I hope this is a clear enough description of what I’m asking.
lemmy.world users can still make new posts in @beehaw.org communities, which are only hosted on lemmy.world and there is no indication in the UI that those communities are a ‘false’ version, only visible to other lemmy.world users
The posts made by lemmy.world users to @beehaw.org communities are not hosted on the ‘true’ beehaw instance. The ‘true’ community is moderated by beehaw mods. The ‘false’ community is moderated by who?
lemmy.world never had moderators for these communities because they were beehaw.org communities.
So who is moderating these posts?
If I had to report a user for breaking community rules, who receives that user report?
Examples of posts in beehaw communities by world users after defederation
https://lemmy.world/post/172609
https://lemmy.world/post/167045
https://lemmy.world/post/158352
First off, this is the wrong sub for this question. See the sidebar, but this is a kind of random discussion sub for lemmings, similar to /r/AskReddit/. The Lemmy or lemmysupport communities would be better locations, as would the meta community on
lemmy.world
… which is calledlemmyworld
(and unfortunately has lots of off-topic junk in it right now). But your question is an important one, so I’ll weigh in here.I’m not 100% certain, but I expect these zombie communities are unmoderated. The right thing to do would be for reports to go to instance-admins, but I’d be surprised if Lemmy covered this edge case correctly right now. I think there’s a decent chance you may have to at-mention or DM an instance admin to get posts/comments in these orphaned communities addressed, and also that admins on affected servers should consider purging them to address this issue of lack of moderation.
This is one more example of how this split increases moderation load network-wide, and how Beehaw is offloading the costs of their unsustainable moderation policies to others.
I’ve had some thoughts pop up when reading the post and your reply.
So beehaw said this may be temporary… But I can’t help to wonder what that means.
Let’s say lemmy.world closes registrations and beehaw refederates. Are they going to be flooded with all the posts that happened while we were defederated?
The amount of stuff suddenly appearing everywhere would be unmoderatable, and if I’m not wrong, it also kind of makes defederation permanent if it goes on for too long. Who would want to refederate instances and tsunami their own with things they don’t know about?My mistake, apologies. I saw this sub recommended to someone else in a thread over at Lemmy.world community discussing something tangentially related but I realise now I may have missed something important as to why it was recommended to them. I previously posted this question in a lemmy.world thread but people did not understand my question lol.
It’s a pretty bad oversight, and makes me think the best thing to do is temporary mutual defederation until it’s addressed which obviously isn’t ideal at all, but I do worry about the implications of so many reasonably sized communities being completely unmoderated on our end. Thank you for the advice tho, I’ll make sure to save your comment so I can refer back to it if this isn’t fixed!
A) wait, lemmy.world defederated from beehaw? When did that happen??? Is there drama going on that I’m OOTL on?
B) As I understand it, lemmy does not handle orphan communities in a sane manner yet. Thats because federation is naturally asynchronous- when you make a post from instance A into an instance B community, instance A lets you make the post “immediately” from your user perspective, and stores it locally. The actual post may not be sent over to instance B for quite a few minutes until the next scheduled check-in for new content. It’s held in a queue.
Now, As far as lemmy.world is concerned, beehaw is just “temporarily offline” because beehaw is simply ignoring to its requests to sync up. So it holds onto all these “waiting to sync” federated posts locally and never cleans them up. It doesn’t know that beehaw is giving it the cold shoulder. It has no moderators, and does not require them for the community, because it still thinks all valid moderators are on beehaw.
Likely, the lemmy backend is going to need some rewrites to make defederation less of “don’t talk to me shuts door” and more of “don’t talk to me, here’s why, please delete all my communities” just to maintain some semblance of network cohesion. Because these orphan posts across instances will grow to become a huge issue… especially once instances run through their natural life cycle and begin to shut down.
No real drama, beehaw just doesn’t have the moderation tools to handle the sudden large influx of users from both lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works (I can never remember where the periods go, sorry if it’s wrong!) in order to moderate their communities how they want to and was struggling. It’s hopefully a temporary measure until mod tools are strengthened but has shone a light on some of the other cracks in the system that require some attention too. From what I’ve read it was basically constantly fire fight issues with limited tools and people or use the nuke option which is unfortunate.
I’m thankful for everyone confirming my thought process, I wasnt sure if I was completely missing something important. It sucks that I seem to be correct, but it helps to know that I’m probably not imagining the issue lol
This Beehaw/Lemmy.World issue is seriously making me lose faith in Lemmy as a platform. I don’t see how Lemmy can grow when server admins have the ability to basically nuke other servers and ruin the experience for everyone on that server, without those users even realizing what’s going on. I don’t know what the solution is, but this seems like a major problem.
Answered here: https://wayfarershaven.eu/post/10130