Who else here is chilling on their own instance watching this shit unfold with some popcorn 😂
I think it’s easy to take this personally but I think it’s more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user’s bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.
I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit.
Agreed. They do deserve their own points if they want to be that type of community. I’d say for instance if places like AskHistorians arise within lemmy or kbin, federating with just those would be interesting.
There are always going to be more exclusive communities. Humans just work like that. I say we ride with it for now.
Federation should be a gradient. If they want to close themselves off why is it using ActivityPub to begin with?
I ate soup with a fork once. Was it the smartest choice…absolutely not. Did it work… sort of.
its _ federation._ Some communities only want certain people. Once mod tools are better we will see changes. Let it grow.
I think it’s also important to note, beehaw has the largest amount of blocked communities
Reading through the comments in their post I’m losing the little sympathy I was feeling. It looks like the moderation tool they are hoping for is one that allows their users to access other communities while preventing the other communities from accessing beehaw. That feels shortsighted and selfish, and I would think most communities on that end on the block would block them reciprocally.
It looks like the moderation tool they are hoping for is one that allows their users to access other communities while preventing the other communities from accessing beehaw.
Was this in the comments of the defederation post or one of the other ones? I’m just curious to read it myself.
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https://lemmy.one/comment/177082
~~https://beehaw.org/comment/177082~~
I believe this is the comment being referenced
Edit: They both link to the same comment, take your pickdeleted by creator
I think the comment they were referring to is this one: #264724
BTW FYI the two links you posted are not to the same comment. The second one is from a total different discussion too.
The comment id varies from instance to instance.
Jerboa doesn’t take me to the comment directly but I’m going to assume this is the one lol
It was part of the annoucement .
After reading many comments I think my ‘outrage’ came, as it often does, from misunderstanding. Also, because when singing up most people say don’t overthink it, it doesn’t matter much. But now I’m seeing that it does matter to sign up for an instance with like minded people. As I see more of what seems to be the drive behind beehaw, it doesn’t really resonate with what I want, but that doesn’t make it wrong. It is ok for that group of people. We just need to make sure that communities of general interest that were taking off there because they were one of the largest instances are also present in a more open and accessible place, so we are not restricted to collaborate.
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many of those are imported from the tier0 Fediblock list, which includes all the instances any decent human being would want to block as well. I don’t see myself wanting any content from pedo dot school or teenagegirls dot biz.
or youjo.love, for that matter
many of those are imported from the tier0 Fediblock list, which includes all the instances any decent human being would want to block as well. I don’t see myself wanting any content from pedo dot school or teenagegirls dot biz.
They are actively trying to be as clean and friendly as possible, and that’s admirable but the tools don’t exist for them to maintain that if they are fully federated. they are woefully undermoderated for how much traffic they are having to filter.
Once better mod tools arrive they may be able to re-open to other large instances.
Perhaps an option in the future would be for them to remain federated but somehow implement post/comment restrictions on outside instances to keep it under control.
But that is an issue too. Why would other instances allow them full access while being prevented from collaborating in theirs ?
That’s each instances choice to make I guess, and it’s part of the freedom of the platform.
beehaw would be within their rights to do it (effectively going read only to the outside, not currently possible but a requested feature is to have private or invite only communities), and if they are intending to be the clean family friendly option, it would be a valid choice to make if it were possible.
I’m not really keen on their reasons for defederating, but this makes no sense to me. What do I care if a beehaw user is posting good content on my community but I can’t go to their instance? It’s still more content and engagement for my community.
I see your point. I was seeing it from the perspective of discouraging stuff to be shared on other communities because it’s already in beehaw, but you’d need an account to participate there.
But I see what you say, allowing them to contribute to other instances isn’t bad even if they don’t allow those instances to contribute on theirs.
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problem is you don’t have to start slinging slurs to troll people. People can still be nuisances and say bigoted things.
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beehaw are trying to be a perfectly moderated and “high quality” community and they are struggling to keep up with it when federated to other large instances.
I think they might need to change their methods because it is inevitable that some crap is going to be going on in low effort posts and comments, but defederating one very large instance from other very large instances is against the whole idea the movement.
I posted this there, but since you can’t see it
“I wonder if the type of community you’re trying to build wouldn’t be easier with a more traditional forum software like discourse. The infrastructure and moderation tools there have had much longer to mature.”
I think they’ve picked the wrong tool for what they’re trying to do.
Yeah. In the explanation they say that four people are taking the load of moderation, that can’t scale. If the rest of the communities keep growing they may end up isolating themselves for not being able to adapt.
I honestly think it’s somewhat irresponsible to have allowed themselves to grow as they did with only four moderators. Other instances have closed registration to maintain healthy growth. That should’ve happened long before this point.
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Exactly. Moderation abilities are just as important as hardware requirements.
yea, four people is not enough for even the smallest community.
Glancing at my one-member Poetry community here:
C’mon, you what’ll you do if you get out of hand, need at least 7 to handle that
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They also spend more time chatting on discord rather than modding lol
It was inevitable, though. Hopefully we see instances segregate nicely into tiers of lawlessness rather than just chaos.
I can see why they need to do it, they apparently only have 4 main mods for the entire server. with the limited mod tools available at the moment that is completely impossible to manage.
I hope they can get past this hurdle.
I can see why they need to do it, they apparently only have 4 main mods for the entire server
Why would they think that would be enough to withstand the waves from reddit? That was just a disaster waiting to happen.
happened too fast for them I guess.
once better mod tools or possibly an invite only read-only sort of solution is available they would re-open to other large instances.
I honestly doubt they’ll open again, they’ll get so used to their safe-space that they won’t be able to handle all the shitposting.
And we know mod tools can only do so much, if they couldn’t handle it with not so many users, I don’t know what are they going to do later if more instances keep appearing and growing.
I’ve got to learn Rust like a madman so I can help implement mod tools. That’s honestly the main bottleneck alongside discoverability.
Elsewhere in the thread right now there’s an open troll. On Reddit you get silenced at -100 karma. What happens on Lemmy? Anything?
As far as I know there are no automod functions currently, so until a human mod manually deletes or bans that user, it will just stay there.
Tools will come, the code for the platform is fully open and the API well documented, so it wont be long before large communities can function fully federated with reasonable moderation.
It doesn’t help that notifications are pretty nonexistent at times. You have to actively go to an instance via browser, or open jerboa to find out anything is going on. Well, I haven’t found any other way to get mod notifications, and I’ve tried a couple of times.
So, for non admin mods to help out there, they’d have to commit to a higher degree of focus than what most people can offer.
I can completely understand why they did but it really sucks that it had to happen. Hopefully, as the Fediverse grows, better tools are made available so instances don’t need to defederate from each other.
With that said, I think it’s a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I also wasn’t aware that other instances vetted their users? This was the first one I picked. Is there a plan to address the issues beehaw brought up?
With that said, I think it’s a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I’ve been calling it a double-edged sword from the moment I knew that could happen in Mastodon and after I joined Lemmy, we see as normal to block lemmygrad from the beginning and that’s understandable, but if an owner goes block-happy they could leave a lot of people stranded and inside their echo-chamber.
They’d be losing everything then and would be forced to migrate to other instance or create their own which may be too much as time goes by and people post more and more.I said this from the beginning but until we get migration tools to carry our content with us to other instance, think of your account as disposable.
Yeah I think a migration tool would be very helpful. I basically just signed up for the first instance that looked good without doing much research.
Having to do so much research just to join an instance is one of the biggest problems of the fediverse.
I saw some advice saying “don’t overthink it, just choose one” and I’m glad I didn’t take it because it seems like it couldn’t be any further from the truth. Until migrating your account is an option, this just seems like a bunch of Reddits talking to each other, you can still lose everything if your local admin goes on a power trip.
Yes
Would be nice if there was a Link funciton. Not just on lemmy but on the fediverse as a whole. That way, you can create an account anywhere and “link” it to other instances so that everything is mirrored. That would mean that each time you post something it would have to travel toward all the instances
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The software right now is extremely lacking in many aspects that it’s hard to pin point which priority should be higher than other (specially since I ain’t helping to it), but yeah I assume there appeared so many bugs when the waves started that we can only be patient.
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So literally “Suffering from success”
If we look at a similar but much more mature tech, email accounts either require something traceable to meatspace or another email account to set up.
Maybe it won’t go that far, I don’t know. We’ll have to see how much fuckery the Fediverse attracts.
lots take issue w/ that due to the whole decentralized, free vibes thing, but I think people will largely not want illegal content so communities will probably take federation as a very serious thing as we grow.
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They made the users suffer for their unwillingness to cope with their situation.
Instead of planning ahead and only accepting a limited amount of users, which would have severed only a fraction of users from us, they decided to grow to become one of the biggest instances, and now took some interesting communities with them, along with cutting off their own users from communities here.
I hope their user base migrates to other, more open instances, and the communities lost will spring into existence elsewhere.
I specifically just deleted my beehaw account and created one here because of this… This move makes me reconsider this whole lemmy thing.
yeah, was starting to like it here, but honestly if any instance will just defederate the second something inconvenient happens… we won’t have a site with good content that will keep people around
My thoughts exactly
Yeah, me as well. Seems kbin has a way more open minded view on things. They don’t defederate from anyone, which suits me just fine. I wouldn’t like to defederated from anyone, including lemmygrad. There are some interesting reads over there (at least for me).
DUDE SAME The whole point was that we want a place that # ISNT CENSORED. Or getting banned because something I said offends you.
Like I’ve gotta learn all this shit and read a 600 page instruction manual about how to use lemmy, but I can’t call someone a faggot (Talking about when someone says some lame ass shit, not calling gay people faggots)
What? No, that was Voat. You know, the place all the insane racists went before it collapsed.
First person I’ve seen actually go negative on Lemmy, good reason too.
You might be part of the reason behind their defederation with your vocabulary.
Have you tried 4chan? Because I’m pretty sure you make a great chan stan and would love all the childish channing.
Also, maybe try updating your vocabulary? Learn more words so you don’t have to always sound like an angry, edgy, child.
Congratulations, you are the first Lemmy user I have recognized from earlier as an asshole. What’s with the shouting and the pointlessly provocative language? Do you feel an irresistible drive to get attention?
Now I have to decide if I want to actually use the
Block Userfeature.blocking and banning people for spamming unironically neo nazi and transphobic shit is understandable . but the problem with most mod,is that they ban people who dare to barely criticize them or their opinions . they take everything personally . i got perma ban from reddit because I told a mod he don’t understand irony and satire . there is also a double standard .if something has a lot of upvote they let it go, but the same copy paste comment with less upvote can result in ban. resulting in banning people who already agrees with them on 90% of their opinion .
Well this would be just a personal block on my part since I’m no mod. I’ve seen enough from this user that it’s clear my world would be a better place without their comments in it, but I haven’t clicked the button yet…
Talking about when someone says some lame ass shit
So you?
If you want to call people faggots for no reason like it’s 2003 just >>>/b/ dude, it didn’t go anywhere. They’ll probably reply to you with a bunch of (images of) dicks though. If it quacks like a duck…
I find it really frustrating to build up a feed of content, only to lose it when moderator fights begin. What servers are next? Which one do I join to get the most content?
I want this to succeed but I don’t know how I can recommend it to people today, since they’re going to ask the same questions.
Power tripping as always. Give mods a little power and this is what you get. What they want 24/7
Exactly! And the idea that I fully cannot see other servers, or never interact with them anymore feels like wasted time.
But isn’t that good? It means you have much more freedom now, you can make communities, post more stuff, don’t have to follow a non existant set of rules.
To an extend. It’s more concerning that I can build up my user, interacting with other communities, building my network and suddenly I loose all that because my server suddenly decides it no longer want to interact with other servers.
hate to say that’s on you, dude. You should look at how that instance works with others.
Apparently migration is in the works, so you should be able to keep your beehaw account.
Can’t predict the future. Can’t control where new communities end up growing organically.
Sure is on me for choosing poorly. However I’m happy to hear that migration is in the works.
Migration is in the works, but it’s not a priority.
That’s true but there are nuanced social consequences for the entire group because of the actions one or a few individuals. The moderation model of Lemmy will be different and needs to start at the home instance. Because all it takes is a few people to act up and suddenly your instance has no content.
But muh freedoms
This is surfacing a fundamental division between mindsets in federation: the people who say don’t worry about which instance you’re on are bought into the promise that federation can “just work” like email. But the reality is that if you care about moderation at all (like, even to the extent of being for or against having any of it) then sooner or later you’re going to have to make harder decisions about instances.
It’s pretty normal for long-term fediverse users to change instances several times over the course of however long this stuff has been around. It’s unclear to me whether any existing Lemmy instances would be a good fit for me in the long term TBH and I would expect that to be true for some time, as so many instances are still figuring things out internally.
Defederation decisions like beehaw made are extremely normal and rational. With their level of moderation staffing and for their user base, they determined it was unsustainable to remain federated with instances that were generating more moderation workload. If it wasn’t them today it would be another instance tomorrow; this will keep happening.
Also, I see a lot of folks saying this is lazy for beehaw, but it’s important to understand that from their perspective, this problem wouldn’t arise if moderators here were keeping a cleaner house and preventing bad actors from using the platform. (Not saying either take is entirely correct.)
In a sense, moderation best practices on the fediverse are inimically hostile to scaling the fediverse up to new users. (And if you ask folks with smaller but prosperous instances that have healthy internal vibes, they’ll probably tell you this is good.)
This is much more fraught on Lemmy than it is on Mastodon, because you’re building communities hosted on a particular instance and there’s not currently a way to move the community. So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Similarly, to avoid endless duplication of communities, folks have been encouraged to participate with existing communities instead of starting a new one on their own instance everytime. But anyone here who has gotten involved with communities on Beehaw will now no longer be able to do so unless they move to a different instance. (Which may be hard, as open instances that are easy to join are the ones that are harder for small instances to handle, which is what caused this in the first place.)
Some of those folks are going to create their own alternative communities on their servers, which to any third-party servers not in the loop on the defederation drama will be potentially confusing. This has the potential to create a cultural tend toward polarization of community norms between everything goes and what we see on Mastodon as content warning policing, but of which are, to me, undesirable.
The best case scenario is that the majority of large communities end up being hosted on instances that have sufficiently rigorous moderation standards and sufficiently robust moderation staff to not impose an unsustainable workload on smaller instances. Then as long as everyone who’s not a nazi federates with those instances, things should go smoothly…ish. But that’s hard both because “sufficiently rigorous” is different for everyone and because moderation labor doesn’t grow on trees.
The part where things get tricky is that beehaw currently has ~15 of the top 50 communities across the entire fediverse and has become the defacto discussion grounds for gaming/tech/news/etc.
One could argue this goes against the whole concept of decentralized communication in the first place, and this may be a position beehaw doesn’t want to be in.
Beehaw has every right to foster a tight-knit community that adheres to its desires.
But there also is a level of responsibility and custodianship over these large communities they foster for the betterment and adoption of the fediverse.
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as someone who just joined, and is still trying to understand “federated” can someone give me an ELI5 rundown of what this means? I thought it didn’t matter which instance you joined because they were all connected, does this mean that other instances can just… block an entire instance?
I’m just some dude observing this space and migrating from reddit - but I looked at Beehaw when all of this started and I immediately thought it was an idea begging to turn into the internet version of Animal Farm. If the goal is to moderate and ban based not on what is said, but on the interpretation of what someone thinks was said or implied…in a straight text based communication medium…?
That’s a problem waiting to happen.
If there are interesting things happening there - and I never tried to join so I couldn’t say - I think they may well become an echo chamber full of cliques.
I don’t know what this space will turn into, but I personally like the idea of a semi open ended reboot.
It’s a recurring fediverse issue - Mastodon has it too. Basically, there are levels of blocking at various points in the hierarchy and you block or get blocked to your tolerance zone. This means that certain norms get squashed(and there are some reasonable concerns about who this helps), but it also tends to self-moderate to the conversations people want to engage with. The “invasive free-speech” instances of Mastodon tend to end up isolated, but it can also be hard to get situated and find an instance and follows you’re happy with.
Something I’m looking forward to with the forum model being added to the mix is a greater ability to browse for organized discussions.
Correct me if I am wrong.
A “federation” is a form of state structure in which parts of a state are state entities with legally defined political autonomy within a federation.
Federation, in contrast to confederation, provides for a certain coordinating administration. That is, you still have no freedom here, and you don’t even know who pays the electric bill in your new entity.
I understand why they did it, four mods is not enough for the traffic. However, I think they could’ve anticipated this better than just removing one of the largest instances. Hire more mods. It seems beehaw has banned so much that I am honestly unsure why they want to be federated. I like the idea of beehaw, some things, like limited communities and no downvotes are really smart. But the closed community mindset may kill it.
They do want to refederate when they get more granular options, but the federation options for lemmy right now is basically federate or not, which is kind of sucky, also I don’t think reports bubble up to the origin server like they do on mastodon, I’m sure it will get there in time, but for now there isn’t that many.
It‘s the bubble concept I already curated for myself on Reddit by filtering out what feels like half the website. Except now I can sort of choose my pre-made bubble, which is more effort to be certain (have to research the admins of a chosen instance a bit and understand their rules and values), but I don‘t mind that.
eh I just read through the post over there, I suppose their concerns are somewhat valid, to a point, but there really isnt a “safe space” anywhere except between your ears.
really just reads like excuses to being lazy.
Totally unfiltered internet trash is just about as useful as being alone, though.
disagree - if there’s “trash” coming in then you know you’re not alone, just awash in detritus.
Either way you’re not usefully communicating, though.
You’ve got to strike a balance where you’re getting information just filtered enough you can usefully digest it, but no more.
i suppose that’s true - i guess the main concern that I have with the top-tier instances defederating is that each instance becomes its own insular echo chamber - lemmygrad is a good example of this.
That’s one of the main points of federation, if you as an admin don’t like an instance you block them, if as an user you don’t like the instance you’re in you go to another one.
There are some key features missing here, the ability to silence entire instances so you don’t have to defederate completely and account migration so you can just pick up your stuff and leave.We’ll see, I guess. It’s very early days. Reddit could be like that in places already. On the other hand, there were subs that were pretty open-ended, like r/askreddit (although I’m bummed they’re not blacking out).
I suspect users will flock to instances that are more trusted if given the choice, since nobody wants to be left out.
My problem with Beehaw in general is it reeks of overzealous and manipulative mods. The internet is full of awful people but to pretend you can make an island of purity where you get to decide what is pure is going to be a worse idea in the long run.
I find it ironic that they say fake niceness will only scare people off, but all the “ethos engineering” only promotes a culture of fake niceness. I don’t buy all this “walled utopia” idealism, especially since this place isn’t like Discord with private servers, but a public interconnected forum. Why choose to set up on the Fediverse if you’re not open to ”strangers” accessing your community? But oh well, I think they’ll probably defederate more and more over time (or switch to whitelist).
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Reminds me a bit of parents who want the benefit of just putting their kid on the internet so they don’t have to entertain the kid themselves but then try to censor everyone when the kid finds anything online they didn’t want the kid to see.
Yeah, somewhat agree (they only had 4 main mods, that’s rediculous) but they do raise a good point in the difficulty of maintaining a friendly and safe community with limited moderation possible.
What we need isn’t large instances splitting off and defederating, it’s better moderation tools and more volunteers.
I’m on a smaller instance and am still fully federated with all three instances involved, so it doesn’t affect me, but that also means if I chose to be a dick and spam/troll on beehaw communities they would have to moderate me manually, or defederate from my instance too.
I suspect this will be reversed when better moderation is possible, or perhaps they will eventually be able to block posts and comments from other instances without defederating entirely if they want to remain as clean and high quality as they are attempting to be.
Can’t bothered beehaw users just simply block the instances they don’t like by themselfes? Does this have to be instance-wide?
