This is surfacing a fundamental division between mindsets in federation: the people who say don’t worry about which instance you’re on are bought into the promise that federation can “just work” like email. But the reality is that if you care about moderation at all (like, even to the extent of being for or against having any of it) then sooner or later you’re going to have to make harder decisions about instances.
It’s pretty normal for long-term fediverse users to change instances several times over the course of however long this stuff has been around. It’s unclear to me whether any existing Lemmy instances would be a good fit for me in the long term TBH and I would expect that to be true for some time, as so many instances are still figuring things out internally.
Defederation decisions like beehaw made are extremely normal and rational. With their level of moderation staffing and for their user base, they determined it was unsustainable to remain federated with instances that were generating more moderation workload. If it wasn’t them today it would be another instance tomorrow; this will keep happening.
Also, I see a lot of folks saying this is lazy for beehaw, but it’s important to understand that from their perspective, this problem wouldn’t arise if moderators here were keeping a cleaner house and preventing bad actors from using the platform. (Not saying either take is entirely correct.)
In a sense, moderation best practices on the fediverse are inimically hostile to scaling the fediverse up to new users. (And if you ask folks with smaller but prosperous instances that have healthy internal vibes, they’ll probably tell you this is good.)
This is much more fraught on Lemmy than it is on Mastodon, because you’re building communities hosted on a particular instance and there’s not currently a way to move the community. So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Similarly, to avoid endless duplication of communities, folks have been encouraged to participate with existing communities instead of starting a new one on their own instance everytime. But anyone here who has gotten involved with communities on Beehaw will now no longer be able to do so unless they move to a different instance. (Which may be hard, as open instances that are easy to join are the ones that are harder for small instances to handle, which is what caused this in the first place.)
Some of those folks are going to create their own alternative communities on their servers, which to any third-party servers not in the loop on the defederation drama will be potentially confusing. This has the potential to create a cultural tend toward polarization of community norms between everything goes and what we see on Mastodon as content warning policing, but of which are, to me, undesirable.
The best case scenario is that the majority of large communities end up being hosted on instances that have sufficiently rigorous moderation standards and sufficiently robust moderation staff to not impose an unsustainable workload on smaller instances. Then as long as everyone who’s not a nazi federates with those instances, things should go smoothly…ish. But that’s hard both because “sufficiently rigorous” is different for everyone and because moderation labor doesn’t grow on trees.
Very cogent writeup, seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw’s decision in my eyes. People are getting really angry, and I wonder if those were the same people who bought into the whole “lemmys great because no one has 100% control” idea, only to be upset when the person in control of a slice they like decides they want to do something disagreeable with it. In the first place, one community shouldn’t have carried the burden of the entire content and community of the “Gaming” or “Technology” sphere, it just kind of turned out that way because once they gained momentum, everybody else just flocked to it. And you can’t blame them, that’s where the content is, and the content is why they’re here.
On the whole, though the software doesn’t really restrict you to one or the other, instances are very quickly separating into two camps - viewer and host. Viewer instances are instances like mine, where the majority of users are consumers and not creators. Yeah, I like to run my mouth around these parts but most of the content on my instance doesn’t originate from it. The host instances host communities, and so they carry the burden of having to moderate those communities and the servers/sysadmins carry the burden of having to relay all that communication to all the other instances. I think it’s this part that needs work as we grow, because the best analogy for a Lemmy community is an email group. Can you imagine an email group with tens of thousands of subscribers all just emailing each other over and over again? Lemmy is pretty much just that, but displayed differently.
seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw’s decision in my eyes
I think people have a right to be upset when they feel unfairly banned from communities for no fault of their own.
The part where things get tricky is that beehaw currently has ~15 of the top 50 communities across the entire fediverse and has become the defacto discussion grounds for gaming/tech/news/etc.
One could argue this goes against the whole concept of decentralized communication in the first place, and this may be a position beehaw doesn’t want to be in.
Beehaw has every right to foster a tight-knit community that adheres to its desires.
But there also is a level of responsibility and custodianship over these large communities they foster for the betterment and adoption of the fediverse.
I guess the others will need to work with them to fix the issues that resulted in this decision.
It’s all about teamwork across the verse and we’ll have to see if they can manage it.
So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Maybe moving a community to another instance will be possible at some point in the future. Who knows?
Moving communities is tricky (even assuming the technical side is implemented) since you would need to figure out how many of your subscribers are on instances who are blocked by your community’s new home before picking one.
Extremely well put. Community migration should be something that would definitely be needed.
This may be the most well thought out response I’ve seen yet.
This is a very good write up. I think there is a big difference in responsiblilty between community hosting instances and viewing instances, and I believe that we will see issues like this more often as community size is ballooning due to the reddit issues. I do believe, or maybe it’s more of a hope, that over time larger communities will bounce around instances until they land on an instance that can better handle the responsibility of moderation, and eventually we’ll end up with a few large instances that host popular communities, and smaller instance that host more niche communities.
I feel that this is the growing pains stage of Lemmy, and if a few QoL features like community migration get worked in, this platform will stabilize into something great.
btw, e-mail servers regularly defederate/block domains that allow a lot of spam…
Who else here is chilling on their own instance watching this shit unfold with some popcorn 😂
Is there a SubRedditDrama community equivalent here?
I am a lurker over there so this decision literally changes nothing about how I use beehaw and my community is still awesome so I’m all good👍
Yet another reason why it’s great to be Canadian.
Exactly the reason why Lemmy at scale will never work, since most people won’t run their own instance.
raises hand
Not a good look. I get its the admins choice and all but it just wiped out a lot of my subscriptions. Its not a good look from the perspective of new users and increases the number of duplicate communities across instances.
I had hopes for it but I guess I’m one of the lucky ones who signed up for lemmy.world.
I think they should just ban problematic users not the whole instance.
Yeah, I can get their desire to vet users before they can join their instance, but for me (and I suspect a lot of other people who are just starting with Lemmy, or just shy people) the effort of making a social interaction with a stranger was enough of a turn off that I went elsewhere. Beehaw still seems nice, I may still make an account there at some point. But, to figure out if a place suits me, first I lurk, then I engage by voting, then I engage by commenting, and eventually I may eventually post. I get applications, but they feel intrusive to how I use the internet.
I also get why they defederated, frankly there’s a tonne of low effort from the big new instances. However, everyone should expect low effort right now because users are antsy from having left reddit, and the low effort posts are the anxious laughter of people new to the party who don’t know anyone yet. So the defederation isn’t a good look, and will cause bad feeling with and within beehaw, so their mods have my sympathy. Better to have enabled downvoting and let the community handle the low effort posts.
Exactly, they got rid of actual voting in order to power moderate. This is all on them, users could also block whatever communities they didn’t like.
I think they should just ban problematic users not the whole instance.
When the vast majority of the problematic users come from 2 instances with open registration, trying to do that is like stopping a flood with a bucket. I think theirs is a perfectly reasonable response to the troll attack they were just subjected to.
They could also just use a whitelist of users who are allowed to comment/post on there. I have suggested as much but we will see how they respond. I might try and contact a mod over there if that’s possible.
Edit: I’ve been told by another user that this isn’t currently supported. I think it would be a good feature to add to lemmy.
Their post explains why your suggestions are not actionable.
But why would it disrupt your subscriptions if lemmy.world and SJW are still federating beehaw? Can’t one instance federate another without it being mutual? Is that the difference between a non-federated instance and a blocked instances, where blocked instances cannot even read your content?
Edit: Actually I think I understand. I checked the blocked instances and they are not blocked just delinked. So in that case, you must be a beehaw user who lost your subscriptions to communities on lemmy.world and SJW.
I just unsubbed from anything that was with them. Fuck em.
I think this is pretty unreasonable. They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with the existing moderation team. That was never going to work. Placing the blame on the open registration instances and mod tools seems silly. That said I hope this does lead to an improvement in mod tooling.
They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with only FOUR moderators. That was never going to work.
might be a dumb question, but how could’ve they prevented this?
I think they should have made a deliberate attempt to remain outside of the top three biggest instances like lemmy.ml. Considering the conscious decision to only have the admins be the only mods (that is there are four mods site-wide that moderate ALL communities) these issues were easily foreseen and they should have accepted that they could not realistically compete for the largest instance while maintaining their moderation goals.
They’ve existed as a small community for a year and a half. In all that time, surely they have met/interacted with some people they trust enough to delegate mod duties to.
And if they haven’t…well, that’s telling on it’s own, too.
I can completely understand why they did but it really sucks that it had to happen. Hopefully, as the Fediverse grows, better tools are made available so instances don’t need to defederate from each other.
With that said, I think it’s a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I also wasn’t aware that other instances vetted their users? This was the first one I picked. Is there a plan to address the issues beehaw brought up?
With that said, I think it’s a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I’ve been calling it a double-edged sword from the moment I knew that could happen in Mastodon and after I joined Lemmy, we see as normal to block lemmygrad from the beginning and that’s understandable, but if an owner goes block-happy they could leave a lot of people stranded and inside their echo-chamber.
They’d be losing everything then and would be forced to migrate to other instance or create their own which may be too much as time goes by and people post more and more.I said this from the beginning but until we get migration tools to carry our content with us to other instance, think of your account as disposable.
Yeah I think a migration tool would be very helpful. I basically just signed up for the first instance that looked good without doing much research.
Having to do so much research just to join an instance is one of the biggest problems of the fediverse.
I saw some advice saying “don’t overthink it, just choose one” and I’m glad I didn’t take it because it seems like it couldn’t be any further from the truth. Until migrating your account is an option, this just seems like a bunch of Reddits talking to each other, you can still lose everything if your local admin goes on a power trip.
Yes
Would be nice if there was a Link funciton. Not just on lemmy but on the fediverse as a whole. That way, you can create an account anywhere and “link” it to other instances so that everything is mirrored. That would mean that each time you post something it would have to travel toward all the instances
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The software right now is extremely lacking in many aspects that it’s hard to pin point which priority should be higher than other (specially since I ain’t helping to it), but yeah I assume there appeared so many bugs when the waves started that we can only be patient.
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So literally “Suffering from success”
If we look at a similar but much more mature tech, email accounts either require something traceable to meatspace or another email account to set up.
Maybe it won’t go that far, I don’t know. We’ll have to see how much fuckery the Fediverse attracts.
lots take issue w/ that due to the whole decentralized, free vibes thing, but I think people will largely not want illegal content so communities will probably take federation as a very serious thing as we grow.
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That’s a bit of a silly equivalence to make, beehaw admins even said it wasn’t a permanent or moral decision, they just need to figure out how to manage that from a moderation perspective, which is probably fair.
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I just wouldn’t take it so personally lol. Your number is probably in the middle of utter filth in the phone book (if those still exist)
we’re on what list now?
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True
i always browse defederated instances like a TV catalog, i’m glad there are instances like this where i can find some of the funniest instances on the right hand side, look at that there’s a troll cafe, a shitposter club, pooper social, and lmao gangstalking services, lots of piss and poop yes, and lotsa feminists, which i imagine are terfs cuz afaik that’s the only feminists that end up banned from lgbt friendly places
I specifically just deleted my beehaw account and created one here because of this… This move makes me reconsider this whole lemmy thing.
I find it really frustrating to build up a feed of content, only to lose it when moderator fights begin. What servers are next? Which one do I join to get the most content?
I want this to succeed but I don’t know how I can recommend it to people today, since they’re going to ask the same questions.
Exactly! And the idea that I fully cannot see other servers, or never interact with them anymore feels like wasted time.
Power tripping as always. Give mods a little power and this is what you get. What they want 24/7
yeah, was starting to like it here, but honestly if any instance will just defederate the second something inconvenient happens… we won’t have a site with good content that will keep people around
My thoughts exactly
But isn’t that good? It means you have much more freedom now, you can make communities, post more stuff, don’t have to follow a non existant set of rules.
That’s true but there are nuanced social consequences for the entire group because of the actions one or a few individuals. The moderation model of Lemmy will be different and needs to start at the home instance. Because all it takes is a few people to act up and suddenly your instance has no content.
To an extend. It’s more concerning that I can build up my user, interacting with other communities, building my network and suddenly I loose all that because my server suddenly decides it no longer want to interact with other servers.
hate to say that’s on you, dude. You should look at how that instance works with others.
Apparently migration is in the works, so you should be able to keep your beehaw account.
Sure is on me for choosing poorly. However I’m happy to hear that migration is in the works.
Can’t predict the future. Can’t control where new communities end up growing organically.
Migration is in the works, but it’s not a priority.
But muh freedoms
Yeah, me as well. Seems kbin has a way more open minded view on things. They don’t defederate from anyone, which suits me just fine. I wouldn’t like to defederated from anyone, including lemmygrad. There are some interesting reads over there (at least for me).
DUDE SAME The whole point was that we want a place that # ISNT CENSORED. Or getting banned because something I said offends you.
Like I’ve gotta learn all this shit and read a 600 page instruction manual about how to use lemmy, but I can’t call someone a faggot (Talking about when someone says some lame ass shit, not calling gay people faggots)
Have you tried 4chan? Because I’m pretty sure you make a great chan stan and would love all the childish channing.
Also, maybe try updating your vocabulary? Learn more words so you don’t have to always sound like an angry, edgy, child.
Congratulations, you are the first Lemmy user I have recognized from earlier as an asshole. What’s with the shouting and the pointlessly provocative language? Do you feel an irresistible drive to get attention?
Now I have to decide if I want to actually use the
Block Userfeature.blocking and banning people for spamming unironically neo nazi and transphobic shit is understandable . but the problem with most mod,is that they ban people who dare to barely criticize them or their opinions . they take everything personally . i got perma ban from reddit because I told a mod he don’t understand irony and satire . there is also a double standard .if something has a lot of upvote they let it go, but the same copy paste comment with less upvote can result in ban. resulting in banning people who already agrees with them on 90% of their opinion .
Well this would be just a personal block on my part since I’m no mod. I’ve seen enough from this user that it’s clear my world would be a better place without their comments in it, but I haven’t clicked the button yet…
First person I’ve seen actually go negative on Lemmy, good reason too.
You might be part of the reason behind their defederation with your vocabulary.
Talking about when someone says some lame ass shit
So you?
What? No, that was Voat. You know, the place all the insane racists went before it collapsed.
If you want to call people faggots for no reason like it’s 2003 just >>>/b/ dude, it didn’t go anywhere. They’ll probably reply to you with a bunch of (images of) dicks though. If it quacks like a duck…
eh I just read through the post over there, I suppose their concerns are somewhat valid, to a point, but there really isnt a “safe space” anywhere except between your ears.
really just reads like excuses to being lazy.
My problem with Beehaw in general is it reeks of overzealous and manipulative mods. The internet is full of awful people but to pretend you can make an island of purity where you get to decide what is pure is going to be a worse idea in the long run.
I find it ironic that they say fake niceness will only scare people off, but all the “ethos engineering” only promotes a culture of fake niceness. I don’t buy all this “walled utopia” idealism, especially since this place isn’t like Discord with private servers, but a public interconnected forum. Why choose to set up on the Fediverse if you’re not open to ”strangers” accessing your community? But oh well, I think they’ll probably defederate more and more over time (or switch to whitelist).
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Reminds me a bit of parents who want the benefit of just putting their kid on the internet so they don’t have to entertain the kid themselves but then try to censor everyone when the kid finds anything online they didn’t want the kid to see.
Yeah, somewhat agree (they only had 4 main mods, that’s rediculous) but they do raise a good point in the difficulty of maintaining a friendly and safe community with limited moderation possible.
What we need isn’t large instances splitting off and defederating, it’s better moderation tools and more volunteers.
I’m on a smaller instance and am still fully federated with all three instances involved, so it doesn’t affect me, but that also means if I chose to be a dick and spam/troll on beehaw communities they would have to moderate me manually, or defederate from my instance too.
I suspect this will be reversed when better moderation is possible, or perhaps they will eventually be able to block posts and comments from other instances without defederating entirely if they want to remain as clean and high quality as they are attempting to be.
Totally unfiltered internet trash is just about as useful as being alone, though.
disagree - if there’s “trash” coming in then you know you’re not alone, just awash in detritus.
Either way you’re not usefully communicating, though.
You’ve got to strike a balance where you’re getting information just filtered enough you can usefully digest it, but no more.
i suppose that’s true - i guess the main concern that I have with the top-tier instances defederating is that each instance becomes its own insular echo chamber - lemmygrad is a good example of this.
That’s one of the main points of federation, if you as an admin don’t like an instance you block them, if as an user you don’t like the instance you’re in you go to another one.
There are some key features missing here, the ability to silence entire instances so you don’t have to defederate completely and account migration so you can just pick up your stuff and leave.We’ll see, I guess. It’s very early days. Reddit could be like that in places already. On the other hand, there were subs that were pretty open-ended, like r/askreddit (although I’m bummed they’re not blacking out).
I suspect users will flock to instances that are more trusted if given the choice, since nobody wants to be left out.
Read access should be managed on the user level, not the instance level imo. I don’t want to inherit some collective blacklist, I want my own.
For write access, it’s more complicated and I’m not sure what to think.
Kbin (I’m on kbin.social) allows users to block entire instances, rather than leaving that entirely up to admins.
The problem is that read access for a user means the content is cached on the instance of that user, making the instance owner potentially liable if we are talking about content illegal in their jurisdiction.
Good point, I hadn’t considered that. But an instance can still strive to keep its blocklist as small as legally possible. This wouldn’t be a big issue in most liberal countries anyway I think.
When an instance has a specific rule, no NSFW for instance, it can’t be receiving that content from other instances and serving it to its users because it breaks its own rules. You might want NSFW content but your instance’s users agreed to that rule, probably because that’s what they wanted out of the instance.
They made the users suffer for their unwillingness to cope with their situation.
Instead of planning ahead and only accepting a limited amount of users, which would have severed only a fraction of users from us, they decided to grow to become one of the biggest instances, and now took some interesting communities with them, along with cutting off their own users from communities here.
I hope their user base migrates to other, more open instances, and the communities lost will spring into existence elsewhere.
I wouldn’t take this too seriously. If they can’t handle the amount of new users then so be it, and the whole point is to not rely on a single instance. I could see the larger instances becoming closed safe spaces over time, in which case people will just leave them for other instances anyway. Nothing is constant but change.
There should be a way to export and import your subscriptions and saved posts so that you can easily transfer accounts to different instances.
Agreed. I’m not excited to have my history tied to one instance.
I understand why they did it, four mods is not enough for the traffic. However, I think they could’ve anticipated this better than just removing one of the largest instances. Hire more mods. It seems beehaw has banned so much that I am honestly unsure why they want to be federated. I like the idea of beehaw, some things, like limited communities and no downvotes are really smart. But the closed community mindset may kill it.
They do want to refederate when they get more granular options, but the federation options for lemmy right now is basically federate or not, which is kind of sucky, also I don’t think reports bubble up to the origin server like they do on mastodon, I’m sure it will get there in time, but for now there isn’t that many.
I think it’s easy to take this personally but I think it’s more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user’s bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.
I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit.
Agreed. They do deserve their own points if they want to be that type of community. I’d say for instance if places like AskHistorians arise within lemmy or kbin, federating with just those would be interesting.
There are always going to be more exclusive communities. Humans just work like that. I say we ride with it for now.
Federation should be a gradient. If they want to close themselves off why is it using ActivityPub to begin with?
its _ federation._ Some communities only want certain people. Once mod tools are better we will see changes. Let it grow.
I ate soup with a fork once. Was it the smartest choice…absolutely not. Did it work… sort of.
Can someone ELI5 what happens when another instance defederate us? None of those are my main instance, so nothing has changed on my end with them…
In a nutshell, beehaw’s server and the servers of the other listed instances are not talking to each other anymore. If new posts are made from either one, beehaw won’t see them and vice versa. You can still pull up older, non-updated versions of beehaw communities/posts from before they defederated, but you won’t be seeing any more beehaw-related activity on them. You might even be able to comment there(?), but no one on their side will see it.
Until they decide to refederate, any further communication is cut off.
Until they decide to refederate, any further communication is cut off.
And what happens when they refederate??? all the backlog of comments/posts will spam them?
Basically they stop receiving or responding to updates from your instance. That means their instance won’t receive new posts or comments from yours, and any communities hosted on your instance won’t be searchable on theirs.
This seems like a sweet mess, having different copies of everything lol.
It’s the basis of federation. Think of it like regular SMS. You can try to send a message to someone, but if they have their phone switched off or blocked you, they won’t receive it.
I’m not hugely familiar with how federation works or why it works the way it does, but why is this better than say instances only hosting what is put on their instance and the browser fetching from multiple instances? So when I want to view something posted on instance A with my account on instance B, instead of instance B keeping a cache of the post my browser just fetches the content directly from instance A?
Well, all the instances kind of acknowledge the originating instance as the OG and it’s also the relay. For example, this reply goes from my instance, to sh.itjust.works, to your instance. If sh.itjust.works defederated from my instance you wouldn’t see this at all even though you’re not on sh.itjust.works.
If you’re not signed up to any of these you may actually be in the best position because as long as your instance isn’t defederated by any of them you can view it all.
See https://lemmy.world/post/149743 for the dirty details about how asymmetric defederation impacts us. It’s stupid complicated.
Yeah, I read that thread, it helped me a lot!
Good. Beehaw sucks
I agree. While they might have the larger communities (for now), they seem to have also absorbed the worst kind of judgmental pricks from Reddit. I was just thinking to myself earlier that Lemmy needs a way to block instances at the user level.
It’s a feature that’s already been requested that the Lemmy devs are looking at iirc
Good to know. I’m sure there’s a metric shitton of QoL improvements like that in the pipe, along with multisubs, account (and community) migration, etc. I don’t envy the devs - lemmy wasn’t ready for this lol. I’m excited to see where it grows from here though!
I’m honestly amazed by all of this, watching the birth of a platform unfold. I think I’ve been chronically online on Lemmy for the past few days xD Here’s hoping Lemmy will really take off.
Edit: one other thing I really hope to see is ex-Reddit 3PA devs picking this up! I’m not sure how many devs will ever want to make that gamble again after being brutally fucked over by Reddit, but I can only hope someday.
I know the dev of Reddit is Fun said they are NOT interested in making a similar app. Couldn’t speak to the others.
🤣
lol
this is why y’all got defederated lol
