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ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works - Beehaw
beehaw.orghey 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
[https://beehaw.org/post/520044?scrollToComments=true] 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. 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.
I think this is going to produce some interesting results, which will likely help progress Lemmy as a whole.
One of the regular topics coming up is users not knowing which instance they should create a user on, and what the implications of being a user on a particular instance are. This change by the Beehaw is going to clarify some of the implications and help drive people towards one instance or another, or even to have multiple accounts on different instances.
I think this will increase the adoption of Beehaw for users that the Beehaw admins are looking for in their community, which benefits the Beehaw instance. Conversely, I think the more general communities on Beehaw that aren’t there specifically for the community Beehaw is trying to foster will likely migrate to the equivalent communities on other instances and settle there. While Beehaw was popular and federated it made sense to subscribe to [email protected], but now it’s defederated I’d expect an equivalent community on a more permissive and widely federated instance to gain traction.
Right now it feels pretty disruptive. Arguably this occurring now with a relatively small number of users (thousands rather than millions) affected is preferable and will help shake out these issues, which will make it smoother for future users.
It will help Lemmy become more resilient. The tooling to help manage an instance defederating is also likely to be useful for instances going offline, or otherwise disconnecting from the fediverse. Better that that tooling is in place early.
I disagree, lemmy is seeing a temporary boost from all of us reddit refugees. We need content and a welcoming community for everyone to stay. This sort of infighting and politicking is going to come across as toxic and exactly the sort of thing redditors wanted to get away from.
If it were done later when the fediverse is bigger and more stable with enough critical mass of content, separating will affect more users but it will be least disruptive to the fediverse as a whole.
I can see your point and do agree that it’s disruptive now. It also exacerbates the difficulty of learning a new platform. Despite that though I think the early adopters are best equipped to cope with that. They’re already dealing with rough tooling and little documentation, official or social.
In terms of it happening when Lemmy, or even the fediverse as a whole, is bigger, if there aren’t tools and practices in place to manage it I think the impact would be significantly more detrimental. Without it happening in ‘the early days’ those tools and practices are a lot less likely to be developed.
I think that idea is exactly what both Beehaw and lemmy.world are trying to do. I don’t know all the thinking of the instance admins, but from my observations I see Beehaw prioritising their community and lemmy.world prioritising federation and availability. I don’t see it as ‘infighting and politicking’, just co-existing view points for managing instances. To put it in terms of popular monolithic platforms, I’d imagine there would be a bit of a shakedown if 4chan, reddit, slashdot, digg, et al. started federating. I’ll not attempt to draw parallels between lemmy instances and other platforms, that’s above my pay grade :)
I imagine we’ll end up with a spectrum of instances with varying degrees of federation and permisiveness, and that the directory services that are popping up will continue to improve to help you find and instance that works for you.
I think one of the challenges with migration is that reddit doesn’t map one-to-one with Lemmy. With a monolithic platform, centralised admin can enforce the types of things I think your hoping for. On Lemmy I think inter-instance differences are inevitable, while on reddit the concepts didn’t exist for it to become possible. Working through how those are handled will result in Lemmy as a whole improving.
I’m pretty optimistic about it.
As a redditor it seems like scary infighting
As a lemmonereringer it seems intriguing, im interested where this goes and i will follow up on the development
As a drun,k im drunk👍
“subreddit drama” on steroids. The politics of federation might take substantial airtime in lemmy
Sounds like you had a fun evening!
deleted by creator
I know we can have multiple accounts (and I am sure apps will help the experience), but I almost signed up for Beehaw as it was big and chose here
I am glad I didn’t sign up and will probably unsubscribe to anything I was subbed to there as I can’t post, maybe I’ll signup so I can just in case there’s anything interesting…
I was thinking about the multiple accounts thing. Maybe the concept of an “instance” needs to be separate from the concept of an account? Like, it doesn’t matter what service you choose for your email account; you can email anyone from Gmail, and anyone can send email to you. The only real difference is that your email address end in “@gmail.com” instead of “@comcast.net”.
On Lemmy, though, the place you make your account matters a whole lot. It determines what content you’re allowed to see, and who you’re allowed to interact with. If the instance you’re on gets federated, you need to migrate to a different account on a different instance. That never happens with email!
A lot of users have been managing this by creating their own instance, with the sole purpose of hosting their account and nothing else. Maybe that’s what we need: a set of “instances” that only host accounts, and a set of “instances” that only host communities. You could then use that account to subscribe to communities from any instance. That way, Beehaw could block content from instances they don’t like, without cutting off all of the users who happened to choose the wrong place to sign up.
Actually, under that system, there wouldn’t be a need for instances to federate content with each other at all. Users could just subscribe to communities with their account, and then the users would be the ones in charge of what they see, instead of their instance choosing for them.
I think it’ll take a little while to settle down, but I’d expect the communities to congregate on more permissive, well federated servers. In the short term I’m doing similar to you what you proposed, e.g. having accounts on various servers, but I expect the need for this to go away as things settle down. I already focus on a couple of instances more than others.
I do think that less permissive instances will still thrive though, although maybe not so much for general content. That may change as more granular controls and better tools emerge so it’s less of an ‘all or nothing’ approach to federating.