cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
We’ve been defederated. Were there that many trolls/assholes on our server? What on earth happened while I was asleep?
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 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.
Hey everyone, woke up this morning with this news. This news really comes at a surprise as I have not seen or heard of any trolling coming from members of this community. I also have not been approached by their admins to see how we could collaborate. In either case, I’ll be attempting to reach out to their admins and discuss a path forward together.
I’ll post an update with the details in the coming days.
Their announcement doesn’t strike me as all that alarming. I could be mistaken.
It sounds like their mods have watched an unexpected expressway arrive at their door this week, Douglas Adams-style, and so they’re closing the door momentarily to evaluate what the new traffic will look like. Honestly feels reasonable, unless I’m misunderstanding it.
The message seems to be that this isn’t meant to be a permanent change.
That’s disappointing, I would’ve hoped that if open signups were their main problem then they would have communicated that. Other instances have “closed signups” but are effectively only bot gateways.
I really hope you find a way to re-federate. But they do have a point, open sign up is a a time bomb. Do you have any anti spam in place?
Ya maybe just approving sign ups is required during this wave. I dunno.
The more I read about beehaw, the more it seems like the admins are the kinds of people who would rather block everything they don’t like than look for an actual solution.
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Elbows too pointy. Blocked.
Justified block
I had to block a user from this instance who posted something along the lines of “would you hit it” of three women wearing Nazi armbands. That made me nervous of this instance. It looks like Beehaw is seeing more behavior like that from this instance.
Report them. We’ll sort them out.
I tried to find them again but I blocked them out of instinct and couldn’t get back to it. I find Nazi imagery particularly distressing, so I acted out of instinct instead of approaching it rationally.
Guys, can we please try to not act so butthurt about this? Simply accept that they were getting spammed and trolled and had to go private for awhile. It’s nothing personally against us or our community.
This. We don’t know what kind of content was happening. It’s good that they’re trying to cultivate their communities along what they believe to be a good and positive ethos, and it’s even better that the Fediverse can support this without crippling everything.
Personally I’d rather there were methods for people to access content across instances without the instances having to federate. So that the repercussions of defederation can be minimized. Then it would not be a big deal at all even if an instance didn’t federate with anyone else.
I feel that it’s actually a big ask to expect the owners of an instance to host/proxy whatever content all other third party instances provide. If I was hosting my own instance I would actually rather prefer to not federate with anyone, because I would not want to be liable / responsible for hosting content that I don’t even have control over. Specially if the fediverse ever becomes as big and mainstream as massive social networks like reddit.
Isn’t that just a website?
You can always access content on other instances, assuming they’re not private. Just enter the URL into your browser bar.
Yes, but then I’d need a whole new account to keep a list of subscriptions, and completely switch to a different website / feed.
The interesting thing would be if the same frontend could make the requests to the the API from multiple instances directly (cross-site) to fetch subscriptions for each instance and aggregate the content in the same feed, even across instances that do not federate.
Ideally you’d get the content from those instances without server-to-server communication, and you wouldn’t need instances to proxy/cache the content from each other’s. Each instance would just serve the content they host when they do not federate. So they wouldn’t be held responsible for 3rd party content while still giving you the freedom to chose to connect with those other instances if you really want.
Of course it would still require some level of coordination for all instances to use the same standards, and be able to authenticate the user consistently (maybe using a cryptographic key). But I expect it would alleviate the inter-instance drama by removing friction.
I agree that it’s frustrating that we can’t still view content and just be unable to interact from our instance. That being said, I think a workaround to have everything in one place (if you just want to lurk) would be adding that specific community’s xml link to an RSS feed along with your sh.itjust.works homepage’s xml.
But they can ban those users, just like they get banned individually in their own communities.
There is pretty much no difference, unless organised brigading was going on from lemmy.world ,etc. which I doubt.
I’m not sure why you doubt it. People have corroborated that slurs were being mass spammed. I myself witnessed a troll on lemmy.world yesterday who dropped an f-bomb and told a lascivious tale about dessalines. They can ban them for 5 minutes until they make another account and start spamming again. It’s pretty easy for a handful of trolls to cause chaos, especially if they had only 4 mods. The mods need to sleep sometimes also.
Yeah, I saw a spammer on lemmy.world spamming scat porn images (unfortunately there is still no way of blocking all images). I reported them and they were banned.
They can ban them for 5 minutes until they make another account and start spamming again
But they can still do this from any federated instance. Meanwhile they just banned 20k+ contributing users.
It’ll be interesting to see if they block kbin.social, fedia.io and startrek.website soon. All these same arguments work for them.
When federation wasn’t working for kbin, the community felt like a safe space. It was calm and interesting. With federation in place the main negative thing I have seen so far is downvotes everywhere. Yes, the Lemmy community feels a lot more Wild West too than kbin did.
I obviously can’t talk for every single sh.itjust.works user, but it doesn’t feel like that here to me, even with federation on. It really depends on the instance and the subscriber base.
Barbarian, you’re a gentleman and scholar. Your patience and understanding of the fediverse has been crucial to the success and growth of this instance, and indeed Lemmy as a whole. So thankful you joined up with sh.itjust.works. Keep fighting the good fight!
They didn’t ban us, they temporarily defederated from our instances. Totally different things.
And no, I don’t think there are very many instances which are as quick and easy to make an account as us and lemmy.world. That’s how we grew so quickly, and we obviously picked up a few trolls along the way.
“temporarily”
It just reminds me of all the Mastodon drama, like them de-federating the Swedish one over not applying shared blocklists, etc.
Why not focus on blocking actual abusive users, and contributing to shared tooling, rather than trying to pre-emptively ban users?
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
// This is meant to be a temporary solution
I found that in a SQL script from 2001…in 2018.
haha. I’m still rocking a temp solution I put in place on my media server about a year ago.
You’re not wrong. I just think you’re choosing a silly hill to die on. What is the purpose of your line of questioning? Do you want to be federated with them or not?
Do you have any experience moderating a Lemmy instance of that size? Presumably they would have been focusing on blocking abusive users for the past week and ultimately decided they had to choose nuclear option.
Neither of us actually know firsthand what went down, but I’m choosing to sympathize and you’re choosing to criticize. Neither of us is necessarily wrong, but I feel it’s wiser to be supportive right now, given that we don’t know what the future might hold and the platform is in a fragile state.
The issue is that it affects the growth of Lemmy as a whole. Like the outcome of all the Mastodon drama was just that I gave up using it, but I was never a big Twitter use anyway.
Imagine the average Redditor’s experience now - they come to browse some Lemmyverse posts. See that Beehaw has active Gaming and Technology communities like Reddit, so try to sign up there. Wait 2-3 hours with no response to their registration and then give up and go back to Reddit.
They can ban them for 5 minutes until they make another account and start spamming again
But they can still do this from any federated instance. Meanwhile they just banned 20k+ contributing users.
Isn’t the issue that this instance (and some others) don’t have any controls on creating new accounts?
Neither does Reddit.
What is your proposed solution? Private invites like lobste.rs ? Or the current tiny trickle of allowed users on Beehaw ?
I think open growth and banning spammers while developing analysis tools to automate it is the best way.
I was just explaining what their issue was, I wasn’t defending it or proposing any solutions.
They can do this from any instance with open registrations. Instances with closed or moderated registrations are a different story. So, could just as easily say, why doesn’t sh.itjust.works restrict new user creation, which is a common practice on smaller fediverse instances including beehaw.
(Answer: then you can’t onboard new users in a mass migration. But that’s what creates the tension.)
Doesn’t have to be organized when there’s 30,000 people on the sites they’re blocking. It can be a marginal percentage of users and still be hundreds of people they need to ban. Potentially repeatedly if the banned trolls just start using sockpuppets.
A small number of mods + dedicated bad actors = blocking the tools those bad actors use.
I doubt this instance is being used by enough people to get trolls using it. It’s just because of the registration policy, which is open as opposed to the rest of the instances.
They just are too lazy to moderate it. Nothing to do with actual illegal content or imaginary trolls.
It seems to me like they don’t want to give up any control by adding mods (currently it’s only the admins) and choose the easy way out by reducing the amount they have to moderate…
I think this is actually totally reasonable on their part. It does, however, mean that we need to start rebuilding some of the biggest communities elsewhere.
Mods on their instance can’t moderate content sent from a community on i.e. sh.itjust.works.
Sure they can, they can ban the user from the entire instance or from the community. To all users of sh.itjust.works for example the content will still appear, but it won’t show on beehaw anymore.
Here’s the PR that implemented this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1298
I’m pretty sure that means that if a Beehaw user is blocked from Lemmy.world, they can still comment on posts federated from Lemmy.world to Beehaw. In the Beehaw duplicate community. But when content from the specific user is sent back to Lemmy.world, the instance refuse to accept the comment either due to the individual being banned from the controlling community on Lemmy.world or from the instance as a whole.
At least that’s how it seemed to work in late 2022 when I administered my own instance and people were intensely ban and block happy on the instance level.
But isn’t it easy to test? I’ll make a community on my home instance and you subscribe to it so it’s federated to Lemmy.world and then you simply remove the content from Lemmy.world, yes?
Yea if they want to defederate will all instances that have an open registration policy they are going to miss out on a lot of things, they are also going to have to defederate a lot of instances. I’m a little sad because theres a lot of decent content on that instance and is going to be inaccessible to a lot of users now, but whatever, their admins made their choice.
By my understanding, and I’d love to be corrected if I’m wrong, but we should be able to still see and interact with their instance their users just cannot see it
I’m a bit doubtful of this so I’ll have to check though
Edit: I am wrong
Unfortunately I don’t think we can. I’m still subscribed to News@beehaw and the last post showing up when viewing the community from sh.itjust.works is from 15h ago, while viewing it from beehaw.org shows there are many more recent posts.
Not really, the block goes both ways (they can’t see our content and we can’t see theirs) so effectively there are two communities for already subscribed communities
I hope this is the case, I would still like to be able to see their content, even if they can’t see ours.
I find this very disappointing, not because I’m hugely attached to Beehaw (although their large gaming community has dominated my feed this week). But rather because the first response to whatever adversity they were facing, real or perceived, is to take the nuclear option. The biggest drawback to Lemmy as opposed to Reddit is the over fragmentation and the lack of quality content, so intentionally increasing those challenges feels short-sighted and bad for the ecosystem as a whole.
I would say that on lemmy mod tools are in pre-alpha state that work for instances under 1000 users. Lemmy needs more tools to moderate and without any other option beehaw decided to go nuclear until they get mod tools
Whole reddit debacle was about 3 party apps and moderation tools
Ok so help me understand here. The root post is Beehaw complaining that their four admins can’t handle the new influx of users. But isn’t that the entire point of moderators? Shouldn’t each community be responsible for dealing with trolls, etc? From what I’ve seen of Beehaw, they’re attempting to have the same handful of admins moderate every single community, which was never going to be sustainable and IMHO misses the entire point of this sort of experience.
If all the new trolls are coming from two instances, and defederating those two instances will keep the load manageable for them, why wouldn’t they?
This kind of decision is a big problem for scaling up Lemmy as a reddit replacement and welcoming huge volumes of new users, but I don’t think that’s Beehaw’s goal and certainly not their responsibility.
The tricky bit is figuring out how to set up fediverse-wide communities in places that most (non-troll) users won’t be cut off from them.
I mean sure, they can take their toys and go home. It’s their instance; it’s their prerogative. I guess I just don’t understand why anyone would want to be invested in a tiny little dictatorship where four admins run every single community.
That’s exactly the issue. We’re at a point where many communities are looking for a place to go instead of reddit and this whole situation will scare them away from lemmy because they don’t know which instances are safe places to set up camp. Beehaw was the only one I saw with a bit of branding in the form of consistent logos and I think that alone has pushed many users to them. I personally just picked the instance that seemed the least shady at first glance and didn’t already ask people to register elsewhere and I think most of beehaw’s users did the same and landed there without getting into the details about the server’s ethics.
I don’t know how to answer the question. I don’t have enough information but from my testing moderation tools are in a poor state and what moderator can do if they can’t moderate.
I tend to agree. Their server, their rules, but an attempt to find a compromise of some variety rather than suddenly and unexpectedly defederating would have been nice.
This sort of stuff was always gonna happen early on. As things calm and the wider community settles into some norms we’ll see less of it.
Oooo fediverse drama right out of the gates. Meta in Lemmy is going to be interesting no doubt about that.
I don’t find this any more dramatic than sh.itjust.works blocking lemmygrad.ml lol
If only a few major instances are defederating your instance, its a “them problem”; if a majority of major instances are defederating you, maybe it’s a “you problem”. (talking about lemmygrad.ml)
Lol fair.
Did that occur after sh.itjust.works was founded though? I joined pretty early and I thought we had been defederated from lemmygrad.ml since the beginning. The drama comes from all the people who got suddenly booted from communities they were subscribed to.
No idea of the chronology, instance blocks is a config file setting and doesn’t show up in the mod logs. You’d have to look for announcements from your admins.
I understand the drama, but only have one piece of advice to those who can’t accept such an decision: If you want it your way, make your own.
I understand the drama, but only have one piece of advice to those who can’t accept such an decision: If you want it your way, make your own.
Agreed.
Yeah, this is different than blocking the tankie instance, but I still don’t think that should have been done.
Shitjustworks and world are generalist instances while lemmygrad celebrates the slaughter of landlords, which even Mao accepted went too far in the end.
Their users posted the announcement that critisizing the CCP was allowed in world to accuse them of racism, homophobia, and the hatred of chinease people. No examples at first, just the origional post. Even their ‘examples’ were not congruent with that accusation. This ended with their suggesting the mods to be similarly bigoted.
There are plenty of examples where the users are imagining wild bigotry from people, attempting to get them banned even. They are, many of them, very violently against a conversation even when it’s respectful from what I’ve seen outside their community
I still don’t think they should have been banned though, but we have to recognize the difference. Scroll the local tab here and then try theirs. The difference is clear
I’m surprised more instances haven’t blocked yours…
What can I say? If people can’t accept that other people might have different opinions and worldview, it’s not people I think I’d miss the opportunity to interact with. So I don’t really lament those who block my home instance.
To address your surprise; it seems that the majority of new people coming to the Lemmyverse are reasonable and thinking people.
I run my own instance and haven’t defederated from y’all yet.
As long as an instance doesn’t have like, truly abhorrent content like pedo crap (looking at you, burggit), or aren’t literally Nazi supporters, I really don’t care. I can just not sub there. Unless/until they start being a bigger nuisance outside their little hellhole.
lol just looking at that instance and yeah I can get behind that decision
Beehaw used to have a rule that you can’t ask for sources.
What a joke, one of the problems with reddit was over moderation and how things had to be so neatly organized with flairs etc.
On the basis of this information, to me de-federation is a good thing and shows how this could be better than reddit, over just banhammering users.
Defederation is still nuclear and makes the whole service harder to approach. We need some intermediate tools besides “allow all” and “block all” for handling other instances.
Please check my profile, trying to help formulate a solution in my other posts
Disappointing, although beehaw gave me weird vibes so I had been avoiding it so far.
Edit: not trying to hate on them, just saying what they’re doing isn’t for me.
Same here
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I’ve really been seeing minimal to zero trolling and toxic arguments. Here, on beehaw, and on lemmy.world. Seems totally unnecessary to me. I don’t think I personally vibe with their whole harping on the “safe space” aspect of their community. I want the internet, not a tiny, “safe”, over-moderated community.
I agree with you, but we do not and should not have the capability of overriding what they and their userbase want to do. While I absolutely wish them the best of luck, I am not a Beehaw member for exactly the same reasons you aren’t.
Yup I definitely agree with that. I really like and am very excited about the things federation brings to the table, even with these growing pains.
and should not have the capability of overriding what they and their userbase want to do.
I disagree, the whole point of Federation is to not fracture user-bases across platforms and if you don’t like it, then don’t join the Fediverse. Want a heavily moderated platform where for whiny b＊tches where you must always agree? Make something that isn’t federated (I won’t mention the ones I know of because I don’t want to support them, but plenty of platforms decided to do this). Federation is about connectedness, that means people are going to disagree. Defederating hurts users by doing the thing that federated services is supposed to prevent, causing fragmentation.
Hardline disagree. Federation is meant to allow variable amounts of connectedness and disconnectedness. If you want a well-connected platform with a central authority that can override user desires, go use Reddit. The point of the fediverse is to allow a bunch of what otherwise would have been disconnected forums to talk to each other and share information, while retaining independence. This, for better or worse, fits well within the principles of federation.
The beauty of the fediverse is that if you don’t like the decision they’ve made, you can change instances or make a new one
That’s fine, but I wish that instances that have blocked your instance wouldn’t appear on your timeline at all. Being able to see defederated content, but not knowing that you’re talking to a brick wall if you interact with it, is very strange.
Maybe there should be a test to see if the other instance is responsive and if it isn’t display a de-federated warning banner and maybe highlight the usernames from that instance in Red to show that they’re not available from this current instance.
Yep, that’d be fantastic.
Also beehaw doesn’t appear on the community browser https://browse.feddit.de/
Its their communities choice I suppose. This seems against the idealogy of the fediverse, but to each their own. Folks can migrate here, or to a different instance of their choice if they disagree with the Beehaw admins.
It’s telling when people interpret “you’re not invited to my house” as censorship.
You’re not being censored. You have a platform.
You’re being told they don’t want to listen to you.
I would disagree with that analogy, de-federation is a form of censorship because of the affects it has on registered users. It prevents users from accessing resources if they are on Beehaw. That analogy only works if Beehaw users could still interact with the de-federated communities but they are prevented from doing that.
Sure they can make a new account but the whole idea of Fediverse was to not have to make 20 accounts for different services, so if you signed up to Beehaw you are effectively censored and you’ll need to make a new account.
So it very much is censorship, maybe not for us outside of Beehaw but certainly for the ones in Beehaw.
This is unfortunate. I quite liked some of their communities. Does put the hoops other instances make you jump through in perspective a bit, though.
I think at this point we might as well start vetting new users if other instances are beginning to complain. It’ll suck for new users but such is the price we might have to pay. As always, keep up the good work, loving this instance.
