to the instance design, i.e. there are unlimited instances on Lemmy, each with multiple communities ("subreddits"), but only one instance on Reddit. So there could be 100 c/gaming on Lemmy, but only one r/gaming on Reddit.
It could just be the subreddits I'm subscribed to, but I don't have any fragmentation on there. The most fragmentation I have is something like r/games (discussion) and r/gaming (pictures), so they serve different purposes.
Maybe we are just seeing teething issues on Lemmy right now though, but seeing something like this is disappointing (spoken from someone who is on neither instance).
EDIT: spelling
But this is (to most people and those exiling Reddit) the beginning of the fediverse and something new. To start fragmenting so early isn't a great look. Can mods ban people on these instances? Still learning how all this works.
I appreciate the thorough explanation. But why did they defederate from us?
They chose to defederate from large instances with open registration. They believe it's allowing users to troll them.
IMO, this is kinda dumb. As any instance with open registration would be able to do what they want to prevent. Also, anyone can create their own instance and do this, they don't even need a server. It's just a bad idea.
To play devil's advocate for a minute, they're main points was that moderation actions right now are disproportionately focused on users coming from here and sh.itjust.works, and that the suite of available mod tools is not robust enough for them to handle such a high volume.
I don't think defederation was the right idea, personally but I don't think it was the wrong one from their point of view either. They're trying to intentionally cultivate a culture over there rather than to moderate over an evolving one, and at the moment its too much work for them with the high volume of users. They don't appear to have any ill-will against this instance as a whole or you. We can disagree with the decision but still respect it as their choice to make.
In the future if their internal culture solidifies I imagine they can refederate with us here; by that time we might have established our own communities to rival the high quality ones over there (gaming and technology) I can see already that lemmyworld is growing pretty well and has a load of communities that are start to thrive!
I don't remember there being open registration here. I signed up and had to wait a few days to get approved. Lemmy World has been great so far.
I don't remember there being open registration here. I signed up and had to wait a few days to get approved. Lemmy World has been nothing but great so far.
tldr: not enough mod/admin power to handle all the activity
Because they want only 4 people to have absolute power managing every single community and registration.
Surprise Sherlock, it isn't doable!
And then they have the audacity to demand the ability to comment and view other instances' posts without giving those instances the same right to their content.
As a Reddit refugee, and thus part of the problem, this kind of thing is what makes me unsure if I want to use Lemmy. I don't want to suddenly lose access to communities I've become accustomed to for reasons beyond my control.
Also, is there a way to see all the instances that have specifically defederated or blocked this one?
It is in your control, just not on a day to basis. You choose which instance your account is on and that is an important decision with consequences. People have signed up to lemmy.world because it's easy but maybe their approach doesn't match what you're looking for.
It is hard at the moment because everything is in flux so the consequences of choices aren't very clear. One thing to remember though - you don't have to have just one account.
the thing is, this is an awful strategy for getting people onto a platform. The reason for reddit's success was that there were forums for pretty much anything you could think of centralized in one place.
99.9% of people don't care that much about which app, which instance, which server, whatever, they're just there for the content. The fact that so many reddit users are up in arms about it is a legacy from when it was a much more niche platform than it is today. But in general, this confusing mess of federation, moderation philosophies, defederation, it doesn't matter which instance you choose because they federate, but actually it does matter because some of them don't, a wall of text needed to explain what happens when the mods of two different servers have a disagreement and how the federation protocol works, it's just not a good strategy for getting people onto the platform.
What exhausting nonsense
Yes, you can go to here to see the instances that are currently linked and blocked in your community.
Edit: Nevermind, this only shows instances your community has blocked. Let me see if there's a better way.
Let me see if there’s a better way.
I'm also searching and gathering, let's share! Also tagging @[email protected]
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances#all-lemmy-instances
3rd colum from the right (BI) shows the number of instances blocked from this instance. It does not tell you which instances are blocked specifically, but gives a rough idea with an overview.
Bottom left you can check 'blocked' and see a visual graph of red defederations. This view becomes increasingly unusable as lemmy grows, and already takes some time to load.
I was on the fence about joining lemmy.world or lemmy.one. As of today I'm glad I'm on lemmy.one I really hope that these growing pains end quickly.
I feel like this is a bad decision under the current circumstances, but also this shows the problems when one instance holds too large a portion of the user base and why we want to decentralize in the first place.
Defederation is a big decision that should not be taken lightly. You are effectively silencing an entire group of people from your group and when it’s a group as large as these two instances there is a lot of collateral damage.
However, we need more instances that are as well run as Lemmy.world if we want to truly be decentralized but I guess that is easier said than done.
I feel like the mods at bee haw are just putting a band aid on the problem because the “trolls” are going to keep coming as long as Lemmy is growing. They can just as easily come from any other instance. Defederation is not a replacement for good moderation.
Either way, I hope that as Lemmy matures we get more and more well run instances so we don’t have to rely on a small group of instances and hope they can get along
I feel like the mods at bee haw are just putting a band aid on the problem
They're putting a full-body cast on a booboo
Seems like they're just using the wrong software? A private forum is more in line with what they want it seems.
Oh wow. That is just vile from them.
I would love to see some specific examples of the so called "trolls" from lemmy.world that trolled them. But defederating an entire instance, nearly 20k users, due to the actions of very few users just seems extreme.
join-lemmy.org should probably add the info that beehaw is very strict in their decentralization/federation, so much so that they are becoming just another walled garden.
This is not to say that I agree with low-effort content, trolls or alt-right people. They should be blocked and even possibly banned. But this should be done on an individual basis. They categorizing an entire instance as "unworthy". We have names for these kind of generalizations.
walled garden
More like a prision
You seem to know what you're taking about.
Why would the Beehaw admins make Beehaw a Lemmy instance? Would it not be easier to achieve what they want through an old-style bulletin board or literally any other forum software?
This feels very much like using a laptop as an umbrella. You can, but why would you?
Less like a prison. You can actually exit them and join another instance.
People joined Beehaw because it's the most similar instance to current reddit. The problem is that current reddit policy just doesn't work.
I think it'll take time for all the reddit migration to develop a unique Lemmy culture away from reddit (there is always risk for a bad culture like what happened to Voat of course), and if they continue their current course, Beehaw will just get left behind as proof of failure of Reddit remnant on Lemmy.
Should lemmy.world defederate from beehaw.org so we don't even see their posts/comments? It seems a bad user experience to have posts/comments appear that we can't properly interact with.
No, this is a bad idea. If an instance defederates, they no longer get the "true" version of posts in other instances.
This idea of defederation is an extreme step. It really is like a nuke, and it really is supposed to be used in extreme circumstances (for example, a nazi instance should be defederated asap). The issue is that this extreme action is being used incorrectly.
They're using extreme actions when a bot could just as easily accomplish the same task without needing to nearly break lemmy. It shows that the admins of that instance really don't understand what defederation is or what it actually does.
No, this [retaliatory defederation] is a bad idea... This idea of defederation is an extreme step... The issue is that this extreme action is being used incorrectly.
I think this is an eminently reasonable take, but I'd like to present what I hope is also a reasonable counterpoint:
A major instance misusing defederation at a time when the broader community is under stress IS an extreme action. In order to reduce their own moderation load, beehaw has:
- increased the moderation load on other instances that need to keep threads like this one where people are processing difficult feelings under control
- created a massive increase in workload for people that answer newcomer questions who will now get a flood of questions around asymetric replication and zombie posts/communities
- made the federated network worse for everyone by sundering large/established communities.
In short, because defederation is such a heavy hammer with many external costs... it's a really big deal when a "load-bearing" instance misuses it.
I agree that retaliatory defederation shouldn't be the norm, especially for small instances. But when a top 5 instance uses defederation carelessly against other top-5 instances, the repercussions reverberate throughout the lemmyverse. It's probably anti-helpful for
lemmy.worldto act unilaterally in this regard, and it's probably too much to hope for consensus among other major instances that this is a misuse of defederation... but if 4 of the top 5 largest/most active instances could agree... I would love to see a 2d or 5d period for beehaw to restore federation and if they don't for the majority of the network to coordinate a permanent defederation with them.I'd then love to see a sort of united nations of major instances established to articulate some minimal cross-instance governance aimed at ensuring individual major instances respond to stresses in ways that accommodate the overall health of the federated network... And sanctions if they don't. I sort of despair that such a cross-instance body could be established or agree to anything given the differing values of the individuals involved... but when instances hosting a double-digit percentage of active users and communities decide to pop on and off the network willy nilly... that's bad behavior that imposes costs for every other member of the network and shouldn't be shrugged aside.
Very well said, and I agree 100%. It's like burning down a house to smoke out a rat. Or using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Or shooting flies with a canon... you get the point.
In my opinion we shouldn't, it would look like retaliation and that's never a good thing.
Let's stay open and welcoming regardless of what other people do.
You won't see their posts and comments moving forward.
You will see them on other instances though? Like I can reply to a beehaw post/comment on lemmy.ml, but they won't see my response.
Yeah, 100%
It'd help spur on the development and lemmy.world and provide a better user experience.
Let the 4 beehaw admins be the dictators of their diminishing, isolated exclave.
Ah yes, infighting. Exactly what we need when trying to combat the heavy influence of large corporate entities.
Nothing more typically lefty than a good infight. Seen plenty of that to go around.
Honestly while the entire architecture is in it's infancy we'd do well to remember being here to have a voice (or at least a front row seat) is a feature not a bug.
Better now than when the corporations get to the fediverse.
I mean, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4 has its roots somewhere ...
It's not infighting. What makes a system like a fedaverse more resilient is being able to break association if needed. There is no central group that can force standards on you.
The biggest issue I'm having with Lemmy is the lack of new posts and discussions which I mainly use reddit to read - especially football related.
Seems like splintering will just make it even harder to do that here. I'm not sure how Lemmy is supposed to grow if discussion and growth is limited by instances.
It seems like Lemmy is already experiencing further fragmentation and authority struggles. It doesn't bode well for growing Lemmy as a whole. Federation seems to be a double edged sword.
It is a double-edge sword indeed. Although, you can look at it differently. There are both benefits and disadvantages of having either massive communities where they either eventually have to be heavily moderated or they become Wild West and many smaller communities where Nazis, communist, snowflakes, bigots and the rest of us normal people have our own places.
Just reading through this post, I think it would be good for Lemmy to have a feature that shows users when writing a comment or post that it won't be seen by users on X instance (in case lemmy.world users are not aware that beehaw.org has defederated them).
If they still go though with the comment or post, it would have an icon that if you hover over/click on it, it shows the communities that have defederated them or what the effect is (X users can't see this post, Y users are not seeing the "True" post etc.)
I don't think I'm explaining it well, but there needs to be some visual indication so anyone on any instance knows that a certain comment or post isn't being seen by users of a certain instance or whatever - or maybe that isn't feasible as there are certain instances that everyone would block.
This 100%. It can even just be done in the UI layer (look up the users' instance and if our instance is blocked there).
Please create an issue on the repo if there isn't one already.
I think it would put awful strain on the whole system, there are more than 500 servers now and they're still growing, can you imagine having to check 500+ servers to see the blocklist every single time someone adds a comment?
What they should certainly do IMO is adding a warning on join-lemmy to make users aware of which servers are blocking others.
What each server could do that would help IMO is having somewhere a post with the list of servers blocking them, so users will know before commenting.
can you imagine having to check 500+ servers to see the blocklist every single time someone adds a comment?
Defederation happens much less often than new comments are posted. The visibility information is also the same for all comments, posts and communities on one instance.
So the check would not have to happen in real time for each comment. It can probably be done once per hour/day for the whole instance as a low priority task.
I like the idea of a visibility indicator.
You only need one check. Eg. if the user is about to comment on a beehaw.org post, check if beehaw.org is federated.
Why not just prevent comments/posts altogether? What's the point in allowing users to talk to a brick wall? Why would lemmy.world users want to interact exclusively with each other on a ghost of a community from another instance?
If Beehaw has say the main gaming community, then that's going to be subscribed from users from all different instances, so there will probably be more comments from non Beehaw users on there than Beehaw users.
Hopefully the main communities move out of Beehaw to an instance that doesn't block large communities though.
Is there a community for suggesting Lemmy features like this yet? Alot of these are vital for user experience.
It's the Issues page on either the Lemmy or the Lemmy-UI repository (I don't know which one is more appropriate):
I don't have a GitHub account so I haven't submitted anything there, but feel free to suggest my idea.
I feel like this is a bad decision under the current circumstances, but also this shows the problems when one instance holds too large a portion of the user base and why we want to decentralize in the first place.
Defederation is a big decision that should not be taken lightly. You are effectively silencing an entire group of people from your group and when it’s a group as large as these two instances there is a lot of collateral damage.
However, we need more instances that are as well run as Lemmy.world if we want to truly be decentralized but I guess that is easier said than done.
I feel like the mods at bee haw are just putting a band aid on the problem because the “trolls” are going to keep coming as long as Lemmy is growing. They can just as easily come from any instance. Defederation is not a replacement for good moderation.
Either way, I hope that as Lemmy matures we get more and more well run instances so we don’t have to rely on a small group of instances and hope they can get along.
Defederation is not a replacement for good moderation.
EXACTLY! That's why this action annoys me so much. It would be like an admin on reddit using an admin action to moderate a subreddit.
My idea for communities of users who want small enclaves: have TWO instances
- One community instance that has no users. Is federated only with the user instance.
- One user instance that has no communities. Is federated to the broader Lemmy federation AND the community instance
This allows you to have users that have their own space. Allows them to interact with all of Lemmy. Communities don't get co-mingled or have to deal with "true" communities, etc.
Defederation is not a replacement for good moderation.
I don't think beehaw admins ever claimed anything like that. In fact they outright said this is a temporary solution due to the current lack of moderation tools and an overwhelming amount of new users.
Thank you for the wonderful explanation. I'm super sad because most of what I wanted to interact with was in beehaw. However I'm not willing to make multiple accounts in order to interact with their instance. I'm sure that other instances of their will be made and quickly overtake beehaw.
Luckily .world/.ml/.works alternatives are all starting to become available.
To be honest, as time went by and a few of my subreddits I frequented started to get brigaded by transphobes and fascist bawbags (Scotland and unitedkingdom subs are a great example of this) I stopped participating altogether in them.
I found the casualuk sub and that became pretty much the only place I’d comment/post. It felt like a much closer-knit community and I’d much rather have that than a massive community that may not feel as “homely” if that makes sense.
EDIT - I replied to the wrong post, I've not had a coffee yet.
Just so you know it may not be your fault. There's a bug that sometimes causes you to see one post when in reality you are interacting with another. Pretty sure there's already a fix in an upcoming version though.
Ahh that makes me feel a bit better at least!
This is a well-known phenomenon known as the paradox of tolerance.
If you allow intolerant people to inhabit your community, it's going to make kind people feel less welcome there, so they'll leave. That means only intelorant people will remain. The only way to maintain a friendly welcoming community is to immediately clamp down on any hate-filled behaviour.
There's a great story about it here. You have to scroll down a bit to get to the actual story (it's a series of Tweets), but unfortunately the original Tweets have been taken down so these spammy types of articles are the only way I can see to share it.
Ironically, this response seems very relevant to this post.
I don't know whether or not this was the right decision for beehaw, although I certainly sympathize with them having staffing and mod tool issues. Modding any forum is a thankless and tiring job, and I'm sure in it's super early state Lemmy doesn't exactly have a mature suite of tools to work with.
I am very interested in the community reaction here though. There seems to be a shared assumption that instance creation in the Fediverse means an open exchange of users and content (outside of bad actor or extreme instances), and most instances should only be distributing technical burden and otherwise be almost just an aesthetic in the larger Fediverse.
This despite the user philosophy in the Fediverse being 'go where you want, interact with who your want', and federation tools meaning that philosophy applies to instances as well. And if you want meaningful differences between communities and instances, this has to be so - there has to be a strong ability to self-regulate, up to and including the ability to defederate from incompatible instances.
I think it'll be very interesting to see how the Fediverse develops. A wider Fediverse composed of sets of federated instances which aren't federated with other sets is possible. A largely open Fediverse with limited walled off instances is also possible. I know right now the latter is probably preferred to encourage growth, but in the long run? (these are not the only conceivable arrangements either, but this post is long enough already)
I think in the short term its very a) short sighted and b) damaging to the whole lemmyverse.
It only highlights to both new users and naysayers the fragility of the whole thing. One (small) group of people can decide to press the nuclear option and suddenly thousands of genuine users both on their server and others are penalised and lose out.
For one of the "big four" instances (.ml, world, shitjustworks and beehaw) to pull the plug so soon after the "blackout influx" will not inspire confidence in users. New users who signed up to beehaw (on advice that .ml was struggling for capacity) suddenly a few days into their interactions find themselves locked out of communities they had joined. Equally people who joined other instances but were enjoying gaming@beehaw or politics@beehaw which were the two biggest gaming/politics communities, suddenly also find themselves locked out.
Yes, this is on one hand the benefit of the fedeverse, but for new members, this just demonstrates that a small group (by the sounds of it 4-5 people) can make a snap decision, and effect thousands of users.
It seems very short sighted and damaging to a lot of the goodwill built up over recent days
It is an incredibly fragile system, and it's honestly hard for me (as a reddit refugee) to see how instances scale from a few hundred or thousand users to hundred of thousands or millions. I was absolutely floored to read that lemmy.ml was hosted on a $100/month virtual server up to the blackout.
I get why beehaw would isolate themselves, at least while they figure out how to manage the massive traffic spike. It may well be that such communities, by their very nature, are incompatible with hundreds of thousands of users. Maybe even with tens of thousands. The flip side of fragility is that you can have multiple...worlds?...within the lemmy universe. Smaller instances or clusters of instances that find themselves incompatible with other clusters.
It's kind of an accident of timing that beehaw was big as the reddit influx started. I suspect their philosophy is not compatible with the average redditor, and if beehaw hosts a lot of popular communities, those communities will either migrate or alternatives will rise on more open instances. In three months, no one will remember [email protected]
What interests me is that there is still a [email protected] community on lemmy.world. Locals can post there, see new stuff, etc. It's not "dead." Maybe no alternative will rise because no one notices.
It would be a little less confusing if communities on defederated instances were marked as such in the "all communities" list.
Amazing post with great info, thank you! There literally nothing in UI to let people know this is how it works tho and relies on words of mouth sharing. Communities essentially look exactly the same but like there's been no activity unless lemmy.world users post in it so you have to be able to guess posts are on a defederated instance or be hypervigilant in checking usernames if you haven't seen any posts about it, or are a new user in a week when this is t discussed as frequently. This is a huge oversight tbh and leaves me feeling a little uneasy. With more questions.
For example the LGBTQ community hosted on beehaw. Hypothetically say all of us genuine users who are aware of this unsubscribe because we find other communities that allow us to participate with a wider community. The shell community is still there, using beehaw branding, looks like a legit LGBTQ space but is now exclusively populated by trolls and unfortunate users who have missed announcements that this has happened. Nothing in the UI informs anyone posting or commenting there that it is not the true instance, and therefore no longer moderated by the owners.
Unaware user who already subscribed before the defederation posts a topic they want to discuss in a few weeks time, and suddenly they're flooded with highly upvoted troll responses That post ends up on the lemmy.world local/all page and is broadcast to other users who may not be aware, and a lot of new users who have no idea this ever happened. Now Beehaw is known as a hub for homophobic trolls that allows queer users to be trolled, and the trolls know they can get away with it in that community. Sure, eventually someone will come in to let that user know what's up and where to go, but by that time the damage is already done.
That also leads me to question how reporting works for this type of thing. If I report a user for breaking sub rules on the false version, who does that report go to? Is it a random lemmy.world mod/admin because we are both lemmy.world users in a community without beehaws mods or is it lost to the ether because there's no longer a connection to beehaw mods? If it goes to world mods, what if someone violates the subs rules that are still shown on the false instance, but not lemmy.world rules? My understanding was that moderation happened in communities by the host instance so does that mean these shell communities are completely unmoderated? That makes me feel very uncomfortable that these shell communities are even still available to world users, if it is the case, and should be cause for a mutual defederation until it's addressed but I'd like to have my reasoning corrected here if I'm off base. I'm still learning but this has me a little concerned so would appreciate being corrected if I'm wrong.
Edit: people are misunderstanding what I'm saying in the comments.
Who is moderating posts made by lemmy.world users in 'false' beehaw communities since the official beehaw moderators can no longer see these posts?
https://lemmy.world/post/172609
https://lemmy.world/post/167045
https://lemmy.world/post/158352
You can click the little colourful fediverse icon, and it will always bring you to the "true" version of the post.
So who moderates those posta? Is that shown before making a post or comment or does a user have to mistakenly post and then see the 'true' post doesn't exist to work it out?
I use jerboa app so that icon doesn't exist at all, which is more an issue for jerboa developers but from a phone/app user perspective, there is absolutely no way to identify a sub has been defederated without switching accounts to a federated account.
Seems like there should be a notice when a community is just a copy that isn't being updated anymore, to encourage people to abandon it and use one that is updated across instances. Or discourage them from subscribing to it.
This, or even better lock all posts and block new ones being generated to stop confusion. I read a post somewhere about how the defederated User's could take the leftover communities and use them as cesspools of .. culture
Exactly! This is a really important feature to implement
This is an incredibly selfish, dipshit move. They’re trying to prioritise the growth of their own instance at the expense of Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole, at a time when we should all be banded together to accept the massive influx of departing Redditors.
This is just going to serve to put people that were on the fence off of Lemmy and they'll go back to reddit.
I’m not sure about that. It just sounds like good old Reddit drama which actually attracts people who will watch it unfold with morbid curiosity.
Yup
Eh? Maybe unfortunate for beehaw users and people from lemmy.world who've joined beehaw communities (like me) but they have the right to decide what their instance is like.
Maybe they just don't want such a big community.
Yeah, this seems to me like the concept of federated instances actually working. It is naive to me to assume that all instances will always want to federate with each other at all costs, some communities will end up by nature enclosed from others. And that is fine.
What would you do to stop a wave of trolls that kept creating new accounts on a remote instance with open sign-ups to harass users on your instance?
Honestly this is pretty disheartening.
I've just recently had this discussion with a friend where he told me he prefered Nostr because he was afraid instances would randomly start banning eachother. I told him that I've never been banned from anywhere on my life and it just wasn't realistic at this stage of growth.
Well that aged like milk, huh?
Man, I just had a glance at Nostr as this is the first I've heard of it, and literally every single post/video/image was about bitcoin. For me, that's a huge turn off personally. I have absolutely zero interest in any bitcoin related stuff, and it's made sure I'll be avoiding Nostr in the future.
I agree
I was just poking around a bit over at beehaw, earlier. and I got the STRONG impression that they really weren't in a position to deal with the sudden influx of users: not enough mod team, not enough money, not enough spare time in the day for the few people running it. I'm not holding that against them, that's to be expected in Fediverse spaces, which I gather intend to spread the load across thousands of instances, not just one.
Is this just them trying to get things under control, or was there some other problem?
This is so over complicated, but I like it lol.
Try looking at this comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/205763
The examples make it much clearer I think.
A great lesson in how the federation works. Thanks for posting.
My second day using Lemmy and infighting is already destroying it.
I don't think "destroying" is the right verb. According to https://fedidb.org/ we can see that at the time of my post:
- the Fediverse has 9.2 million users
- Lemmy software nodes have 135,410 users
- Beehaw has 12,365 users (9.1% of all Lemmy)
- Lemmy.world has 23,756 users (17.5% of all Lemmy)
- The remaining users are spread across 358 other active servers
Lemmy and the Fediverse are going to be just fine.
I'm guessing Beehaw will lose its explosive growth of late and shrink back into a very niche community that few people care about. I spent a few weeks there, and I suspect this is just fine with the admins. It's a nice place and I plan to visit now and again, but I've effectively migrated here as my new main node.
To be honest according to your own data that doesn't seem good for Lemmy. Two huge instances who make up almost 30% of all Lemmy users aren't federated anymore, it seems to me it's a pretty big deal for Lemmy.
The same growing pains happened on Mastodon; it'll settle out soon
That's a real bitch move, basically shadowbanning huge portions of the reddit migration. Unsubscribed from everything they host and lost a ton of content. Hopefully we can grow our own technology, gaming and whatever other large discussion hubs.
This isn't much better than what reddit is doing, fucking safe spaces. I miss the hell out of the internet at the turn of the millennium. When the users started touching things it all went to shit.
So it seems that it's taken about a week of exodus before Eden begins it's fall in to the temptations of taking sides and hurling insults.
I find it ironic that you call it "fucking safe spaces" when it's their admins efforts to maintain a safe space for their user base. Beehaw obviously doesn't have the staff to facilitate the Reddit exodus but it wasn't built for that purpose in the first place.
Regardless of impact, I respect their position, even if I don't like it.
I was venting. I'm not a fan of the idea of safe spaces, censoring, or mods in general. That's what the up and down vote buttons are for. I like the wild and free frontier internet, and Lemmy was feeling like that.
I think what they did probably hurt the migration and adoption of the platform, hopefully not too much.
Of course its their decision to make, I'm not going to change it, but I don't respect them for it. And that's OK, I don't have to.
Man this is starting to sound like reddit 2.0 where everything is walled off depending on what your subscribed to
What was their reason for defederating? I tried to read their post and it didn’t make sense to me.
They felt like they were getting a lot of flaming and trolls from those two instances.
To elaborate user sign up on these instances are the easiest and fastest. They could ban a user from our server only to have that person spin up a new account and keep harassing them.
They felt this was their only solution to that problem given their current tool set.
Creating a "safe space". Meaning that instead wanting for the community to self-regulate they want to have all the power of censorship.
Essentially, if you ever write anything they don't like, they want to be able to never see you again.
They want to built an echo chamber where nothing even remotely upsetting can be mentioned or discussed.
I mean from what I've seen the less abrasive frame would be 'find a space for constructive discussion for the marginalized.' I'm not really their audience, but I have eyes, they take an abnormal amount of shit in their day to day life.
I don't think there's a shortage of places in that universe to speak your mind, and I wouldn't try to set someone else's house rules.
similar to truth.social is a never federated, modified mastodon instance. good luck
I think this is the best explanation of how federation works that I've seen so far. Really appreciate it. So would it benefit us to use an account for me different website to get the benefit of both communities? Is there a way to be essentially logged into two accounts at once so that you can see separate federated communities all at once?
Thank you, that is a great explanation.
I do get where Beehaw admins are coming from. They want their instance to be a tight-knit safespace, and it is pretty hard to accomplish when there are only several admins dealing with an insane wave of newcomers. Unless Lemmy moderation tools get better, that seems like an OK temporary solution. Though, it is still kinda unfortunate that federated services, while being a great idea overall, are so prone to balkanization (that is, essentially, the fragmentation of mastodon situation all over again) but it gives user choice.
They want their instance to be a tight-knit safespace, and it is pretty hard to accomplish when there are only several admins dealing with an insane wave of newcomers.
In that case they shouldn't have been on the Fediverse to begin with.
why not? the thing about the Fediverse, once again, is that you get to choose who you want your instance to associate with
they temporarily don't want to associate with big instances with loose registration requirements, and it's because they're afraid that they wouldn't be able to handle any possible flows of bad actors from those instances with how small their team is and how barebones the Lemmy mod tools are currently
which sounds really reasonable to be quite honest
You are now banned from beehaw
They want their instance to be a tight-knit safespace, and it is pretty hard to accomplish when there are only several admins dealing with an insane wave of newcomers
They could do that by blocking all users from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. What they've done is prevent their users from interacting with the broader fediverse, which is not at all what they intended to do based on their post.
I don't think Lemmy supports only blocking users from an instance yet so they actually can't do that. I believe the only option is a full block with another instance so the only way to currently defend against a flood of malicious users is by doing what beehaw did.
Its convenience. 99% don't care about anything apart from getting what they need. The blackout caused them inconvenience so its therefore annoying. Its the same attitude that can appear when workers take strike action.
They literally said they wanted to create a safe space for themselves. Just let them.
Just explaining how this affects the users here, that's it. I just said why I personally think this is a mistake.
Wasn't directed at you but all the doomsayers in the thread.
This explains things really well. Beehaw's goal is to be the tight-knit, invite only home for all kinds of people. It's not supposed to be a Reddit alternative, but a thing of its own. However, KBin and other instances aren't blocked yet from federating with them, and making a new instance is also an option, so it's not like all is lost. This is a reason why having more than one account helps.
It's tricky because beehaw accounts for 13 of the top 50 communities across the fediverse and have become the de facto gaming/tech/news destination.
Not anymore (hopefully)
@AgentGoldfish
In my opinion, this is an extraordinarily dumb act by the beehaw instance owners. It’s worse for beehaw users than for us, and will likely result in many beehaw users leaving that instance.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but how is it "worse for them"? Sure, if your goal is to create a big community, it's obviously bad, and perhaps it will lead to the death of that community. But their main goal isn't growth, it's having a "save space" and highly moderated community.
In your opinion, how should they have acted to achieve that goal when according to them, they are not able to moderate that much content at the moment in a way they want to? Lemmy.world allows any user to register without any vetting and is one of the biggest communities, does it not make sense to temporarily block content from here to decrease the amount of content to moderate?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but how is it “worse for them”?
It cuts off beehaw from the wider lemmyverse. Since their users can not interact with lemmy.world posts and have limited capacity to interact with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works users on other posts.
I understand they want a highly cultivated community, there's nothing wrong with doing that. The issue is that they way they've gone about doing it is by making the experience far worse for their users. Several people have already said they've made alternate accounts on other instances because of this.
Effectively, instead of created a sanctuary, they've created a prison. They wanted a walled garden for their users. But instead of allowing their users to interact with the wider fediverse, they lock them in.
In your opinion, how should they have acted to achieve that goal when according to them, they are not able to moderate that much content at the moment in a way they want to?
Blocked all users from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works from posting in their communities. Either that, or just use a bot to remove all comments from users from lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works.
Effectively that action would create their walled garden on their instance without preventing their users from interacting with the wider fediverse.
Defederation is not meant as a means of moderator action, and that's how it's being used.
Thank you for your explanation. If it can easily be done, blocking users from lemmy.world seems like the obvious solution then.
I think there was a post made by the admins that basically explained that their technical knowhow is limited and that they are overwhelmed with the situation, perhaps this choice was done because of lack of knowledge.
I read that whole thing, and no speculation as to why theyve done this?
The beehaw admin said, to grossly paraphrase, they don't have enough admins to deal with the extra activity and they're "mildly annoyed" that sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world have "open registration" policies as they feel it invites trolls and the like.
🤷
Edit: full post if you want to read it. I left out some stuff about ethos and spirit and stuff.
If anything I hope this will serve all communities as valuable experience. I hope to see beehaw sharing the results sometime in the future. We'll se what happens.
I think it's gonna be allright. Defederation from big instances might be very good for those that want to maintain somewhat intimate wibe for themselves.
I'm hoping simply banning all outsiders from commenting and posting is a viable alternative. Means users from the walled garden and outsiders aren't barred from interacting elsewhere.
Yeah, definitely. More refined mod tools are necessary and I'm sure those are being developed. For now we have only a nuke button.
So they de-federated because of federation?
More like, they de-federated because the moderation load became extreme, so they're now disconnecting and reasessing.
This is a reasonable take.
So maybe this is a silly question and I don’t understand things completely but does this mean as a lemmy.world member I should unsubscribe from beehaw communities and find similar communities elsewhere?
Yes, I think that's what they tried to explain. If you do not unsubscribe from a community on an instance which has defederated your instance, you will only ever meet lemmys from your home instance in this community. This probably gets stale rather quickly, hence the recommendation to unsubscribe.
If you want to interact with lemmys from other instances, unsubscribe from communities from instances which defederated your instance.
Yes.
I think this entire issue is showing a critical issue with Lemmy's maturity, which is honestly the number one thing blocking people from sites like Reddit from joining. All of Lemmy's tools for dealing with moderation are currently a bit underdeveloped. From the Admin tools of an instance to the moderator tools for each community, there just isn't very much granularity. That means right now Lemmy can't handle large communities, and with one as large as lemmy.world some trolls filter in. Even worse, right now if a lemmy.world user goes and posts a homophobic rant on a queer instance, like Blahaj, and people proceeded to report it, those reports would only go to Blahaj when they should probably go to both Blahaj and lemmy.world, meaning that those toxic users are only banned within the instance they offended in and can retreat to the refuge of their main instance, and proceed to attack other communities. One of the issues is less so with the tooling and moreso with just how fast Lemmy has grown, for example beehaw has 5 admins but over 12 thousand users, plus the users from the other communities they are still federating with. That means that every admin is managing thousands of people, which is not sustainable. Until these critical issues with the tooling are solved, Lemmy is going to be staunched in its growth, and we are going to end up with instances defederating to try and take control.
Edit: The report thing might be incorrect, and if so I apologize for not verifying that information before spreading it.
Or, more likely, just quickly create another user and continue to harrass Blahaj. You are correct in that lemmy needs better admin tools. However, when Reddit was young it also didn't have very good admin tools. The devs probably couldn't have predicted this massive influx of users, so they didn't put as much time into the administration tools.
Thank you for this explanation; it’s super helpful. Regardless of our views on this decision, I think it’s important to remember why we’re here in the first place. This decision does seem drastic, but I don’t think hoping that beehaw “dies off” is the right mindset. I’m sure Reddit is sitting on the sidelines waiting for something like this to happen, so we should be doing whatever we can to keep the momentum we’ve gained in the past few days and ensure the fediverse doesn’t implode.
Yeah it's a good point. This is the power of the fediverse as far as I understand. The fragmentation is a feature and not something problematic.
If they want a heavily moderated "safe space" (whatever that is) that is totally fine. That is definitely not for me but it will find it's niche.
For context; the beehaw announcement
One main issue (or benefit, depending on your POV) with federation is that it trends toward the lowest common denominator of moderation. Because of the way things scale, you rely on others instances to moderate their users. But what if your standard for etiquette differs? For a large instance, you either try to convince other instances to get in line and adopt a shared value system, or you relent, or you defederate. All of these options will likely result in a more "average" standard of quality among the wider pool of instances.
Maybe that's good, maybe it's bad, but I'm not surprised instances with quality standards on the extreme ends get pushed out.
I'm very grateful for this post. Thank you very much.
This is a really good explanation for how defederation works.
I understand your point that Beehaw defederating from two subs for moderation and user management seems like an extreme reaction. But it's one I kind of expected from them given Beehaw's philosophies as as an instance.
Their detailed posts about what Beehaw is always made it very clear to me they think carefully about how they run their space and the users they want to grant access to. They really prioritise making their instance a safe space for well-meaning discussion through their vetted registrations.
I'm not an admin. I'm not an experienced Lemmy user. I'm not someone who has had experience moderating and being an admin on several communities before. They have and I've also seen activity on the Lemmy repo from them showing they have dev experience too.
As you pointed out, the entire site of 12k users is currently managed by 4 people who seem to have quite a lot of experience managing communities. That's a big workload. I've been using both Beehaw and Kbin since Reddit's awful API changes to see how both places grow and so far I've found Beehaw to be a very enjoyable experience with a pretty high engagement rate. I usually get hella upvotes and replies to anything I say. It does feel like a pretty active, close-knit place of well-meaning people even at this early stage. I think they're running Beehaw pretty well so far. Kbin is very solid too, but Beehaw I've found tends to have a deeper level of engagement and longer, more in-depth post styles that I prefer.
I know any instances with open registration could hop in and contribute to Beehaw, so this issue they have of not being able to vet and control users isn't unique to those two instances. But given so far the place to me as a user still feels the same as when I joined a few days ago more or less, I'm going to take them at their word that they're getting an influx of activity that isn't a particularly good fit for Beehaw for now. There's a lot of instances that could defederate from. 2 is not a huge number so far. Plus they did explicitly say at the end this is not a permanent decision, they may very well change their minds later on.
So personally, I respect and understand Beehaw's decision at this moment. Lets give things time and see how things develop. It's definitely a temporary, broad axe to cutting an apple type solution to their troll problem - which may very well continue as Lemmy gets more popularity as a platform overall - but I think they want to be specific about who they pull into their moderation team to ensure the vibe of Beehaw is maintained. Lets give it some time to see what happens.
There’s a lot of instances that could defederate from. 2 is not a huge number so far.
They defederated from 300 some instances. And it's kinda ridiculous to use the number of instances instead of the number of users. They defederated from 2 of the top 4 instances in terms of number of users.
It’s definitely a temporary, broad axe to cutting an apple type solution to their troll problem
Two things:
-
It doesn't actually address their troll problem, since anyone can create a new instance and post to their communities.
-
It has the knock on affect of their users not being able to interact with a huge chunk of the wider fediverse
That second point is the main criticism I have for them. I don't think they fully understood the consequences of their actions. They're using an extreme admin-level action for community moderation. That's now how this was intended to be used.
Why would anyone stay on an instance that can't interact with a huge chunk of the fediverse? Only the most passionate beehaw-ers will stay there. Most will likely leave to more accessible pastures.
Majority of these 300 instances actually are Mastodon and other microblogging instances.
They likely have imported a Mastodon-tailored blocklist at some point.Why would anyone stay on an instance that can’t interact with a huge chunk of the fediverse? Only the most passionate beehaw-ers will stay there. Most will likely leave to more accessible pastures.
Maybe this is the point. They’ve taken this extreme action to drive their non core users into other instances. This leaves only the users that want to be part of their more isolated instance, which seems to be their goal. Low volume, high quality discussions within their own community.
-
The more I think about it, the more it seems that the appropriate response is mutual defederation. It will cause a lot of unnecessary confusion if lemmy.world and the other affected instances don’t do that.
I think most people sign up on whichever instance is most convenient but still want to access all other instances. Those people should still be able to do that, even if one instance has decided to hinder that ability.
IMO the best solution would be to mark those posts when viewed from a de-federated instance. Something like "Note: your comments on this post will only be visible to other users on this instance".
Thanks for posting this, it made it a lot clearer for me and answered why I could still see the Beehaw communities I'd subscribed to
Thank you for the very detailed explanation.
I'm still confused on how the sending works of posts and comments between instances. Like if I want to set up my own instance and pull posts from lemmy.world and beehaw.org, surely I can do that without both of them needing to give me permission via federation? Unless they actively blocked my instance. It would only be when I make a post or comment on my copy on my instance that their users would not see it unless they federated with me. But let's say Midwest.social federates with my new instance, would their users not also see my posts and comments regardless of the community I posted them to?
surely I can do that without both of them needing to give me permission via federation?
So there are whitelist only instances (which honestly is what beehaw should be doing), so if you hosted your own instance, you would need to be whitelisted in order to interact with beehaw communities/users. Otherwise, federation is pretty much a default
Like if I want to set up my own instance and pull posts from lemmy.world and beehaw.org, surely I can do that without both of them needing to give me permission via federation?
Ok, so this requires some understanding of the ActivityPub protocol, and my understand of this edge case is admittedly a bit fuzzy. You can still access that information, you could do it right now just by going to https://beehaw.org, and if you have some mechanism to pull that data, you could still get that data if you wanted to. But critically, that wouldn't use ActivityPub.
With ActivityPub, your instance would send a request to the community on beehaw to follow the community. The beehaw instance would then send updates to your instance, where they would be stored as a copy. Beehaw keeps the "true" version, as the community is hosted on their instance, but you have your own copy. If beehaw defederates you (or is whitelist only and never federates you), then you can't send that request (rather, you can send the request, but beehaw won't listen). So beehaw will not send updates via ActivityPub.
My guess is the instance chooses whether you can freely federate, or that your request needs to be accepted. I would also guess that they only see posts on commonly federated instances.
When I look at the instances list on SJW, they are still federating beehaw. So if you try to view [email protected] right now through SJW do you see the latest posts that are on the main site? I'm curious because I think you should see them, they just won't see your posts or comments.
Thanks for this write-up. Great link to send people.
Did they explain why they defederated? What was their motive?
They were under a troll attack from users coming from the instances they defederated. It's a necessary, albeit temporary, measure.
The consistent presence of ML content on their feed upset the liberal sensibilities of their mods and user base.
To actually answer the question, they themselves said it was a temporary measure to deal with the huge increase in activity while having limited moderation capabilities.
What is ML? (Other than the lemmy.ml’s TLD)
Really sad to see the community fracture :'(
It's a new era. The fragmentation is a feature not a problem.
Does anyone know of an instance I can sign up for that is the most likely to not be defederated. I guess that's a tall ask but I like seeing everything. For some reason I can't sign up for lemmy.ml and lemmy.world I signed up but then it started telling me my login credentials were wrong and when I choose forgot password there's nothing in my inbox.
I also signed up for sh.itjust.works but then the all feed on there doesn't even have this thread for some reason and a bunch of stuff is old.
I'm guessing the best way to get an instance that won't be defederated by anybody is to stand up your own instance. Then be very, very careful not to upset the admins of any instance in the Fediverse.
I'm still new to all of this, but that's my best guess atm.
Lemmy.one is run by the people who rhn /r/privacyguides on reddit, so I think I think it's a great option.
This is a good question. It ultimately depends on the admin of that specific instance. Try find an instance where the admin is very active in posts / comments etc and see how they handle certain things and the way they conduct themselves.
This should give you a good idea of how they operate and maybe give you a bit more trust. But things change all the time, so anything is possible really. What I would recommend is making a few accounts on a few different instances, then just pick one to start with. If that instance changes in a way you dislike, move to another one.
It's a bit of admin really, but in the name of freedom I think it's worth it.
I guess if this sort of bs happens more often its most beneficial to sign up to a very small instance.
As someone just learning and exploring the Fediverse, what in your opinion would be a good reason to defederate? Also, thanks for the excellent write-up to help me understand better
sorry for the off-topic but do someone know if lemm.ee is still federated?
On the bottom of every instance there is the hyper-link "instances" which shows a list of blocked instances and of linked instances. I don't know if it manually edited or if it is dynamic, but if it is the latter case then it appears, according to some testing I've done, to not update instantaneously.
Anyway, according to lemm.ee "instances" page we are still linked and I think we will remain so, since they do not seem so keen to create an extremely walled garden like beehaw. Meanwhile, we do appear on the very long "blocked instances" list from beehaw.
Kind of a dumb question, but if a user browses "All", do they see Beehaw posts and Lemmy.world posts as if they were on the respective instance?
No. All is served by the instance that you log into, and it consists of all of the communities that your instance federates with.
For example, if I make my own Lemmy instance I can't find [email protected] in All until:
- Someone on my instance (probably me) searches for and subscribes to [email protected]
- It passes a check that lemmy.world is not explicitly defederated from my instance by me (the admin)
The only true "All" is Lemmy.Directory or similar instances that subscribe to everything automatically
Why can I still interact with beehaw communities? This won’t ever stop. You’ll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won’t see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities.
Including instances that..?
sorry, I had to do a lot of editing in order to get it to post this morning.
Including instances that are also defederated.
Basically, beehaw has decided we can no longer access the "true" version of communities on beehaw. So the versions hosted here on lemmy.world are still visible to lemmy.world users, but that doesn't update the "true" version, and also doesn't update other versions hosted on other defederated instances.
It will be interesting to check beehaw communities hosted on defederated instances in a few days. Because the version on lemmy.world will be very different from the version on sh.itjust.works which will be different still from the "true" version.
I figured as much. Thank you for all the clarifying info.
Is there any downside to staying subscribed to their communities if I just want to see the posts? It's a shame because their communities seem to have the most posts at the moment.
After the moment of defederation, you will not get anything new in communities coming from beehaw except posts and comments made by users of your home instance.
So you can still see old posts and comments of beehaw users, but everything new will have to come from your home instance exclusively. You won't see new posts or comments made by users from beehaw or any other instance in communities originating from beehaw.
Thanks for the post. I think I understand what's going on now.
If I'm understanding this correctly, I could still post to beehaw but only other lemmy.world users would be able to see it. Is a list or something anywhere on lemmy.world where I can see which other instances have defederated it (or have been defederated by lemmy.world)?
Saved!
I'm trying to process this, as this federation thing is a bit new to me. So if I subscribed to Free and Open Source [email protected] and I subscribed by using the syntax URL of https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected] then when they post, I see their stuff, but when I post they don't see my posts because of defederation?
I'm confused. If I am now subscribed to beehaw, does that mean i'm exempt from being defederated? Or do I need to try signing up for lemmy.one?
You will only see cached posts from beehaw, plus local comments on those cached posts, using your lemmy.world account. I moved today because of that and immediately noticed the difference.
sorry, I'm just waking up. What did you move to? I'm wondering if I should try joining lemmy.one
No, it means your only subscribed to a copy of the beehaw community hosted on this instance. Any content you post there will only be visible to people on this instance and any content you see will be from before defedaration or what other users of this istance have posted.
I think this is the best explanation of how federation works that I've seen so far. Really appreciate it. So would it benefit us to use an account for me different website to get the benefit of both communities? Is there a way to be essentially logged into two accounts at once so that you can see separate federated communities all at once?
@AgentGoldfish Hrm .. the actual dumb thing is not getting defederated but owerwhelming other instances moderation team because of the lack of moderation on _your_ site.
-
There are other, less heavy handed ways of accomplishing the same thing
-
This action doesn't actually do what they want it to do, since anyone can create a new instance and post,
-
This action does more to make the experience of their users worse
So yes, admins choosing to defederate another instance despite not understanding what that actually does and what the consequences of that action are is, as I said, dumb.
@AgentGoldfish Did you read what _they_ wrote about the decision to defederate?
-
