- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works - Beehaw
beehaw.orghey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one: ##### we have made the
decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this
is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a
decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our
thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary. — we have been concerned
with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with
federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related
[https://beehaw.org/post/520044?scrollToComments=true] how difficult dealing
with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four
Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to
deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below). an
unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time
here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some
pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of
improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and
federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t
wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now,
while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain. aside
from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by
and large, boils down to: - these two instances’ open registration policy, which
is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it
makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior; - the
disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two
instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on
those two instances; - our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a
vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to
participate in; - and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not
possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account
for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom
explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of
whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for as Gaywallet puts it,
in our discussion of whether to do this: > There’s a lot of soft moderating that
happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just
that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust
and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around
you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when
there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when
there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a
community like this and it’s not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes
people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only
works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can’t
even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a
tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t
sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a
short timeframe. > > Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open
to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw
problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of
energy to undo. and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people
legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful
while it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re doing this. our
words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle
platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want
a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you
disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with
the understanding it was an informed decision. this is also not a permanent
judgement. in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and
interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether
we feel capable of refederating with these communities. thanks for using our
site folks.
Is there a summary somewhere of each instance’s “reputations”? Most descriptions I see are just things like “A place for everyone”. It’s kind of frustrating that new users are told to join any server, because it’s all federated, and then go oops sorry you joined the Nazi server, sucks for you.
Well, to be fair. If you join the nazi server and stick around, i dont have much sympathy. Lets be honest, there will be hints.
It’s the internet. Make a new account on a better place. For fucks sake you can probably keep the same username with zero repercussions. It isnt really a loss.
It took me all of 15 minutes to repopulate my subscribed list when i picked a dead end community. And when my current one fails, i can literally do the same again. It isnt a loss. My goal at a certain point is to maintain some semblance of anonymity anyways. I had countless reddit accounts over the past 12 years. Why would i be worried now?
I used an extreme example, but it’s not always that obvious that you’re on a server that’s going to offend the wrong instance admin. Some don’t want to associate with porn, others “tankies”. In this case, lemmy.world’s offense was simply being “too big”.
I get that a lot of redditors are used to creating alts and throwaway accounts. I just don’t want to have to do that constantly as a workaround for communities disappearing from my feed due to defederation.
How much effort did you have to put into Reddit to prevent subreddits from disappearing due to going private?
In the Fediverse, there’s one more layer of indirection. The instance. For better or worse, Beehaw controls some of the largest groups, whether or not that’s due to their moderators or whatever that’s on them.
I imagine that we’re mostly Reddit refugees right now, this concept of “instance” is alien to all of us. But its really not much different than a “group of subreddits” that somehow got a magic wand and was able to go private together (or share users, etc. etc.).
I remember in Reddit, tons of communities would go private all the time, mostly because they got trolled so hard by other invaders that they had to do so to protect their culture. Whether that’s the “trolls fault” or the “community’s fault” depends on the instance. But it looks like Lemmy / Fediverse has new tools to deal with this age old issue.
I get that it’s very similar to subreddits going private, and that we have no control over that when it happens. I just find it very disruptive to lose 1/3 of my communities all at once due these events.
The draw of the fediverse is all this interconnectedness. But with people being so divisive these days, it just feels like the end will be siloed walled gardens everywhere. If I need a dozen logins to participate in the communities I want, it just defeats the whole purpose, and we might as well go back to old school single-topic forums.
I think that’s fair. And I think those communities aren’t 100% sure what they signed up for when they planted themselves in Beehaw.org.
Yes and no. We’re obviously in the learning stages of the Fediverse (at least, in regards to Reddit-like community building). I don’t think its quite time to toss up our hands and give up on it yet.
What does Beehaw teach us? Like, what does it really teach us?
It means that large coalitions of communities are important. That they hold power, that they move as a bloc and that they have influence upon other instances. Is this a bad thing? Will this doom us to single-topic forums?
No. I argue not. What Beehaw wants here is a curated list of users who won’t post pornographic memes to their servers. And lemmy.world, being a de-facto Reddit Refugee site, has a lot of users who will post troll-memes explicitly to piss off people like Beehaw.
From Beehaw’s perspective, they’re trying to experiment with the Fediverse in a way that makes no sense to Reddit users. But… I think I can get behind this. Beehaw wants Fediverse instances to not only be collections of communities, but also of curated, trusted users.
Maybe it works out for them, maybe it doesn’t. But everyone is pretty open about this discussion. I’m not entirely sure if Beehaw’s perspective is in the wrong, even if I don’t plan on joining their server any time soon. I do think it was unfair for the trolls to coordinate a porn-meme-NSFW attack upon them.
But where as in Reddit we would have tossed up our hands and said “Well, the Admins don’t care, this is Reddit, can’t do anything about it but grow thicker skin”… this is the Fediverse now. New options are available, and it makes sense to experiment with them to see if it works.
What’s the ideal future? Well, what if we curated users a bit better? What if user-curation became the norm? Is that too bad to ask for? Why do we have to be stuck in Reddit’s troll-friendly ruleset?
There’s other solutions. Beehaw is saying that if moderation tools got better, maybe they can open back up and reunite with everyone. I dunno what the Lemmy programmers think of that, but maybe that’s solvable on Beehaw’s side with their moderators.
Maybe none of this works out and Beehaw is forced into a private instance (or tightly curated list of isolated Lemmy instances). Is that so bad? No. In this case, a hypothetical “ImNotAnAsshole.org” Lemmy instance may open up that can Federate to both Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org, and one login at “ImNotAnAsshole.org” can serve everybody and keep you united.
Good stuff.
“Why do we have to be stuck in Reddit’s troll-friendly ruleset?” Makes me realize that while I don’t want to be in an uptight, echo chamber community, neither do I want an environment that’s just endless canned snark. I think it’s fine if different planets want to do it differently.
Did they really do that? Sounds like harassment to me, can’t they be banned?
What’s the point of banning someone when creating new accounts is free? They just make a new account and continue the harassment.
As such, Beehaw.org just mass banned everyone from lemmy.world, the source of the attack.
They argue that lemmy.world needs to be better at curating users. Obviously, as a “reddit refugee” site (or kinda-sorta one anyway), that’s incompatible with Lemmy.world’s idea of running this site. So we’re at this standstill, for now.
In any case, these are typical troll tactics. Beehaw was the first to deal with them, and first to click the defederate button.
I wonder if, in a way, this a phenomenon of perceived scarcity? Unlike the dominant social media platforms, the fediverse isn’t one thing. As you said, the worst that need happen is a shifting of activity congregation. And the more familiar the fediverse becomes, the easier that will be to do.