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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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So what does that mean exactly in the context of Lemmy for Lemmy world any sh.it justworks and how is it different than someone who is part of a different instance?
Basically, our instances can no longer pull in posts from Beehaw, and Beehaw cannot pull from us. There is a wall between us.
If both a member of Beehaw and a member of lemmy.world are on a community on a third instance (like midwest.social), our comments and posts are
invisible to eachother, like the other isn’t thereare invisible to Beehaw users, but we will still be able to see theirs (as we have not defederated them).If both a member of Beehaw and a member of lemmy.world are on a community on a third instance (like midwest.social), our comments and posts are invisible to eachother, like the other isn’t there
Is that really how it works? It’s contrary to my understanding but I can’t find that covered in the documentation.
I assumed that the discussion on a post on a 3rd party server would be served by the 3rd party and I would still see comments from beehaw users on that posts.
Just double-checked what I wrote, yes you are absolutely right. Edited it to be clearer.
So they are basically doing the same as reddit, censorship and discrimination for their own interests.
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.
I bet the name sh.itjust.works attracts some users that are not serious about being good citizens of the fediverse. But I also bet that most of the users there are good ones. As always it just takes a minority of assholes to ruin something good.
Unfortunately this means those guys won. And they may move to another popular instance and keep on behaving like that.
it just takes a minority of assholes to ruin something good
And this is why active moderation is important. You need to get rid of the assholes to keep things good.
those guys won
It’s a bit premature to be using the past tense lol. I’d wager many, many Lemmy accounts that were made in response to the blackout will just as quickly go inactive once reddit is back to business as usual.
As the beehaw announcement goes out of its way to make clear: the decision is not meant to be permanent, and will be reassessed as things settle. “Things” being a sudden rush of redditors who mostly didn’t anticipate a Lemmy migration ahead of spez’s AMA (which is the same window that the beehaw mods were given to prepare).
This hardly feels like gossip, much less drama. This feels like four mods pausing to see what’s what as the next few days/weeks go by.
Down with shitheads, up with sh.it.heads.
This comment made me think earlier (way too hard on a day off, to boot) because I hadn’t associated any negative connotation with the instance name. I chose this instance because as a home automation hobbiest, I love when shit just works. I read @TheDude@sh.itjust.works efforts on setting up their gear/testing its capacities to see how said shit will work, and I like graphs and happy seals wanted to be part of that test so I joined 😂 Greetings from Philadelphia and thanks for having me!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
First time being told you’re horrible because you’re not like “them” or get behind “it”?
More confused than anything else
Well, how about this:
You’re dealing with people that left reddit because the moderation wasn’t strong enough. By default, “regular stuff” isn’t filtered enough for them. So when you people come here with your regular stuff and they don’t have the manpower to filter through it, they decided to shut the gates. For now.
To be honest, I’m glad we’re on a platform where the default is “I don’t want to hear that so I’ll ignore you” instead of “I don’t want to hear that so I’ll try to silence you”.
Fair enough. That’s a reasonable explanation.
The admins of beehaw are delusional if they think providing personal email addresses to private instances is a good thing imv. Let them have their silo, unintended consequences will happen.
Also passwords are hashed but don’t re-use any password at all on Lemmy.
All instances are private actors and should not be trusted as default
Email addresses are not private info. You don’t have to put your real name in them.
Yeah I know, still don’t want any spam though. My email could be sold to spammers.
I could have a specific email just for Lemmy but Reddit didn’t even require an email address so it’s I don’t see why I should with Lemmy
You do not have a dedicated spam email? There are also one-time-use emails.
Some instances don’t even require an email address (self promoting reddthat)
That’s what we are saying, the admins have the option to force email registration or not, sounds like Beehaw do force and now Beehaw are butthurt that other instances don’t force the same so have de-federated some large instances from them.
To be honest, I’m glad we’re on a platform where the default is “I don’t want to hear that so I’ll ignore you” instead of “I don’t want to hear that so I’ll try to silence you”.
Heard, that’s a great way to think about it
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.
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.
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
I hope this is the case, I would still like to be able to see their content, even if they can’t see ours.
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
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.
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?
