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
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 ❤️
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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.
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.
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.
This feels like a bad idea. Let’s look at some popular federated networks:
- Anyone with a phone number can call anyone else with a phone number.
- Anyone with an email can email anyone else with an email.
- Anyone can setup a Matrix server and message anyone else with federation turned on.
- 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).
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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
I was liking the technology community.
Was put off by the joining form. But makes sense reading their aims.
Consider the kbin tech magazine instead, i think
Thanks! I’ll give it a look
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.
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.
We need private and read-only communities when accessing from another instance
400 instances? Did you mean 400 sublemmys? There’s only 192 instances in total last time I checked
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.
See for yourself https://beehaw.org/instances
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?
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
No one can leave the federation as it is a perpetual union! Just kidding
