ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works - Beehaw
beehaw.org
hey 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 (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). 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.

Interesting bit of news for the threadiverse. All three of these are fairly large lemmy instances

  • bill_1992@kbin.social
    13·
    2 years ago

    Some of y’all getting angry need to look at yourself in the mirror. The whole point of federation was to allow communities to do things like this if they want.

    A lot of new people are going to see this mudslinging and rightfully turn around. Nobody is coming to Lemmy to see drama between instances.

    • smartman97@kbin.social
      3·
      2 years ago

      I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it. The fact that federation has been the only discussion since the blackout is not good for the alternatives to reddit. My whole life is tech and if it’s this distracting to me I can’t imagine any remotely average user being interested. The fact that this was the perfect time to be part of an alternative but the whole experience has mostly just proven reddits “give it a week” response true.

      • ParkingPsychology@kbin.social
        9·
        2 years ago

        I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.

        That was never going to happen, not even in the best possible case.

        Far left and far right are always going to split off. Do you want to be having discussions about race with neo nazis? I don’t. Let them go to their own dark corner of the internet.

      • SQL_InjectMe@partizle.com
        3·
        2 years ago

        I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.

        No. If an instance hosts toxic communities then your instance can choose to defederate from it. You don’t have to wait for the centralized authority to ban them. It’s about being able to choose your admins and form a web of “good” communities.

      • Noki@kbin.social
        1·
        2 years ago

        kbin is only live a month or so… of course there will be problems and missing moderation tools - it wont be much better for lemmy.

        There is no perfect time - some people will stay some will go back to reddit witout any change. thats a user thing not the fault of beehaw or the federation of servers.

    • eta_aquarid@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      exactly this; the whole point was so instances could pick and choose who they wanted to interact with

      I’d always heard that federation was good because if you get an instance infested with fascists, you (and everyone else who doesn’t want anything to do with them) can just cut that instance loose and let it drift away

      I guess others thought different?

    • Cylusthevirus@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      I mean some people absolutely do love and feed on drama, but is that who we want to attract? They’re not the nicest bunch to have around in my experience.

    • spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I do think it’s fair to criticize the decision to try to be one of the largest instances while only having four moderators. They should have accepted a place as a midsize instance with midsize communities in order to maintain their moderation goals. Or they could have worked to get more moderators. Blaming the defederated instances and mod tools seem disingenuous at best. That said mod tools undoubtedly need improvement.

      • yozul@kbin.social
        2·
        2 years ago

        To be fair, they said the reason they were defederating from those two instances in particular is because most of their moderation involved people from them. They didn’t expand beehaw beyond what they could handle, the rest of lemmy expanded beyond what they could handle. If this really is just a temporary measure, which is also what they said, then I think it’s pretty reasonable.

        • spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          1·
          2 years ago

          That’s because they defederated from the two largest competing instances. I’m talking about the communities users not the instances. The issue is that beehaw has the largest and therefore defacto default communities. The timing is bad and will likely affect wider adoption. The biggest problem is that it is entirely foreseeable and solved by either accepting a smaller community (closing signups) or improving moderation capabilities (getting more moderators or investing in an alternative moderation system) before it meant splitting the threadiverse in half.

          • yozul@kbin.social
            3·
            2 years ago

            I’m not denying that it sucks, but if you’d told anybody this was going to happen a month ago they’d have just laughed at you. Of course they were unprepared. Everbody has more than they can deal with. Adding more mods isn’t as simple as picking some names out of a hat, and this isn’t a thing anyone was preparing for. There currently are no alternative moderation systems, everything is too new and until recently was all way to small for that to be important, and they just have more work then they can deal with trying to suddenly moderate all of the threadiverse.

            This was a bad option that sucked, but every option was a bad option that sucked. I’m more concerned with how they deal with things as they normalize over the coming weeks and months than I am with how they’re trying to put out the fires in the short term.

            • spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              0·
              2 years ago

              But they chose a nonstandard moderation strategy that limited their ability to scale moderation with users. The default system is that communities are moderated independently of admins (not saying admins don’t form communities or that there’s no overlap between admins and mods) whereas on beehaw only the admins can create communities and therefore are the primary moderators.

              Now I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with the system they’ve chosen but the fact that it is nonstandard and in fact built into the core precept of beehaw means that this was easily foreseen.

              • yozul@kbin.social
                2·
                2 years ago

                Easily forseen if you knew that lemmy was suddenly going to have a hundred times as many users in the space of a couple weeks. That was the thing no one was prepared for though.

      • surrendertogravity@beehaw.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        The admins have always been clear that they’re not trying to replace Reddit, and I’m quite sure they were not trying to be one of the largest instances.

        If they weren’t trying to get large then how did that happen? Based on admin comments, beehaw was one of the more active instances when the first wave of migration happened; and a decent amount of the pre-first wave posts about lemmy I saw on Reddit were about how Beehaw was a good instance to join as it was defederated from lemmygrad.

        • spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          I’m not saying this has anything to do with replacing reddit but it is bad for the larger threadiverse community. Notably there were several other instances that closed registration for the purposes of not growing quicker than they could handle long term (see lemmy.ml). Beehaw has most of the largest (and therefore defacto default) communities. Active steps to avoid that would have allowed them to maintain their moderation goals while growing in an organic and sustainable way that benefits the larger threadiverse community.

          • surrendertogravity@beehaw.orgEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            I was strictly replying to the part of your comment where you said they made a decision to try to be one of the largest instances – imo they did not make a explicit decision to try to be that, but rather the growth was a side effect of the circumstances around reddit users checking out the fediverse.

            Is closing registrations is better than having an application with questions that weed out low-effort users? IMO it’s probably a wash. beehaw has only banned one user from the local instance that I know of, so the application process seems to be working overall. The issue is that other instances are growing too quickly and needing to moderate those users, not their own.

            I do agree this isn’t great for the threadiverse and I wish it hadn’t come to this, both on a personal and community level. I was subbed to the knitting community on lemmy.world, it was the most active of those communities that I saw, and now I’m locked out. Idk if I want to move to an alt on a different instance, or self-host my own so that I’m fully in control of what I can see, or what. :S

            • spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              0·
              2 years ago

              No the issue is that four moderators for the whole instance was always unsustainable and allowing the communities to become the defacto defaults without growing the mod teams was a bad idea. This was easily foreseen and corrected. Blaming other instances is not at all fair.

              • Noki@kbin.social
                1·
                2 years ago

                you do not understand the problem. The growth was on every server of the fedivers - so moderationg users from different servers was to much work. how should they stop people from other servers? two options - block any individuell(which is to much work with so many open registration servers - they can just spamm new servers) or nuke the server where most of the trolls come from.

                • spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                  1·
                  2 years ago

                  I DO understand the problem. They only have an issue with an influx of users because they are the largest (defacto default) communities. A position that was incompatible with their moderation system from the get go. Had they had more sustainably sized communities none of this would have been an issue.

  • ANuStart@kbin.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    The sad reality is that during the reddit blackout, people were pushing lemmy (specifically Beehaw) as the reddit replacement because yay decentralized, federated, fun!

    For a lot of those reddit refugees the effort they put into making content and trying to make Beehaw their home is gone now.

    They’re not going to want to start all over at a new instance and rebuild yet again.

    They’re just going to go back to reddit

    • Briskfall@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      I feel like the concept of “decentralisation” is good for the consuming users and people who want to discuss an interesting topic/subject, but not really for OC/content craetors… They just want their work to be as exposed to as many people as possible (exposure -> more clients -> bigger brand/value -> profit???), and defederalisating goes against that principle.

    • eta_aquarid@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      I think the issue is that everyone’s so focused on seeing Lemmy as a “notReddit” that they outright get pissed when it doesn’t work the way they think it should (like Reddit except the parts they think are bad)

      Lemmy (and kbin, and other similar platforms) and Reddit have the same niche, but they’re not the same thing

  • mitch@beehaw.org
    3·
    2 years ago

    I think this is a fair choice for Beehaw to make, but I am frustrated that now I have less content to read. I wish we had better community discovery tools.

  • BaroqueInMind@kbin.social
    3·
    2 years ago

    This simply solidifies my opinion that I’ve had all along that Beehaw is a trash instance full of sensitive censor-happy ninnies and I hope they all resolve the issues they are having to eventually be finally free from trolls and assholes in their humble & beautiful walled-garden paradise echo chamber. All the best for them.

    • bill_1992@kbin.social
      7·
      2 years ago

      Isn’t the whole point of the fediverse that you get to create and craft your experience for your community? There’s a really good reason defederating is a feature. I don’t get it, Beehaw decides to use the features of federation so now we: firstly become tribalistic (them vs us), and secondly decide to get angry? Like it or not, this is what you signed up for when you wanted federation.

      I don’t see the point of getting angry like this, and really don’t see how this negativity being conducive to a thriving community. Some new people are going to explore fediverse, see tribalistic mudslinging among instances, and say “not for me.”

      I’d say respect their decision and move on, if it’s not for you it’s not for you.

      • zalack@kbin.social
        6·
        2 years ago

        Yeah, they’re saying “look, we only have four mods, have a highly targeted type of community we are trying to build, and have had to disproportionately moderate users from these instances” which seems reasonable on it’s face.

        That’s kind of the beauty of Lemmy/Kbin right? You can spin up an instance with whatever rules you want. I think people are reacting to the fact that during the Reddit exodus Beehaw kind of looked like a “default” general instance, including me.

        But that’s a misreading on our part, not them going back on that.

      • Leigh@beehaw.org
        4·
        2 years ago

        Absolutely. It’s disappointing that this person read a post made by the Beehaw admins that was written with nuance and grace, and then decided to respond with vitriol. That’s exactly the kind of attitude that is so prolific on Reddit, and I am happy to leave it behind. Thank you for your reasoned reply.

        OP, I encourage you in the future to choose grace.

        • Ski@kbin.social
          2·
          2 years ago

          This kind of post right here is the gold standard for why I chose Kbin over other instances. Well reasoned, free of vitriol, and looking to build a new culture outside of the one a lot of us left behind on Reddit.

        • eta_aquarid@kbin.social
          1·
          2 years ago

          yeah, this is the weird thing; Beehaw’s reasonings are incredibly reasonable, and they’re not saying that the other parts of Lemmy aren’t good enough for them, which is what I think a lot of people are getting mad at

          that and thinking that they’re entitled to access to Beehaw

        • BaroqueInMind@kbin.social
          0·
          2 years ago

          Vitriol is a strong word to describe what I said about Beehaw. I do not hold a bitter spite to what Beehaw did, in fact I understand and accept their decision as prudent and appropriate for their community.

          I simply hate how they act benevolent where the reality is the opposite; that their admins are legitimately overlords akin to a full-time power-abusing reddit moderator.

          Regarding your comment that I need to act with more grace, my apologies. You are correct, I should be less aggressive in my opinions and will self-censor henceforth to protect and maintain the humility of the discussions that occur here.

          • Leigh@beehaw.org
            1·
            2 years ago

            I simply hate how they act benevolent where the reality is the opposite; that their admins are legitimately overlords akin to a full-time power-abusing reddit moderator.

            What do you mean by this? Do you have examples? Maybe you’re correct and I just haven’t seen it, but every example I’ve seen of them responding to something has been great.

            Regarding your comment that I need to act with more grace, my apologies. You are correct, I should be less aggressive in my opinions and will self-censor henceforth to protect and maintain the humility of the discussions that occur here.

            Don’t sweat it, brother. <3

      • Noki@kbin.social
        1·
        2 years ago

        100% - the beauty of the fedivers is that everybody can chose to federatre OR NOT!

        If people wanne follow beehaw they can switch server or even go to some other fedivers project and follow from there.

      • BreadDog@kbin.socialOP
        1·
        2 years ago

        Its both a value add and a negative. For those more focused on their own community (Like beehaw) it’s an obvious positive. But for many users, losing access to certain communities on your own instance of choice is going to be a negative. I personally don’t blame Beehaw for favoring the former. I think improved moderation tools and more granular federation would at least make the move less of a blow to users.

      • eta_aquarid@kbin.social
        1·
        2 years ago

        Isn’t the whole point of the fediverse that you get to create and craft your experience for your community? There’s a really good reason defederating is a feature. I don’t get it, Beehaw decides to use the features of federation so now we: firstly become tribalistic (them vs us), and secondly decide to get angry? Like it or not, this is what you signed up for when you wanted federation.

        Yes, exactly

        like we’re not owed Beehaw’s cooperation; it’s their instance and if the users want to do this then that’s their perogative

        Regardless, this is being blown out of proportion; Beehaw outright said that this was temporary

    • dan1101@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 years ago

      Yeah I don’t feel quite as harshly but as soon as I saw they didn’t allow downvotes I knew their philosophy wasn’t for me. Too bad about losing their gaming group though.

      • Captain_Wtv@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        I’ll be honest, it’s weird to not allow downvotes but be on a federated site. Idk if I’m weird or if that’s just me tho. Like if you go to beehaw from another Lemmy instance you can downvote them.

        • Noki@kbin.social
          2·
          2 years ago

          most of the fedivers has no downvote - please be respectfulll of the diferences.

    • lamentforicarus@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      I have a beehaw account. I’ve only experienced one user who’s a bit too intense about their thoughts. Everyone else has just been chill. The admin aren’t defederating from lemmy.ml, the other big instance, and have no plans to do so. They really were just overwhelmed by the two feds they blocked because of trollish users. It’s not as intense as you make it sound.

    • geoffervescent@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      I think it’s great. I want an account there for the occassions when I want to visit a safe space or a SFW website. It doesnt have to be your identity. You can go to different instances in different contexts, for different modes of interaction. And a third unrelated instance can remain federated with them both, if that’s amenable to all parties.

  • experbia@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    All this talk of defederation and blocklists makes me generally uneasy. I understand how it’s easy to fall into. Nobody wants political extremists and criminals and bad actors and stuff on their instance, so it makes sense you might want to ban trollfactory dot xyz, nazihq dot us, and/or uncompromisingmarxist dot boats, or whatever.

    But I think the stupidest shit I saw on reddit were the subreddits that would ban you for even posting on an ideologically competing subreddit, with no consideration for the message you’d written. This is worse than that because it’s the opposite, and includes even reading the content.

    Imagine if when you went to post on /r/RestaurantOwners, and its AutoMod had the power to then immediately ban you from even looking at /r/antiwork and /r/WorkReform. Imagine posting to /r/conservative to correct someone’s error only to get permanently banned from viewing any “leftist” subs ever again. This is the vibe I get from this and as much as I want to avoid creating nodules of extremism and hatred, I want less to have people grabbing my head, taping my mouth, and averting my eyes from things they don’t like when they don’t even know what my thinking is.

    I feel like widespread trigger happy banlists are the death of small instances, too. Maybe one small instance doesn’t catch some newly registered asshole for a day or two but it’s too late. The 16-hour a day lifestyle moderator on a massive instance who has gangstalking delusions over nebulous “trolls” has already blacklisted all 150 of your users permanently and listed your domain for defederation as officially owned by the Nazi party in a massive register shared by the top 100 largest instances. The number of times I’ve heard this story with small Mastodon instances is more than I care for.

    • Sentrovasi@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      You’re not banned from looking at anything. Just go to their instance, abide by their signup rules and don’t do the shit they defederated to avoid.

    • sim_@beehaw.org
      1·
      2 years ago

      The admins at Beehaw have been explicit that this choice is not about locking their users in but about keeping bad actors out. But all of this is new, so the tools to accomplish that are crude for now.

  • spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1·
    2 years ago

    Ultimately this is because beehaw allowed themselves to become one of the largest instances on the threadiverse with a minimal mod team. Any blame on the other instances/mod tools is deflection. This is poor management at it’s core and is bad for the larger community. That said I would love to see more in the way of improved mod tools.

  • Retronautickz@beehaw.org
    1·
    2 years ago

    I don’t get the issue here.

    This is common in de-centralized social media.

    Federation allows the admins of a server to decide what kind of servers they want to federate with, but also to defederate from others.

    It’s only two servers that were creating problems with all the trolling and intolerant comments that came from there. Beehaw didn’t isolate itself/blocked everyone else in the fediverse.

  • FantasticFox@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    I created my first account there but left for lemmy.world once I realised users couldn’t create communities and all the communities were controlled by the same small group of admins.

    I had enough of such cabals on Reddit.

    No mods, No masters

  • Syo@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    I guess. That is the whole point right? If you like how a instance is run, you join them. And if any beehaw users don’t like this direction it’s taking, they can always make another account on Lemmy.

    Fediverse allows for great potential of redundant, diverse, and flexible meta content consumption, but we the users are bearing some of that growing pain right now as this all grows and things get shuffled on the fly.

  • arkcom@kbin.social
    1·
    2 years ago

    They should be running a standard forum software, but are already in too deep to fix the actual problem.

  • abclop99@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I think one of the problems is communities all being created on the same few big instances that allow anyone to create one.

  • Sean Tilley@lemmy.ml
    1·
    2 years ago

    Honestly, this is disappointing, but not particularly surprising. It’s a problem that’s at least as old as Usenet, in terms of different communities not getting along. It’s also not uncommon that people setting up instances are new, inexperienced with moderation, and sometimes even just let people register without any kind of verification because why not?

    I think an important point is for admins / mods from various instances to try to get on the same page, in terms of policies. Building that common ground early, and establishing best practices, really helps mitigate a lot of the BS that can happen.

    • BreadDog@kbin.socialOP
      0·
      2 years ago

      Certainly so. From a sort of… sociological point I’m wondering what the impacts are of major instances growing independent of each other. I feel like I can already feel it with kbin and lemmy both growing separately during the blackout. I’m wondering if the trend for major instances is going to be where each one has their own unique culture or if they will eventually homogenize.

      Only real concern here, although I didn’t participate during the mastodon surge last year, I heard that defederation became a bit of an issue with how common there. Granted, I feel like the impact is probably less here with the fact that you are interacting with topics rather than people.

      • Shortcake@kbin.social
        1·
        2 years ago

        i think it really depends on the admin. I saw many threads on mastodon of hundreds of instances defederated with and listed reasons. some made sense, others did not.

      • Nepenthe@kbin.social
        0·
        2 years ago

        I’m personally hoping for a unique culture, especially since we currently have quite a good one. Going solo is just going solo – it’s sad and kinda dumb, since it defeats the entire point of the fediverse, but if they’re ok hanging out on a closed forum it’s not like those haven’t existed for decades.

        I hadn’t thought something like Mastodon would be able to defederate. Thinking about it, that would be far more disastrous for a platform aimed at following individuals to be able to do. The stress induced from having to choose an instance knowing they block other instances and being unable to even tell if that’s a bad thing or not until you investigate each and every one anyway. Having to look up what your favorite people are on, if you’re on Mastodon, so you can get news without leaving any of them out. What a mess.

        • eta_aquarid@kbin.social
          1·
          2 years ago

          they defederated from Lemmy.world and the other one, that’s it

          they’re not closing themselves off; they made it very clear what they were doing and why; people keep just catastrophizing about it over and over for some reason

          like they made it clear what they were doing and that it wouldn’t necessarily be permanent

        • GuyDudeman@beehaw.org
          1·
          2 years ago

          They’re not going solo though. They are still connected to hundreds of other instances. Including Lemmy.ml, which is still the biggest instance.

          • cnnrduncan@beehaw.org
            1·
            2 years ago

            Additionally, the Beehaw admins have said they’re open to refederating with lemmy.world et al if/when Lemmy gets better moderation tools.

        • AbelianGrape@beehaw.org
          1·
          2 years ago

          Lemmy specifically hasn’t implemented less harsh measures yet. This is a stop-gap action to cut off a trolling problem at its source. The beehaw admins say they will reevaluate when less drastic tools are available, e.g. allow beehaw users to interact with lemmy.world but not the other way around.

          I’m not sure I 100% agree, personally, but beehaw’s ethos is “be(e) nice” and if trolls are trolling, it can make it very hard for some people to open up and contribute. So I see where it’s coming from.