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.
This whole trend of Beehaw picking and choosing who is valuable in their space, even before an infraction has been committed, is disturbing. I understand their moderation limitations, but it seems like their choice for exclusivity could easily be taken too far.
Right now I guess we just wait and see what happens, but my gut says this is a bad idea.
I understand blocking an instance like lemmygrad where the target audience of the server itself is an issue, but blocking large general-purpose instances seems like it’ll hurt the growth of the platform as a whole, which is critical at this point when people are moving away from Reddit. Luckily the post reads as if this is a temporary thing, but I almost wonder if the fediverse thing might not be for them if they want to close off their community to this extent.
I also don’t know what this means for moderation of pre-existing Beehaw posts - is it just kicked off to the admins of the blocked instances?
I agree, it’s really not great. Maybe a beehaw de-federation is in order, where we get as many instances to block them just like they blocked us. They want to lock out users from bigger communities like lemmy.world? We should show them that this way of doing things is undesirable for the rest of us and make their instance inviable for use with major instances outside of Beehaw.
what does this mean in practice for users of those instances and users of beehaw? im still new to this whole thing, but i can still comment and interact with beehaw and all from lemmy.world
No. The connection between Beehaw and lemmy.world has been severed on a technical level. That can’t communicate or share content directly with each other.
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So, as a lemmy.world user, am I now just unable to participate in something like [email protected] for example?
Not from lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works, no.
You can use an account on an instance that does federate with Beehaw. Or open a Beehaw account.
making restrictions already is only gonna drive people back to Reddit, and Lemmy as a whole is already confusing as-is and a majority of Redditors won’t want to jump ship.
Why do you place any value on that at all?
Not from lemmy.world
How am I able to see and comment on this post then? I’m a lemmy.world user on the Jerboa app.
This post that lives on Lemmy.world is just a copy of the original Beehaw post. When the two instances were federated, comments here on the Lemmy.world copy would be sent to the Beehaw instance to update the original with the new comments. Comments on the original post on Beehaw would be sent to other federated instances to be updated on copies on all the instances federated with Beehaw. That sharing of messages is no longer happening between lemmy.world and Beehaw (As of now, Lemmy.world will accept messages from Beehaw, but Beehaw won’t accept messages from or send messages to Lemmy.world.) So the lemmy.world copy still exists and can be commented on, but no new comments are being sent to or from Beehaw.
I’m also a lemmy.world user on Jerboa (I made my account two days ago lol) and I’m also very curious how this works. I’ve been really enjoying the chill vibe of beehaw but wanted to test out Lemmy on an open registration instance.
Damn, that sucks. Hoping that things settle soon and the admins reconsider. Much love from lemmy.world!
I’m kinda wondering if this will end up being the case with kbin as well? lots of redditors are coming here, albeit less than are going to lemmy I think?
some lemmy people I spoke with said that their stuff is basically all ex-redditors now. so it might just be like you said, which redditors go to one or the other.
I did see @alyaza say that kbin hasn’t been anywhere near as problematic. And you may be right about who chose to go where. It is interesting one causes more issues than the other.
I will say I have not really seen much issue inside of kbin, personally. The community I’ve seen so far has been pretty chill.
kbin is massively chill and I am LOVING it
this. I like the vibe here
Yeah there’s an obvious difference between lemmy and kbin at least in my kbin-user’s experience and perspective. here on kbin we’ve been isolated for the past few days so I think the vibe here has really been “we’re kbin, and this federation stuff comes second”. lemmy kinda just feels like chaos in comparison, and I think they’re much larger. a lot of the communities and posts I see now are lemmy and beehaw whereas the past few days it wasn’t really like that. I imagine when lemmy got their influx they just saw it as “fediverse” and went nuts.
The difference in ui and the way things are done, as well as where they were advertised I think also plays a part in the difference.
It’s odd seeing beehaw users oppose lemmy but are entirely chill with kbin, since to me it feels very similar. Maybe i just don’t get beehaw’s complaint with lemmy, or perhaps kbin is just small enough that our presence isn’t felt?
Just to clarify, Beehaw is lemmy: we’re a particular instance running the lemmy software. (Sorry I know that’s nitpicky.)
yeah I’m not really sure what the proper way to phrase it is. like it’s clear beehaw is kinda… separate, from lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, etc. same software but clearly a distinct community.
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