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.

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

  • claraEnglish
    131·
    2 years ago

    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.

    and this is the issue with beehaw isn’t it, i’m not judging them wanting to carve out a vetted/secure and controlled space, it’s entirely understandable given their audience and purpose, but then why are you building such a community on federated software? that sounds impossible! part of the point of federation is to allow cross-talk from other spaces and communities. if you’re going to defederate and wall off from 400 instances (as OP claims) then beehaw should transition to vanilla forum software, this would save themselves all the headache.

    all the best to them ❤️

      • markEnglish
        31·
        2 years ago

        I don’t think it is what the mods want. They would rather be open, but not at the cost of being unable to keep on top of moderation. Also, the software works perfectly well as a closed forum. And maybe that suits beehaw better.

        This is a feature of federated communities, there is no one source of who’s in and who’s out. That is the job of each instance. But if an instance does not control its users then it will lose reputation and be excluded from certain spaces.

        Therefore, we are all responsible for the reputation of our own instance.

    • scrchngwslEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      Same as you, I can neither agree nor disagree with this, and it is of course their choice who they federate with – that’s part of the point of this thing, you can choose who to federate with. It is really interesting to see how lemmy develops and how communities use it to handcraft the sort of online space they want.

      It does seem like their immediate goals would be better served with a forum, but I also see why a platform-agnositic approach using ActivityPub and federation makes sense for them over the long run, as there are surely plenty of users on Mastodon for example that they would want to interact with and incude in the safe space they’re creating.

      The learning for me I think is that when I reply to posts on other instances that are federated onto our instance, I should be mindful of that instance, its culture and its rules. I’m walking into a room and talking to people in that room, so I should read the room first. Again, it will be interesting to see how the culture on lemmy plays out, and whether “reading the room” becomes a core part of how people use federated software.

    • Ted Ward@toot.wales
      5·
      2 years ago

      @clara @theory

      After reading some of the “essays” they have on the about the community it seems they want there own site/community. Maybe a forum/reddit/discord server would suit what they want better than a federated place.

      To me it seems they just looked for somewhere they could achieve what they wanted (ie reddit copy) but not understood the federated part of the tech.

  • dadEnglish
    8·
    2 years ago

    This feels like a bad idea. Let’s look at some popular federated networks:

    1. Anyone with a phone number can call anyone else with a phone number.
    2. Anyone with an email can email anyone else with an email.
    3. Anyone can setup a Matrix server and message anyone else with federation turned on.
    4. There is one DNS system despite it being decentralised.

    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).

    • markEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • dadEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        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.

      • Mane25English
        2·
        2 years ago

        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”.

  • GreatAlbatrossMAEnglish
    8·
    2 years ago

    This is a painful thing to hear, but it is going to be part of the process of building federated communities. If places want to have a wide audience, they need to keep on top of the moderation. Hopefully, this will mean improved moderation kicks into gear on those instances.

  • MerylasFalguard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    Oof. I had added a couple of the communities from there on my feed here, since they had the largest gaming community for instance. I don’t want to have to make a different account for every major server, but the fact that one group can just decide to cut everyone else out like that makes it seem like that might be necessary. X.x

    Regardless, I feel like isolating like this is just gonna make this whole Fediverse thing feel even more user-unfriendly for people who are on the fence about sticking around.

    • SensEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Well that instance will lose out to others, give it time and those communities will be created elsewhere and people looking for a larger pool of content will sign up on a federated instance.

      For the other side of the argument, safe spaces, well moderated can be important so private communities need to be added to Lemmy with some haste.

  • Aninjanameddaryll@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    Eh, I can understand not having the resources to handle things. They jumped in head first and only discovered afterwards that they were jumping in just before a flood hit. It sucks, but it is what it is.

    It just makes using beehaw pointless now. Federation is the entire point of lemmy imo. So if an instance can’t access some of the major ones, it becomes a non-starter

  • Lubricate7931English
    4·
    2 years ago

    I was liking the technology community.

    Was put off by the joining form. But makes sense reading their aims.

  • juniperEnglish
    73·
    2 years ago

    I can kind of understand where they’re coming from. To register with their instance you need to be approved, they obviously have it set up like that for a reason - to weed out nuisances/trolls etc. They want a ‘safe place’. With the explosion of new lemmy users, they have tons of people accessing and posting in their communities without having to be registered / approved and it probably feels quite overwhelming for an already-established instance to be ‘ambushed’ in a sense. It was probably manageable before the reddit evacuation but I imagine it’s pretty crazy right now. It’s frustrating if you want to contribute to their communities though, for sure. No option but to register within their instance and wait to be approved for the time being.

    • TediousParrotEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      It’s going to be interesting how this plays out. I also see where they are coming from, but severing people from a community in either direction will cause upset.

      Lemmy and Lemmy like services are not the same as Mastodon like services. It’s the ‘then’ vs the ‘now’. It doesn’t matter so much if my Mastodon history and reputation is severed because the focus is on ‘now’. Lemmy on the other hand relies on the history of each community.

      Edit: I do see this from another perspective as well… there are a huge number of communities being started (I presume this is people trying to either recreate Reddit or to land-grab similarly named communities) but not a huge amount of content being posted.

      • SensEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        We need private and read-only communities when accessing from another instance

  • SensEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    400 instances? Did you mean 400 sublemmys? There’s only 192 instances in total last time I checked

    • babeEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      They’ve defederated from a Iot of common badfaith instances on the fediverse, lot of pleroma and masto troll/fash instances - which is normaI for admins on the fediverse. Its active protection of your users from harrassment. Most mastodon instances have 200-400+ instances blocked and defederated. Its standard.

      Lemmy admins may be new to the fediverse, but once the troll instances start to realise how easy it is to mess with you from the safety of their instances, you’re going to need your admins to start communicating with the long term masto admins, get their blocklists and recognise how they keep their users safe proactively rather than retroactively.

      Defederation is one of the strongest defenses the federation has in terms of maintaining stability within its wider network and enforcing that admins/mods do their jobs. Its a matter of everyone seeing eye to eye and agreeing on ground rules for civility and agreeing they’re going to moderate to a decent active standard and keep control of their users. If an instance is unable to keep control of its house, or the admin goes AWOL and ends up with tons of bad faith users running amok flinging poop everywhere, then yeah they will get defederated. It can always be fixed later on with serious discussion and commitments made between the admins of instances.

      But yeah every instance on the fediverse that doesnt want underage porn / nazi imagery / fascist agitators / gore / hatespeech etc getting posted continually to their users, is going to have to defederate a couple of hundred instances. The Fediverse is a lot bigger than Lemmy, and people outside of Lemmy/Kbin can all post to your instances and your threads, or even start our own threads.

  • christophskiEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Can anyone explain this? Does it mean that users on beehaw can’t see the posts from those other instances? Or the other way round? Or both?

    • theoryOPEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      It means they wont see anything new (post, comment, message) from the instances they defederated, and vice versa, and neither will be able to subscribe to (or even see) communities on each other