- cross-posted to:
- censorship@exploding-heads.com
- cross-posted to:
- censorship@exploding-heads.com
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Beehaw “moderators” don’t have an issue with their user base checking out other communities. As is clearly obvious from the fact that they aren’t defederated from all other instances.
They do have an issue with droves of unvetted users from other instances trolling and harassing their community though. And the most effective way to deal with that currently is to defederate from the instances that the majority of those bad-faith users are coming from. The unfortunate (and unintentional) side effect is that Beehaw users won’t be able to interact with any of the users from those instances.
This is a situation born out of a combination of
- lack of manpower and moderation tools
- gaps in the configuration of inter-instance interactions
- the way the internet works
You can disagree with this decision and users are free to switch, but this meme is a poor caricature of the actual effects of Beehaw’s actions and (at least in my estimation) of their intentions.
The decision to defederate is less of an attack or an indictment against the other instances and more of a practical necessity for them to protect their community.
If the user base of the lemmy verse keeps growing I wouldn’t be surprised if either
- more granular control over the way instances interact with each other is implemented and the restrictions are softened or
- the amount of spammers and trolls reaches a level that forces more instances to vet their users and the defederation is lifted entirely or
- more powerful moderation tools show up and in combination with a greater number of people moderating makes the pre-screening of users unnecessary
Yeah I agree. They’ve been quite open about everything so far and their main issue was the modding implications of open sign up. The tools just don’t exist yet to manage it effectively and keep the kind of community they want, so it’s just easier to defederate for now until they do. They have a dialogue open with shit just works and said that the admin of lemmy.world hasn’t replied to their message, but that it’s fine if they don’t want to talk too.
I am a bit disappointed that inter-instance sniping has started so early though. I personally am on both instances and am going to try and treat both in good faith for now
Fortunately, @ruud made a comment https://beehaw.org/comment/298646. They should be working together soon.
Oh good that’s promising. Ultimately this platform generally is only going to work en masse if everyone tries to work with each other. I know they don’t have to necessarily, but it’s nice to get along
I agree with Beehaw’s decision, until moderation tools are strong like on Mastodon to quell targeted hate spam and other such 4chan level trash…They have every right to defederate Lemmy and any instance that compromises the wellbeing of their community. I do hope these issues which have caused this situation are resolved overtime. I’d donate to help the effort. Decentralized social media feels like the future of how we interact with others with internet-based communication. It needs support to get off the ground and run faster than sites like Facebook or Twitter.
No, the meme is accurate. The owners of beehaw are so obsessed with protecting their users from possible harassment that they are willing to put them in a prison with no communication with most of the outside world (lemmy.world has the most active users and sh.itjust.works is in top 5).
Users are people capable of making their own choices. It they don’t like the moderation approach they can just make a new account elsewhere. You don’t get to tell them what they like.
Yes, how dare I criticize someone’s actions and the impact they have on our community.
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It hurts both their users and us. The federation is now more divided for no good reason.
If they wanted to create a private community from the start that would be perfectly fine. But they let people sign up and create big communities that everyone else now relies on and then defederated. Isn’t that a bit irresponsible?
Isn’t it a bit irresponsible to let bigoted trolls post a lot of dick pics? Because that’s what was going on. You’re talking about [theoretical problems], but the mods of Beehaw made a (possibly flawed) call during an emerging situation to avoid a lot of [actually existing problems].
Are you saying that the only possible actions are to allow trolls or defederate? It seems to me that there are also other, better solutions. If their decision was flawed, we should be able to criticize it.
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I see, you see Lemmy as being one big community, rather than separate communities that can interact with each other
so you see defederating as like locking away a part of the community, rather than a community deciding to lock up for a bit
The community didn’t decide this as far as I know. It was the owners who did it and informed their community after the fact. If there was some kind of vote and I missed it, let me know.
And the users on beehaw are free to create accounts on other instances if they want. Your prison metaphor is a bad one.
I’ll be honest: that’s a shitty way of handling this. Making 20 accounts to view content from 20 different instances that don’t want to cooperate with one another defeats the purpose of all of this. If that’s the plan, the Lemmyverse or whatever it’s called is dead on arrival.
The plan is to refederate after Lemmy moderation tools catch up to the needs of Beehaw.org.
Seems reasonable to me?
It’s just temporary, primarily due to lemmy having very poor moderation tools. Once moderation tools improves, beehaw mods should be able to handle refederating.
Just use small instances with good moderation policies.
They are restricting their users freedom. But yes the users are free to leave.
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If I create an email service, a lot of people sign up to use it and after some time I tell them I will no longer deliver emails to gmail.com, would that be alright?
It would be more similar to you blocking gmail.com from sending you messagess because thier users keep flooding your server with spam.
This happens every day. Unfortunately a small group of assholes ruined it for all of us until tools are available to deal with them.
I don’t know what kind of features they need, but I could have helped make the tools and I’m sure many other people would be willing to help if they only asked.
Why would you do that?
Gmail users send a lot of hateful messages so I decide to cut off all communications with them.
That happens all the time with spam mail servers which is exactly the same problem beehaw was having. If you set up an email service that hosts spam bots and do nothing about it then the other email services will start blocking it.
Beehaw was being spamed with dick pics and other shit that was actively malicious. They could ban those profiles but then those users just went and made new profiles on lemmy.world or one of the other instances with open signup. Right now Lemmy has limited moderation tools so the only way to perminantly “ban” those users is to defederate with the instances that keep hosting them. They plan to refederate with those instances once better tools are in place to perminantly block users like that.
Isn’t this exactly how gmail treats a LOT of other email services? Email is a mess of spam and whitelists and is barely usable as a result, partially because there is no human moderation.
You might be right about that. I hate email. I was just giving an example of providing a service that people rely on, then when a problem occurs cutting it off from the outside world instead of trying to fix it.
And they can leave beehaw on a full-time basis. Let the admins decide how they want to run their instances, and if users don’t like it, they can hop over to another. This is all a part of how decentralization is supposed to work. Of course it’s messy and inconsistent.
There are plenty of beehaw users who agreed with defederation. After all, they had to essentially write an essay to be allowed in at all. I’m not surprised there are users who are okay with defederating. And again, the ones who aren’t are free to make accounts on instances with open door policies, like shit or world. Beehaw admins probably prefer it that way anyway.
Did those users agree after the fact or were they asked first? If there was a vote and that’s what their users choose then I take back what I said. My impression was that there wasn’t any vote.
fucking lmao
as if they can’f make an account on another instance
y’all are just hurt because you think you’re being rejected and insulted by this, when they made it clear that it wasn’t personal or permanent
as if they can’f make an account on another instance
So that makes it right to cut people off from the outside world without asking them first? Do you want things like this to keep happening? Or should we maybe try other solutions first? Somehow other instances didn’t have to defederate, so maybe it’s not necessary?
nobody is cut off, holy shit
this is not as big of a deal as you’re making it
people can make new accounts on freer instances in seconds
I have a BeeHaw account and a lemmy.world account. I’m not imprisoned lol, it’s the Internet, not some.private island. Nothing’s stopping anyone from browsing or joining any of these communities
People’s freedoms were limited for no good reason. But you are right that they can leave. Users can leave Reddit too.
Freedoms were not limited. Any user can still go apply for a beehaw account if they want one. Any beehaw user can open an account on any other instance they want. People can still talk, people can still be heard.
No one is entitled to force others to listen to what they say. Beehaw’s owner pays for their server. It’s their own private instance. They can determine the rules that accounts that use or federate with their instance have to follow, and everyone has the freedom to associate with beehaw if they want.
Finally, beehaw isn’t a government, taking an action to limit the freedoms of their citizens. In most modern, western societies, that is between governments and their people. In nearly every similar structure, those people do not have the same “rights” in regards to private businesses or private organizations.
Don’t believe me? Go into a grocery store and start screaming obscenities at fellow customers and see how long it takes you to be forcibly removed and banned from the premises. And that won’t be your freedoms being limited, either. It will be that private business deciding that you’re not allowed to associate with them any longer.
This is no different. The people who run beehaw can choose how to run their space. It’s their money they pay for the service with. We don’t get to tell them how to spend it. Their users and donors have a say in it, and if their users and donors don’t like how the operators respond to their expectations, then they won’t have users and donors. That’s for them to decide.
People act like they’re entitled to an audience with beehaw users, and they simply aren’t. It’s that easy. You can’t just go into your neighbor’s house and demand they listen to what you have to say. They can, and will, boot your ass to the curb, or worse, as soon as they’re tired of listening. I’m not sure why this is so hard for some people to understand.
fucking exactly lmao
people from other instances seem to have felt entitled to Beehaw’s communities and are acting like something was stolen from them when they’d never owned it to begin with
They could also simply apply for an account on lemmy.world, if they wanted. I hear the bar is pretty low, and the users of beehaw were indirectly notified of this, too. And the inconvenience of having to create a second account is almost nonexistent.
Yeah. I’m surprised by how hostile ordinary users have been at this point. Beehaw defedrated after the mods were swamped and most of the content they had to deal with was from these two instances.
I have accounts on both and I was just reading a discussion on beehaw where both the owners of lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had chimed in and everyone was talking about how to get federated back in the future after beehaw have had a chance to get more moderators and the influx of users stabilizes at the end of the month.
My only gripe is that all of my negative interactions at this point have been with people from lemmy.ml so why do they remain while the other two were defederated? But that might be just my experience.
I think shit and world got defederated because they don’t have that “why do you want to join” question on the sign up page, and so is easy to make spam accounts on.
Well sort of. They got defeated because it was users from those communities causing a large portion of incidents that needed moderation. Open sign-ups are fine if you have some other way to filter users.
I saw a wave of the harassing spam they were getting right before they defederated. One was a meme about lynching drag performers. Another was a picture of an erection that was posted in what looked like every feminist and trans friendly space, asking if it was bigger than the ones owned by the denizens of the communities. I’m sure it was just a small fraction of what they were dealing with as more shitty little hatemongers find their way to Lemmy, but I happened to catch it by sorting by new at exactly the wrong time. I can’t blame the Beehaw mods for not wanting to deal with the psychological toll that comes with manually moderating that kind of content.
I saw dick-pic spam.
There’s a lot of words we can use, but its a lot faster to just say they got harassed by the whole slew of NSFW-spam, porn-spam, harassers and such.
Sure, but a lot of users here are minimizing how bad it was, so I wanted to be specific about how explicitly hateful it was.
Dislike the meme, because I fully believe the beehaw decisions have solid, purely technical, grounds.
The very existence of that community boils down to people screaming the word “Tankie” at one another while trying to reproduce the most cringe corners of old Reddit.
Beehaw mods are just another group of power tripping nerds common to the social media space. These technical issues are all outgrowths of their desperate need to control discourse.
I swear I’ve never heard “tankie” before a week ago and now I’m on Lemmy I read it 50 times a day.
Tankies are usually characterised by their willingness to defend the use of tanks to crush civilians who speak out against authoritarian communist governments.
I feel this should have been part of my beloved “Trotskyist insults” stamp set I was gifted many years ago.
I still don’t understand what it means. From the context, I assume it’s bad to be one, but I have no idea why.
Tankie is a term invented by anti Stalinist Marxists in Britain used against the people who followed the marxist-leninist line and supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary where the USSR send in tanks to violently crush reformist uprisings. It has since been used as a pejorative for Stalinists and soviet-apologists, mainly by other leftists.
Let’s be real, it’s mostly used as a pejorative for “leftist I don’t like” these days.
now, why is this phrase so common on lemmy all of a sudden?
Because the main developers of Lemmy are concerningly biased. Luckily the project is open source but unfortunately it does appear that the lead developers are into defending the crimes of the CCP mainly through moderation on their own platform (which of course is their right). They strongly dislike discussion of CCP crimes on their platform and ban users.
I unfortunately don’t have the links but there are 3 threads you can pull on to kind of paint a picture of what the lead devs opinions are.
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His moderation tendencies on lemmy.ml.
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His GitHub compendium on communism and Marxism and how they didn’t necessarily fail.
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A breakdown of everything on Mastodon by what appears to be a slighted user. This is the personal vendetta they are talking about in the most recent blog posting.
Ironically enough I kind of dismissed the twitter drama as drama until I read the most recent article the dev team posted and their denial caught my eye. Especially how they said it wasn’t worth addressing. Didn’t sit right with me and I saw some others feeling the same way posting about it.
People are also pointing out that prior to the influx of users from Reddit the Lemmy ecosystem was ‘red’ in a sense but it’s largely been suppressed by the sudden popularity.
Do I think any of this matters? Honestly, yes I do.
Only because, of course, the lead developers opinions matter and will influence the features the project will incorporate as time goes on. A recent example that comes to mind is the PolyMC controversy where the lead dev went rogue and denounced LGBT or something. The team all quit and ported it over to Prism Launcher.
Instances like that can happen and come up. You never know what might happen. Anyways it’s not affecting anything right this moment so it might be a sit and watch scenario.
Grab some popcorn I guess.
Oh and for anyone curious I think socialism is awesome and I live in Canada so I’m not some kind of capitalist romanticizer. I think a mix works best but ultimately capitalism will collapse under its own weight. Especially if left unregulated.
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I mean that’s literally what they say in their sign up form, but a bit more self congratulatory, so it’s not really a surprise is it? They don’t want to deal with randos and reserve the right to kick anybody out for what they consider “asshole” behavior.
I see little proof for that yet. They behave like a small forum which reached its capacity.
You know you really nailed it when you hit that equal up/down ratio!
thats great! people think differently.
I’m hoping they re-federate soon after their technical gripes are ironed out. Seems like a promising community, but only time will tell.
https://beehaw.org/post/594843 It seems like there is work on it, but the lemmy.world owner does not respond to beehaw admins
It seems like there is work on it, but the lemmy.world owner does not respond to beehaw admins
Maybe you should have read all of what you linked: https://beehaw.org/comment/298646
tldr: Beehaw admin sent Ruud a statement but didn’t ask any question or ask for comment. Ruud read and acknowledged the statement but didn’t reply because there was no question to reply to. They’re now in a chat room with some other instance admins.
IMO quite some trouble when the easy solution is to just not subscribe to communities you don’t like.
Thanks for the correction, i read the post when it was made and only re read the post itself when linking. The problem as far as i understand it wasnt with communities people didnt like, but with trolls and harassment that is hardly controlled with a no barrier signup process. As long as the mod tools are not good enough to deal with that, beehaw.org has every reason to deal with this in a way that compromises content wise.
Yeah, they basically make you write a cover letter. I don’t even write cover letters for jobs I want. Definitely not going to write one to be approved for an Internet forum.
all i had to do was write a sentence or two and i got approved instantly
What was the sentence
something like id like to join beehaw because it seems like a nice community and id like to be part of it
Carefully writing that down. You can delete your comment now. Thank you
if they want to hide in a lil hug box that is their perogative
This is hilarious!
Can someone explain fot new users what the hell is beehaw so we don’t subscribe to them.
They had some quality communites. Ah well, we can make them here with blackjack and hookers.
Most of them already have popular alternatives
what are the popular alternatives to blackjack and hookers? asking for a friend
beehaw initially seemed like a nice good natured well rounded place but they got controlling and weird very quickly. never even let me in, i typed pretty good faith answers and haven’t heard shit ofc
I’m surprised they didn’t just ask for more mod help.
Probably a lack of people with the same vision and trust as the admins
check out their modlog. they have way too many unnecesary bans or post removals. wasting energy instead of focusing on the real trolls.
How do I filter modlog to only show logs from given instance? I’ve entered modlog that is available at bottom of page on beehaw and also different instance and the modlog is quite similar with some beehaw entries not showing up on other and vice versa.
I assume the modlog is combined from all federated instances, so I can’t really tell what actions are made by beehaw unless it references community belonging to beehaw.
Beehaw was almost responsible for me not joining this service at all, got frustrated when I couldn’t log into my account a week after I made it and nearly gave up entirely.
Yup I had this experience too. I’ve read that their denial emails aren’t being sent out by their mail server, but it really felt like they just ghosted me.
Toxic positivity is absolutely a thing.
Yup!
God I know people like that, the most normal social behavior gets interpreted as hostility and is met with aggression.
I’m on the SDF instance. It’s a small instance that seems to Federate with all the big ones including Beehaw. It has manual approval but only asks one question and approval is within a day.
Also the host platform has been around since 1987.
SDF gang rise up. Love the historical aspect of the platform
There’s always a chance you might have unfortunately been overlooked from the sheer amount of applications the admins have to sort through daily. I had to resubmit my app twice to get through, same answers and all. Got approved in under 30 mins
Maybe they want to turn it into some kind of cult?
Just realized I can interact with deleted posts lol.
I wonder what it was…
I think it’s a healthy part of the growth of the Fediverse. Maybe it ends up being a good idea, maybe not. Hopefully everyone can keep an open mind and learn some lessons along the way both with successes and failures. Let’s be real, if this is what kills the Fediverse then the Fediverse was doomed from the start.
This is all early days and I’m just enjoying the ride. It’s really just refreshing that it’s not some VC backed mega corp making these decision.
Hilarious, I thought the same thing. Safe space locks doors. Ehh whatevs it’s how all this works anyway, right? Which is something I’m not totally sure I know anyway lol.
And this a prime example of why the multi-instance system is great. Don’t like one instance? Go to another one.
EDIT: I also wish to say that I feel both sides of the situation have merit. Yes, it sucks that we’ve been defederated, but in all fairness, there legitimately was an issue with abusive users causing havoc over on Beehaw.
Yeah I think Beehaw have a clear ethos and want to protect that. I think the misunderstanding is from the new people influxing into Lemmy/Kbin (me included) - they don’t have to be a part of the wider Fediverse. They’re big by the standards of Lemmy/Kbin when people arrived so people are suprised that they don’t seem to “want” a big influx - they were expecting them to embrace redditors and want to be the new reddit. They understandably want to be able to moderate their communities and that’s difficult with the current tools. They may also want to screen their users which may not be ultimately sustainable in a federate model.
Beehaw will continue and succeed in it’s aims but it’s probably not going to be a big player long term, but I don’t think it wants to be the mass choice. Lemmy.world and Fedia.io / kbin.social at the moment seem like more likely bets long term as they’re embracing the growth, and analogous communities to big familiar Reddit communities are being created which will be clear places to go for future influxes.
can anyone tell me what happened to the beehaw?What I only know about is that it’s about CCP.
beehaw doesn’t have moderators, only 4 admins. they have closed signups and try hard to curate a particular style of community. lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works have open signups. some of those users went on beehaw communities to troll, and the amount was too much for beehaw admins to manage in terms of moderation. so they defederated.
Why can’t they find mods? Lol
It’s not that they can’t, it’s that they don’t want to.
Which is fair enough. Beehaw got started as a side project to putter about with the tech. I respect knowing that you don’t want your instance to get too big and sticking to that.
They defederated us because we allowed open registration
…go on…? And…?
And because this instance had open registration, it quickly became one of the biggest instances. Trolls were using the open registration + federation to harass their community. Because there are a lack of mod tools and the fact they only have 4 mods, they couldn’t keep up. In order to keep the community they wanted in tact, they decided to temporarily defederate until they’re better equipped to handle it.
They had a safe space they wanted to keep. That’s 100% on them. Ain’t nothing really wrong with it.
It’s only a big deal right now because the user base is small and they were a top 5 instance. Give it a while and they’ll be nothing in the fediverse.
They say it’s temporary but it’s not. As things grow they will defederate more instances and eventually they’ll be a tiny slice. Again, that’s on them. They have a space they want and want to heavily curate. That’s the beauty of the fediverse.
temporarily defederate
Would you like to buy a bridge?
I love how folks on this thread are so sure beehaw’s lying about that - despite the supposed amenable chat they and sh.itjust.works admins had about the situation. You guys are reeeaaally butthurt about the defed even though it wasn’t personal
Not gonna happen.
I’ll bet you a sixpack, assuming you reciprocate.
I’ll take that bet. Too bad there’s no RemindMeBot. I would’ve set one for a year
One year sounds good.
I hope either one of will remember this June 17 2024. Send me a message.
I estimate a 6 pack to be $12.
It is possible to save posts and comments, you can then go to your profile and see them under «Saved».
On another note, I also do not understand why everyone thinks it’s a permanent decision when it has clearly been explained before why it was done and what will be done in the future. It is also quite weird how the users that are most mad about it are those that don’t even use beehaw.
That’s kind of an oversimplification. The de-federated because they only have four mods and didn’t have the ability to effectively moderate all the users from large instances with no vetting process.
on top of that, they were getting some pretty heinous abuse from a couple of users on the open-registration instances
They only have 4 admins for their server and the massive influx of people across the board, but mainly Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works being two of the biggest instances with open registration, was apparently causing them issues.
They have a very curated instance they’re wanting to have and that’s on them. While they’re in the top 5 for users currently, that probably won’t last. As more people join, they’ll end up joining instances that don’t ask for answers to question forms.
It’ll be fine. Beehaw will refederate or they’ll wither.
Fine in the long term, but a bit annoying in the next weeks. They had in my opinion already big gaming and tech community, with some interesting discussions, and now we are more fragmented, making the whole thing less attractive and straightforward for new users.
I heard their message boards were getting lots of death threat level nasty messages, the mods said it was too much to deal with case by case.
So begins the game of broken telephone.
Yeah, I heard that the main moderator of beehaw is creating all the accounts himself, and putting those on to defederate (/s people, /s, this is 100% satirical I repeat, this is 100% satirical)
Well I heard he eats puppies /s
I heard he was eaten by a puppy
He used to moderate the c/jailbait community
Some say the sick fuck showers naked
lemmies: laughs at beehaw defederating
also lemmies: “hey we should totally defederate from exploding-heads”
I think it’s a fair point. They won’t be able to remain federated to many instances if their point of contention is open-enrollment.
I understand needing the Lemmy moderation tools to improve and that it’s temporary, but the damage to their own communities and users may not be temporary.
Their users will turn inward and end up preferring their own communities—which is fine. However it also means that non-beehaw users will shy away from those communities in favour of others, lest their home site get de-federated at some point for the same reasons. These effects combined means slow-to-grow, low-visibility communities in the fediverse, and increases the chance that their communities may dwindle if others of the same subject become pre-eminent outside of Beehaw.
In short, while I understand their reasons, I think that it risks making Beehaw.org permanently insular and ultimately much more similar to a non-fediverse website.
I think that is currently already in the process of happening. The reactions to the announcement from Beehaw users can generally be split into
23 categories:-
Support, we should keep our communities insular
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Neutral, I support whatever the admins decide
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Opposition, I’m leaving to an instance that isn’t insular
EDIT: Added neutral, because on reflection there were quite a few posts like that
This means they are already self-selecting for insularity, which means the resulting userbase is very likely to want this “temporary” solution to become a permanent one.
This isn’t necessarily an issue: if the userbase is happy with their insular nature and are comfortable with it, and it’s clearly signposted on the sign-up, then after some network healing where we build communities separate from Beehaw everybody gets what they want
It’s also not an either or. You can want to be part of Beehaw to have a close-knit home base while also singing up for other instances to bop around on.
Sup. I’m doing that. It’s working pretty well for me. I recommend it to anyone who wants to participate in the communities on beehaw but also wants the very permissive pattern, particularly if you have a favorite community here or on lemmy.world. I see plenty of people who are upset that they really liked a community on beehaw and now because their instance is defederated they can’t go there, but consider that that community was the way that it was because of decisions made about moderation
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I think their problem is open enrollment in combination with lack of moderation and mod tools to handle that. Defederation is not permanent, as Lemmy implements better mod and admin tools instances which have defederated to mitigate spam or trolls can start opening up more again.
Exactly. The point of the fediverse is the federation. Without that, you have a simple online forum from the 2000s. Congratulations, your time machine worked
