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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 (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.
We still federate, but god knows how long that will last. They have defederated nearly 400 instances and they sound lile theyre losing the plot
This feels like a bad idea. Let’s look at some popular federated networks:
This feels like a modern day IRC netsplit and we will all lose. This decision needs to be reversed once better tooling / organisation is put in place. Blocking should be done at a different layer (e.g. call blocking or email spam filtering).
But it is absolutely true that telephone networks and email servers that get used too much for spam calls/messages will get blacklisted by other providers.
If your email provider gets a bad reputation then your emails will get blocked (that is a lot of how spam filtering works). That is pretty analogous.
This is different because it bifurcates the network. End users will have to understand which Lemmy providers federate with whichever others in a way they don’t have to with email today. It also feels like the bar to classifying these two providers as malicious is a lot lower than with email.
The difference is you’d usually get some sort of error message if your phone call doesn’t go through, or your email bounces.
What’s really needed is some sort of warning symbol meaning “this person can’t read your comments”.