Why lemmy.world should not defederate from beehaw.org.
What defederating would mean:
We won't see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.
Pros:
There is less confusion, you can't respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.
Cons:
We won't be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won't see any of our content.
Summary
Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our 'front page').
beehaw.org users already can't see our posts/comments anywhere so it's not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn't really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.
My gut feeling is that defederation should be done as little as possible. I'm quite new to all this, but to me, it feels like it should be user preference instead of admin/mod preference. I have no clue whether that is even possible though. Perhaps there should be more filters than just Subscribed, Local and All to alleviate certain issues.
One problem atm is that a user can't block by instance, just by community or individual users. It seems a lot of people are requesting this ability though so hopefully it gets added in the future.
I think that would be great feature. Do I understand correctly that if a user would want to do that now that they have to set up their own instance and determine what to federate and what not?
Lets avoid defederating. I am not to sure why beehaw.org defederated Lemmy.world, i understand it's not a final decision but more of a quick mitigation to deal with de difficulty related to the reddit exodus. Right?
But surely we hope that this level of users is permanent? I think it'll be in place until lemmy has better moderation tools, which could be quite some time. It has the benefit that it is Open Source though so anyone can help.
the level of users is hopefully permanent, but the lack of moderation to adequately deal with it, both from beehaw and lemmy.world, is not
its also a cultural problem, at the moment the culture of the fediverse is still settling and folks are poking and prodding and seeing how much they can get away with
The problem is mainly that open registration allows quick ban evasion, making it very hard to remove bad actors that are using instances with open registration (without admin approval).
I'm not using beehaw and probably never will. I don't want to be in a "safe space" as they put it. That said, I totally understand that some people want that sort of community, it's their decision, and thanks to federation anyone who disagrees can just leave. If you're complaining about them defederating from you - you're probably part of the reason they did.
That said, it would be really helpful to have some sort of icon next to posts/comments that are defederated from your instance, just so you don't waste your time responding to them when they can't see it.
They said they couldn't deal with the level of abuse and spam that came from lemmy.world users. They have a much more restrictive content policy and smaller, centralised moderation team than most other instances which exacerbated the problem.
What's dumb is that if someone wanted to troll them they could just make an account on any number of smaller instances that they federate with. I mean, eventually they will have to be completely siloed off to prevent outside trolling.
Tbh, that's kinda hard to believe. I have seen zero malicious activity in my 4 days here. Maybe their standards are just higher than mine, not sure that's a good thing in this case but whatever. Damn that sucks, beehaw had some good stuff.
They circled their wagons due a perceived threat to a small population of their user base, of which they feel is their responsibility to protect.
I constantly shit on Beehaw, however I can't blame them for this. There is a huge influx of random people joining all these federated sites and high potential for pieces of shit coming in to troll sensitive individuals.
They were struggling with moderation, and a disproportionate number of people they were addressing were coming from those two instances, which happen to have open registration.
Now im sitting here wondering if I offended anyone over there lol. It's hard to imagine, but since I've seen no bad actors myself, I'm starting to think that it's possible I did, unknowingly, with zero intent to do so, and they just have a really strict thing going on. I doubt it's the case, or I hope not at least.
The first problem was actual trolls using were using lemmy.world's open and automated registration (beehaw makes you write why you want to join and manually approves registrations based on that) to troll Beehaw.
The second problem was that the moderation tools aren't mature enough yet to deal with problem one with anything between manually banning every troll (which will immediately come back by creating another lemmy.world account) and total defederation from the instances most of those trolls are coming from.
Because Beehaw's mission statement is to be a safe space, it was decided to go with the defederation option.
However, the defederation isn't planned to be permanent. Improvements in mod tools and/or maturing of communities are said to be reasons to refederate again.
Doubtful you offended anyone. I think beehaw was seeing serious things like child porn and anti-LGBT posts, and traced them back to lemmy.world or the other one.
One of the benefits of federation is the ability to choose your sources. If one doesn’t fit your moderation style you remove it. It’s a feature, not a minus. Expect more of this until the mod tools mature and trolls make homes among the open servers.
I've seen people make analogies between Lemmy instances and email servers, but I don't think it's a great comparison. I think a better one would be ports on a trade route in the old sailing ship days. People are from different port cities, but they get on a ship and go to other ports and trade/interact with the people there.
So with that analogy, the port city of Beehaw is one with more restrictive laws about behavior: if you aren't generally respectful of others, they toss you out. There was a sudden influx at Beehaw of crowded ships from the ports of Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works, both ports with less restrictive, more wild west attitudes. They found that their sheriffs were spending all their time tossing people who came from ships with one of those two flags, so they decided not to let those ships dock at their port anymore, or let their ships dock at those ports, for now.
When you have a group that don’t respect the rules and you don’t want to lower yourself to their level of discussion, you cut them out. Why would they be tolerated? And who is at fault here? The people wanting civility or the trolls causing issues? Why are you blaming the people defending themselves?
Honestly I think this is an interesting real-world experiment in the entire federation paradigm. It's going to happen again and again, there's no escaping it. How does the ecosystem work when two large instances can't communicate directly? We're going to find out.
They might also remove the block again in the future when moderation tools have improved and/or lemmy.world does a better job at vetting users, and then it would work better to have never blocked them.
So we'll still see posts from beehaw users on other instances that beehaw still federates with?
Will we be able to interact with the above posts (vote / comment)? I'm guessing yes, because the posts would be hosted on those 3rd party instances still federating with beeehaw, not beehaw.
If I inderstand correctly, I'd be in favor of keeping the federation, which in short means "keep interaction with beehaw users through other instances", even if we lost sync and interaction with "communities / posts in those communities. hosted by beehaw"
Yeah, we can see them and interact with them. But the beehaw users won't see our comments, the other users on the instance will. So it could be confusing if you were expecting a reply from a beehaw user - as they won't even be able to see your reply.
I'm not sure how voting works, I guess our votes would count? As the copy is held on the instance? But maybe beehaw users wouldn't see them.
You'd be able to see and interact with comments/posts made by BeeHaw users on other instances. However note that the BeeHaw user will never see it. Everyone else will.
Work with the other instances first. Try to find a compromise. This should be done as a very, very last resort. And that’s not the impression I’m getting at all. Just a pain in the ass for users, and barely a hurdle for troll, which I’ve not seen much of on the first place.
This whole defederation situation seems like putting the power in the hands of the wrong people.
Users should choose what they want to see/interact with. Maybe subs/mods. Not entire servers imho.
If certain subs on beehaw want to restrict access, fine because users choose to participate. If users want to restrict themselves or control their own experience, fine because it only impacts them. But when it's done at a server level you have given too much power to people that aren't part of your community.
Yeah, Beehaw administrators said in their post that this was not really on moral or ethical grounds but just about it being really hard to moderate an influx of users from another instance. They have their registration behind an application for a reason, after all. Having a giant instance with open registration have free reign on their community kind of defeats that purpose. They also said the defederation isn't meant to be permanent, but rather it's a stop gap solution until there's better moderation tools.
To simplify it as much as i can, defederation should be read only. Not if(in our group/(then)they have access
The instance itself shoud be able to say it does not want content created from a subset of the internet. (Personally Its not my first choice as a freedom of speech advocate. But for them to delcare who is welcome to talk in their house is a decent compromise.)
To benefit the federation as a whole, the information and conversations taken place there should be available to the whole of the hive.
The mods could have their pie not needing more hands to manage the influx, the fediverse would have their pie with more content as a whole. ie more information available to more people at a loss of fewer availible accounts with acces to comment within restricted instances.
Defederation to me == we cant moderate the collective to our standards.
We cant moderate the collective to our standards =/= IF Y'ALL BADDIES FUCKING READ OUR SECRETS WE'LL DO SOMETHING NAUGHTY
federation is supposed to give different levels of control. you can, as a user, block the users and instances (and communities, i suppose).
instances can also block users and other instances.
the idea is that contradictory instances wont be in constant conflict. like, a instance called "SuperiorHeterosexual" wont be federated with "GayPower"
i dont know about lemmy, but there are levels of (des)integration in Mastodon: Silencing, Defederation and Block.
some admins may shit on proportionality and go on a power trip. that is true. the good thing is that you can create another account in another instance you like and trust the admins more.
I think associating your basic online identity with your sexual preferences is pretty weird in the first place. Maybe I just don't get how this is supposed to work. It would be bizarre if my email address or other online identity also directly represented what I prefer in the bedroom.
How do I have an unbiased discussion about gardening or whatever if my address is @gaypower or @whateverhetero
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.
The problem is that since beehaw was the second largest instance before the reddit wave they had quite large communities already. So they naturally will attract subs. In fact they probably attracted quite a few from the two instances that now can't access them and probably can't actually unsub from.
With lenny.ml and other instances able to access them it's likely they will be the community for at least some topics. Which we won't be able to access. So it's not as simple as let them do their own thing and we do ours.
This could lead to people leaving the blocked instances for others with access to the big communities. Till those instances run afoul of beehaws sensibilities. With lemmy as a whole losing users each time.
They defederated from lemmy.world and another large instance as they said there was an influx of abusive users from these instances and their small, centralised moderation team was unable to manage it.
The main thing is that beehaw has an application process for creating a new account, while most lemmy instances do not. They defederated because they were struggling to keep troublesome people out since banned users could just create a new account on another instance and get back in.
Their moderation/admin policy is very strict, and they only have a few admins to manage it.
Beehaw mods want more curation of users and content on their instance and they think the mod tools available to them are not sufficient to handle users coming from other instances so they decided to defederate a couple of instances, from which, they say, too many trolls are coming due to their open registration policy.
I don't think not wanting fascists and trolls galore makes it a liberal safe zone, they just don't want the truly wild west. There's a lot of people out here now which weren't just a month ago.
It's their decision and you should respect that. I also don't agree with the defederation and the rest of their policies but you can just not use it. No need to turn this into a political conflict.