Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
It’s important to note that the admins of beehaw are not happy about this solution, either. And they hope to refederate once they have better tools and enough mods / admins to deal with it.
They point wasn’t to shadowban, that was a side effect. The point was to protect their member–who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance–from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that. Nobody’s happy with the situation, but it’s the best they could do under the circumstances with the resources they have.
I also don’t think it’s wrong for instances to have their own strong rules and preferences. This is one of the GOOD things about the Fediverse. The software features and how people use lemmy will catch up eventually.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
That’s true for just the duplication problem, but the defederation / shadow banning issue is not one that reddit has and is pretty confusing and poor user experience for new users coming in.
This isn’t reddit 2.0. It’s a different platform with different mechanics that hasn’t had over a decade to mature.
Change is hard. People need to learn to adapt.
Right, but even non-reddit users would be confused by it. When everyone advertises lemmy as seamlessly integrating with all the different instances, it doesn’t matter what instance your account is on, this definitely is not that.
It’s a young platform experiencing unprecedented growth. There’s going to be growing pains where misunderstandings and misinformation are bound to happen. We need to correct the misinformation and set proper expectations.
The ability for a server admin to choose what servers they federate with is a core concept of the fediverse and needs to be properly communicated.
The idea behind federation is, that individuals host their own instance and connect (federate) with others individual’s instances.
But that’s not easy for less tech savvy people.
Except you’re not making a case for why they should rather than go to some other alternative once it pops up soon.
One of us is confused, I’m not sure which. I’m not “making a case” for anything. I stated a fact, “Lemmy != Reddit”. It’s a completely different platform, with different underlying technology, that can perform a similar task. Anyone who’s representing it as a 1:1 reddit clone that you can just hop to with no effort to learn how it works, is misleading others.
I’m not trying to win any arguments nor convince anyone to stay. If another alternative pops up, try it, if you like it use it. If you like lemmy use it. Hell, use them both or use neither. That’s the benefit of having choices.
Expectation management… people need to stop pitching this on Reddit as the new Reddit then.
Well, new Reddit might easily mean better but also diffderent Reddit. Also, I am not sure whether people actually call it a new Reddit. Most of the time I heard the destription was a Reddit alternative which by definition doesn’t imply that it’s identical or even better in all ways.
But… It is essentially identical in design to Reddit apart from the decentralised concept.
Which is a massive change that tbh I’m still not sold on.
Federation seems to cause more problems than it solves and it’s created so many fractured communities that it’s impossible to get involved in niche ones anymore.
It’s definitely more messy. I suppose the reason i left Reddit was that the corporate structure ended up compromising their ability to live up to the responsibility of running a community space. As running the community became increasingly subordinate to revenue the decisions of the corporate body became increasingly out of whack with the best interests of the community. The federated concept feels like a possible solution to that problem.
But… It is essentially identical in design to Reddit apart from the decentralised concept.
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I foresee a lot of issues with defederation and the proposed mod tools in the future, as well. They can refederate but it’s not a good look for the platform when the federation can be fractured so easily. We have not seen the last of this issue.
I also question what it’s going to look like when these moderation tools are implemented. Lemmy has more avenues for moderation/admin abuse than Reddit, and less recourse for users. There are a lot of concerns here that just seem to be swept under the rug under the pretence that “you can always go to another instance”.
Ultimately it’s not an issue with the function of the fediverse, but with the moderation philosophy of the people running these instances. Particularly when it comes to the viability of voting. That’s a huge opportunity for suppression that I don’t trust certain admins not to abuse.
How does Lemmy have more avenues for admin abuse than Reddit? On either platform, the admins can technically do whatever they want. (Including editing users posts, spez). Lemmy makes it easier to just go somewhere else. At the end of the day that is all you can do.
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That was just a typo. Beehaw has advertised itself as being a largely positive, safe online space. People who sign up for it would generally be considered to want that same ethos.
It’s not ideal at the moment but until the moderation tools improve it’s the best way forward if they want to stick to their ethos. I enjoy Beehaw and the admin do seem like they want to refererate when it’s possible to.
I’m on both Beehaw and Lemmy.world so I between the two I can interact with everything I would want to see.
Yeah I too just have accounts on multiple instances. At this point I’m not sure there’s any way around needing multiple accounts ATM. Maybe at some point you won’t want/need them, but right now, IMHO you basically do.
I think they just dropped the s off members.
I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be “members” and missing the s is a typo.
Wow so much misinformed hostility against Beehaw here. The mod tools for Lemmy are currently limited and they just want to protect their community from trolls and spam. There’s no conspiracy here to break federation.
Beehaw is some pseudo moral purity echo chamber. They consider anyone with a contrary opinion a troll. People create these “safe spaces” under the guise of protecting minority groups, but fuck… I’m a minority, and I knew immediately I wasn’t going to be welcome there.
People are free to judge it as they please.
–edit–
Why aren’t other instances having this problem? Like if trolls and spam are such an issue, why do I only see relevant on topic comments in other instances?
The issue isn’t trolls, it’s political dissent. And if you care about the truth, if you care about having the ability to talk about and express your ideas freely to other people, to have uncomfortable discussions with people you disagree with, to be exposed to new ideas, and fuck… to possibly even change your mind, you shouldn’t support beehaw.
If you genuinely want that type of environment, go for it, but that place should be called out for what it is.
This type of political authoritianism is why I left Reddit. It kills discussion, and I’m here for critical discussion.
Why would you not be welcome? Is it for your political opinions? Even if it were, I don’t think they would personally shun you unless it entails attacking minorities.
That aside, and having said that of course it is everyone’s perrogative to judge this behavior, I personally feel it is an exaggeration. Not every instance is about free speech nor should they be, at the end of the day the fediverse is about creating communities, one is able and should shape them into what their vision of that is. This is not authoritarianism, in this case they said it is due to their inability to moderate.
Even if it weren’t for that, it is good that communities don’t federate with every instance, aa I said, not everyone is about free speech and changing opinions some are here to have a good time and for that adequate protection is necessary.
I myself prefer deciding myself when to block other instances, so I joined one that let’s users decide. But if other instances decided to block us I would understand and either move on or join another instance to interact with them without thinking much about it (having multiple accounts is kind of easy on the apps,)
I think I’m kind of used from servers blocking one another from my time on mastodon and I’ve seen the necessity of the practice, for example an anime focused group blocking bot instances, brigading, alt right groups, etc.
Eh, there were a few posts about this on lemmy.world when it happened. People went through beehaw’s modlog and could only find a handful of actions taken against both communities.
Seems they just want to have their own little bubble.
True, but unsubbed from them when it happened because I don’t want to see communities I can’t interact with.
Why add to the problem and have frustration with wanting to discuss something you are blocked from?
They have every right to protect themselves against spam. But that said, ever since they defederated, their activity and user numbers are down.
Agree that they have every right to handle their instance however they want. I also have the right to not interact with them while they are blocking the instance I call home.
Good. Serves 'em right.
Also - fwiw - they are likely to refederate in the future. I subscribe to beehaw communities, cuz we can still see them, just can’t talk to them.
For instances that are mostly for discussion, its pretty pointless to stay subscribed.
Unless you’re ok lurking and just reading. I used to rarely contribute to ask reddit, but I would read a ton of those threads
You can still communicate with other people from your own instance.
I guess we will just have to take their word on that refederation thing
As a member of Beehaw I haven’t seen any reason not to trust them so far. They’ve been transparent about why it was done and they’ve spoken with other instance admins.
Think we have to be conscious that this is all still at an early stage and generally it’s wise to give people the benefit of the doubt at first. I get the cynicism but this isn’t a privatised space- people across lemmy have been constructive and open so far, so maybe give them a chance?
Both teams of admins have been openly posting about the discissions they’ve had with each other too. There isnt any hostility or underlying motives behind the situation at all. They are genuinely open and honest about things and definitely looking to refederate once it makes sense again to do so.
It might seem like there is some drama here but there really isn’t any at all.
They’ve already been talking to the admins of those instances, they did it because there weren’t better options like in Mastodon, remember that Lemmy is still Alpha software
Yeah I don’t see any issue with having conversations with each other even if the beehaw folks never see it
is there a list of beehaw community? how do I know which community is from beehaw?
this is a bit confusing but I will prevail
The community name will be !something@beehaw
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I disagree with this. A more nuanced take is that you should consider any beehaw communities read only unless refederation happens. The defederation was not out of ill will, it was about self preservation in a growing ecosystem and the reasons were clearly communicated and a path to refederation was left open. Read only posts are still valuable, and even though there is a more complex mechanism at play than true “read only” understanding that you can view is better than just blocking them in reverse. We are all friends here, and I think in the long run refederation will happen as this platform matures.
I’m basically a read only user anyway so hah!
I’m starting to realize that maybe I should learn to lurk. If I lurked in reddit I would have had a better experience.
Lurking with occasional comments in areas that interest you is best, I find. Oh and ignoring anyone who comes off as a troll or clown
Ignoring anything so controversial that people are at each other’s throats also helps. Although a healthy bit of disagreement is always fine.
Yep I’m all for some healthy back and forth, but once people start frothing at the mouth, I’m out
Yeah I would agree with this. It’s good to know for anyone new coming in but should be taken in good faith unless and until a reason crops up to change that. Not seen anything like that so far.
It would be nice if Lemmy let you know if you were browsing a thread from a defederated instance. Like a flair in the title or something, So you can read but you know your comment will only be seen by users on your instance.
Can we actually see the posts from people at Beehaw?
I was subbed to some communities from before defederation. I also have a accounts at a few instances for discovery.
@[email protected] , you should add a link to the announcement which explains why Beehaw defederated since this looks to be the top question many are asking.
Is there any reason for them defederating?
Beehaw.org is a highly maintained instance with careful moderation and rules for their instance and communities.
The explosion of new users this month has overwhelmed their moderation team with having to keep up with now moderating new huge user bases from large instances like sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world. These instances in particular it seems had lots of bad actors causing issues in their communities.
There are plans for them to re-federate at some point with the advent of new modding tools and updates to Lemmy
That honestly does not sound like the worst way to curb the increase in traffic. It’s understandable for communities to “get their house in order”.
But it does put a damper on the growth of every instance. The second people hear one of the biggest instances has cut off from the other biggest instances, they go “this fediverse thing is just too complicated!” and go to one of the centralized replacements.
“The growth” of the fediverse in general or of any platform in it is not responsibility of one server. The only thing Beehaw admins are responsible for is Beehaw.
If you want Lemmy to grow create your own communities and threads, participate in other people’s communities and posts, etc.
there are more than 1000 Lemmy servers, many of whom are open to community creation (something that Beehaw never has been)
Go create content on Lemmy if you want it to grow.
BTW, “growth” is not necessarily a good thing on the fediverse. Growing too much can be the death of a server.
I don’t mean to the growth of the fediverse is their responsibility, but I feel it is a problem that will affect them along with everyone else. Trolls are an existential threat to a safe space community, but lack of users is too.
You said yourself that Beehaw is one of the largest communities. They aren’t struggling for users, despite stricter rules and de-federation. If you actually read the announcement threads about the de-federation, Beehaw users love it and are very supportive of the decision. The outrage seems to be entirely generated by people who aren’t members of that community, so who cares? If you’re that unhappy make your own community (or cry) but don’t pretend it’s the responsibility of Beehaw to pander to non-members.
And to the overall growth concerns, again - who cares? Lemmy doesn’t have to be a 1:1 reddit replacement. I’d say many of us actually consider it’s relatively low user count as a positive.
You said yourself that Beehaw is one of the largest communities. They aren’t struggling for users, despite stricter rules and de-federation.
The pond is very small; prior to last month it was a puddle. That bar isn’t exactly high. Beehaw definitely aren’t seeing the growth that .world is today (there’s been a 40% increase in users here today alone), and I don’t doubt a large portion of that is that fewer people are directing users their way due to the defederation.
Beehaw users love it and are very supportive of the decision. The outrage seems to be entirely generated by people who aren’t members of that community
I’m not sure we are reading the same Beehaw defederation post. The top comments on the post that got linked earlier in this thread are all native Beehaw accounts either expressing frustration or saying they will leave for other instances. Judging by the replies they aren’t in the majority, but it is still a large portion of them.EDIT: my understanding of the Lemmy UI was flawed and I was wrong. The above commenter is correct here.
but don’t pretend it’s the responsibility of Beehaw to pander to non-members.
I’m not pretending its their responsibility. Its not. They don’t owe anyone anything. I can still call them out for what I perceive as shooting themselves in the foot. Explain their motivations all you want, I understand what the Beehaw admins are trying to say, but I disagree with them and personally think this will have a longer-term negative effect on their platform than the trolls will.
The issue is the the growth could literally kill the underlying servers. Imagine running an instance on a raspberry pi and all the sudden see a hundred thousand users start hitting your server.
If that was Beehaw’s issue, I’d be more sympathetic, but it isn’t. They are using it as an incredibly crude moderation tool, not because of some technical limitation.
They have defederated as a moderation step, not as a technical step. Large instances with open registrations were the source of several trolls that would spew hate, get banned and then simply re-register.
There is no moderation tool to deal with that aside from limiting sign-ups, which the instances in question were unwilling to do (which I get, because manual approval creates a huge workload).
In order to keep their community as safe as possible, Beehaw defederated, because they prioritise community safety over community reach.
That’s the point! That’s the whole point! There are no other tools built yet It IS an incredibly crude moderation tool, because the alternatives are being worked on as we speak
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The most trolls came from those two instances since they have no criteria to joining and they have so many users, and beehaw prides itself on being a nice, safe space. Lemmy currently doesn’t have the moderating tools to empower them to take care of all the new, toxic redditors, but they said they’re willing to federate with them when it does, which I’m sure it will eventually.
Read for yourself: https://beehaw.org/post/615042
The post also contains links to updates on the defederation.
I’m already starting to get pretty tired of people in the fediverse saying shit like this:
What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.
A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)
A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)
Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.
Having “multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse, if you want it” is the most nightmare user experience sentence I can possibly imagine.
A user does not want multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse with it being unclear when their comments will be shadow banned and not. They want to be able to see a post and go in and comment on it.
Federation is not a feature, it’s an implementation detail.
Federation is a feature. If you want to spin up a network of Lemmy instances between universities and ONLY federate with other universities, you could!
Want to spin up a private instance for you and your friends and not federate with anyone? You can do that too!
To me one of the big selling points of federated services is you don’t have to be part of the same giant bucket as every other shithead. If you want, you can pick and choose who you federate with.
Beehaw never tried to promote itself as a default instance. It was a toy hobby project started by four friends that through a fluke of where it was listed, had an enormous, unexpected growth spurt.
It’s still those four people’s server though, and it’s totally their prerogative in how they run it. We aren’t entitled to it’s content, and users don’t have to stick around if they don’t like the way it’s being run.
The fedeverse gives you choice. That means there will be some servers whose choices you don’t agree with.
I’m sorry, but no. The point of the fediverse is not to spin up niche communities, since we already have forums. You want to be part of a niche small forum, go spin up your own bb instance and run a niche small forum.
The point of the fediverse is to recreate the global social networks that are twitter / Reddit / etc, but to do so using open source servers that are decentralized and anyone can host.
Again, federation is not a user facing feature, it’s an architecture / implementation detail. Fediverse enthusiasts are like train enthusiasts who love every detail of how they’re built and their history and how much philosophically better they are than cars, but none of that matters and train networks will fail if they don’t provide quick and convenient transportation to their users.
If that were true, then the software wouldn’t have the ability to defederate built directly into it in the admin panel. You could write software in a way where defederating from a specific instance is hard to do.
IMO the point of any open source software is the noone really has ownership over what “the point” of it is. Anyone can take that software and use it how they see fit.
If that were true, then the software wouldn’t have the ability to defederate built directly into it in the admin panel.
A setting in an admin panel is not a user facing feature.
IMO the point of any open source software is the noone really has ownership over what “the point” of it is. Anyone can take that software and use it how they see fit.
In broad strokes yes, but in more specific and relevant strokes, the point of social networking software is for users to use it to engage with each other, not concern themselves with how it’s servers are administrated.
Admins are users too from a developer’s point of view.
Beehaw never tried to promote itself as a default instance. It was a toy hobby project started by four friends that through a fluke of where it was listed, had an enormous, unexpected growth spurt.
This is my read on the situation, but my view is different - if BeeHaw want to have what is functionally just a private Reddit-like forum, let them. But we should stop acting like BeeHaw is a part of the Fediverse with the same goals as Lemmy-at-large.
Of course, lemmygrad.ml is my home instance and I’m pretty sure BeeHaw has never federated with us so I’m not really missing anything.
Most of the complaints seem to come from people who assumed BeeHaw was just like any other Lemmy instance and have sort of made it, or a community on it, their home; or tried to join and almost bounced off Lemmy because they assumed BeeHaw was just what Lemmy was like.
I think the best move going forward would be to either de-list BeeHaw from Lemmy directories or make sure it is properly signposted what kind of server it is. I think this will all naturally become less of an issue once big, generic instances like Lemmy.world blow up and become the defaults, and traffic to BeeHaw slows down.
User experience is not the primary motivator for the development of the Fediverse. The features you dislike are the core features of the Fediverse and are the main reasons it exists.
Software exist to solve a user’s problem. All software’s primary motivator should be user experience.
It’s quite frankly asinine to spend your time building a social network that user’s don’t want to use (see: Reddit’s official app / new site).
Ignoring psychology, network effects, and how social networks work while instead trying to build one based on naiive dogma is doomed to failure.
It may be the point, but it makes the UX terrible. Lemmy is really struggling from a UX perspective, enough to make me question if it’s worth sticking with.
The new user experience is pretty terrible because 90%+ have no interest in trying to figure of “federation”, they just want shit that works.
Progress? Either that or their site got overloaded.
It’s working for me, but quoted below:
Regarding Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, this post goes into detail on the why and the philosophy behind that decision. Additionally, there is an update specific to sh.itjust.works here.
For now, let’s talk about what federation is and what defederation means for members of Beehaw or the above two communities interacting with each other, as well as the broader fediverse.
Federation is not something new on the internet. Most users use federated services every day (for instance, the url used to access instances uses a federated service known as DNS, and email is another system that functions through federation.) Just like those services, you elect to use a service provider that allows you to communicate with the rest of the world. That service provider is your window to work with others.
When you federate, you mutually agree to share your content. This means that posting something to a site can be seen by another and all comments are shared. Even users from other sites can post to your site.
Now when you defederate, this results in content to be no longer shared. It didn’t reverse any previous sharing or posts, it just stops the information from flowing with the selected instance. This only impacts the site’s that are called out.
What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.
A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)
A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)
Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.On that last point, another consideration at the individual level is - what do you want out of Lemmy? Do you want to find and connect with like-minded people, share information, and connect at a social and community level? Do you want to casually browse content and not really interact with anyone? These questions and the questions that they lead to are critical. There is no direct benefit to being on the biggest instance. In fact, as we all deal with this mass influx, figure out what that means for our own instances and interactions with others, I would argue that a smaller instance is actually much better suited for those who just want to casually browse everything.
Lastly, and tangential, another concern I have seen related to this conversation is people feeling afraid of being locked out of the content and conversation from the “main” communities around big topics starting to form across the Lemmiverse (think memes, gaming, tech, politics, news, etc.) Over time, certain communities will certainly become a default for some people just given the community size (there will always be a biggest or most active - it’s just a numbers game.) This, again though, all comes down to personal preference and what each individual is looking to get from their Lemmy experience. While there may, eventually, be a “main” sub for <topic xyz> (again, by the numbers), there will also always be quite a few other options for targeted discussions on <topic xyz>, within different communities, on different instances, each with their own culture and vibe. This can certainly feel overwhelming and daunting (and at the moment, honestly it is.) Reddit and other non-federated platforms provided the illusion of choice, but this is what actual choice looks and feels like.
[edit: grammar and spelling]
They want an echo chamber
I thought it was because they lacked the ability to effectively moderate.
That’s correct.
Moderator tools on Lemmy are still super, super basic when compared to Reddit’s. There’s a fair bit of work to be done yet.
To some people having any moderation beyond “just block the trolls yourself lmao” means creating an echo chamber.
Which effectively creates an echo chamber, be it good or bad
If the echo chamber I’m a part of prevents nazi and fascist ideology from becoming normal than I’m all for it.
Excuse me if you misunderstood my initial comment but it doesn’t argue against your statement at all. Again, a good or a bad one, an echo chamber is an echo chamber
That is the direct reason, yes, but the larger problem is that without effective moderation they are unable to curate the type of community they want. “Safe space” is a loaded term, but if you actually read Beehaw’s documents (particularly the ‘spirit of the rules’ one) it is quite clear that they are attempting to create an online community where people feel safe and can be themselves free from attack and/or ridicule. The de-federation is because they are unable to deliver on this “safe space” promise at the moment. In my opinion that’s absolutely fine and they should be praised for taking quick and decisive action to protect their community. It doesn’t need to be some controversial thing that people attempt PR spin over. Just call it what it is. If people have a problem with it, unlucky.
If they wanted an echo chamber they would have defederated from all other instances.
I’m sure they have a reason,whether it’s the correct decision is another matter.
To be fair, they are pretty highly defederated compared to most instances.
it’s just because the mod tools aren’t where they need to be yet and beehaw does a lot of work to protect minorities. the mods weren’t really happy with having to defederate and they plan on refederating once the tools are better or we get settled in
Oh, gardens can have diversity without being an echo chamber. As they said they don’t see another way to stop those people who like to shit in carefully created gardens.
Nobody likes shit in their garden.
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And this is exactly why they have to defederate. People like you exists.
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…but he has 62 downvotes?
He can’t see them
Isn’t that that nature of instances and communities anyway? Not that I agree with their choice. Thumbs and communities (as a result) establish narratives, and those who oppose the narrative eventually leave or are forced out.
I mean—maybe? That wouldn’t necessarily be malicious, but I think it’s fair and appropriate to apply a healthy amount of skepticism and suspicion to their purported goals and reasoning. Beehaw is a self-proclaimed “safe space”, and unfortunately that term has become a kind of dog whistle for militant identity politics.
Particularly in instances, like this one, when thinly veiled patronizing is wielded to preemptively paint a large group of strangers with a very broad brush in the purported aim of protecting marginalized persons from “malicious” outsiders, my cynicism radar tends to beep very loudly. It may well in fact be true that the current suite of mod tools makes beehaw’s managers powerless against an overwhelming tide of new traffic, but that wouldn’t automatically rule out competitive motives.
Federated or not, Lemmy represents an opportunity for wealth for whoever is best positioned if it ends up being a successor to Reddit, and what we’re going to see is a round of jockeying and vying for position in the coming (ongoing) chaos. I’ll admit that like many of us I’m very new to this platform, but the fact that defederation is possible at all leads me to believe that less scrupulous individuals in positions of ownership could with only small effort leverage it to enlarge their influence at the expense of competing servers.
Maybe I’m dead wrong on a technical level; maybe I’m full of shit–I’ll admit I basically don’t know what I’m talking about except in the broadest possible terms, so somebody please correct me if I’m wrong–but I wonder if this isn’t so much about creating an echo chamber as incentivizing people who identify with beehaw’s stated ideology to come under its umbrella (with supposed protections for hate speech), and defederation is just a way to force people to make the same kind of unhappy, unnecessary choices many of us just made with Reddit.
EDIT: I really can’t thank y’all enough for this. It feels like I’m right back on Reddit. From the accusations that I must be a secret conservative because I dared to question motives to the folks unable to actually engage in discourse without manufactured disdain, it’s like nothing has changed at all.
Maybe beehaw doesn’t have an axe to grind, but somebody sure does.
My god, this post was unnecessarily long. I think they just don’t weirdos posting dick pics and bombarding it with questionable content. Not everything is a culture war.
I’m voting for full of shit based on the dotted line you drew between any safe space and militantism.
Okay. To be clear, I wouldn’t automatically assume anybody who wants to be free from hate speech has bad intentions, but I also think it’s fair to be critical of any effort to stifle dissenting opinion–even uncomfortable opinion–with the justification that the censorship is to a third party’s benefit, and it’s immaterial whether the third party is children, a historically disadvantaged group, or any other class. That is, I don’t say all this to accuse beehaw of ulterior motives–but I also wouldn’t put it past anybody, and skepticism is appropriate (like always). More and more frequently, “safe space” really just means: We want an echo chamber, but it’s okay because we know best. That’s a red flag.
When it comes to racism, sexism, and transphobia, the “dissenting opinions” are things like “you do not exist” and “you are sub human” and “you do not deserve rights.”
You’re fooling yourself if you think that not tolerating hate == stifling dissenting opinion. How should one stand up for human rights? Moderately? Or militantly?
Sounds like you’ve bought the old conservative line of bullshit on all this. “Oh they don’t permit sexism? We should be highly skeptical of this!! What about freedom of speech??”
Le sigh
The problem with defederation is the same problem with the position you’re taking, that it conflates all opinion with whatever worst thing you can imagine, enabling you to insist that because some people are awful, everyone who doesn’t agree with the proposition is (or in beehaw’s case, everyone who doesn’t join their walled garden). This isn’t a case of “they don’t permit sexism.” They didn’t permit sexism when they were still federated. Defederation is an extra step–they want you to use their server or otherwise not participate in their communities at all, and the explanation for why is that the people on lemmy.world are sexist. Maybe they’re authentically overwhelmed, and it’s certainly their prerogative, but one would be wise to examine their stated basis more critically, because heavy handed owners of platform infrastructure are why Lemmy is in this position in the first place.
Now you’re just not reading. Look at this thread. It’s been clearly shown and stated publicly that they are simply overwhelmed by the explosive growth coming at them from instances like lemmy.world that have added millions of members overnight. They have a more intentionally managed community with high standards and hands on moderators and they cannot right now handle the sudden explosive volume. They are trying to scale up and their desire and intention is to refederate. Meanwhile you have spun up all kinds of tales in your head about how they want to control speech or ban it because of their militant identity politics. You’re making all of that up, when the actual explanations are right there in public for you to read. Try gathering more information and forming fewer judgments based on your internal biases.
I simply adore it when the right tries to use the vocabulary of the left and only outs itself!
Newbie here. Is there an easy way to identify a beehaw community? I’ve been hitting the subscribe button left and right to build up my profile feed and I’m just winging it here. thanx!
Disclaimer: pretty new to Lemmy a federation (older than this account though).
From what I gather, defederation is supposed to be a function of this whole system, but intended to cut off whole instances that refuse to moderate or are active cesspools. In saying that, I don’t understand Beehaw cutting off two of the other biggest instances. I know they have a weird mentality over there of no downvotes and saw some odd conversations condemning someone’s political views while admitting to not know the person at all (dafuq?).
It seems to me it would make more sense to block a single community rather than the whole instance.
Maybe they want a walled garden, but as new people come in and want as much content as possible to show that this is a better venue than Reddit, to me they give off the wrong message.
Am I mistaken somehow? Anyone able to enlighten me?
I recommend reading Beehaw’s statement: https://beehaw.org/comment/263590
As it is just text on a screen, I think there are more and less generous ways to read the post. But I think a lack of scalable mod tools (to combat an internet-sized influx of “bad actors”) is a reasonable (and hopefully temporary) rationale for defederation.
Having read this, I get what they’re going for, but also question the venue a bit.
With Lemmy being about federation, it sounds like they want to have a de federated mini Lemmy to themselves where they can decide who is allowed in or not. Not that that is a bad thing, if there’s a demand for it, but I think it’s different than what every other instance is about and maybe would be better as something like a Discord server (or FOSS alternative).
Again just my 2c, I just know I’m looking for a better quality alternative to Reddit, and an isolated instance isn’t my cup of tea.
Eh, I have accounts on both instances. I’ve appreciated the active moderation on some Beehaw communities - I’d rather discuss LGBTQ issues on Beehaw than other instances, for example. But I also like to see more content elsewhere, so I’ve got my Lemmy.world account too. It’s pretty easy to account hop when using an app. It’s reminds me of being a member of multiple hobbyist forums, in a way.
I’m still looking for an app that lets me browse using multiple accounts at once. I’d like to have a feed from Beehaw and Lemmy.World, for example. Defederation won’t be a problem if I opt in to moving in and out of their walled garden
You can do dat with liftoff for lemmy. They have and everything “All” Section where all of your logged in instance in the app is combined into one feed.
You can still subscribe to stuff on Beehaw from elsewhere it’s just interaction with it is turned off for now. It would be nice if an app had a selector for what account to post/vote as on the fly though.
So the question is it turned off for the blocked instances or is it just not visible to Beehaw. If I make a post from Sh.itjustworks, can someone from Lemmyworld see it? Or can no one see it?
As far as I understand, Sh.itjustworks and Lemmy.World are communicating like normal right now. So users should be able to post to communities in each of those instances, comment, etc. unless that user is using a Beehaw login.
Doing that on Jerboa right now. It’s great!
I’d rather discuss LGBTQ issues on Beehaw
Sooo… I’m nonbinary… and I got banned from beehaw for talking about my ex pushing their daughter into LGBTQ.
So who gets to decide what issues are acceptable to talk about?
I can’t speak to your personal experience in getting banned, but judging from your short comment history so far I wouldn’t want you on my instance, either.
Yet here we are communicating 👋
Admins and moderators decide on behavioral standards for their instances, just as it has been for every discussion forum that has ever existed. I don’t care to personally adjudicate your experience with Beehaw - I am simply sharing my own.
Sorry did you mean to respond to me? I don’t really see how your comment applies to mine.
Seems like the system is working just fine!
It’s important to remember that federation is just a feature in the end. As an instance administrator, you’re absolutely free to choose who to federate with.
I don’t see anyone giving Hexbear any shit for not federating with anybody.
People are just salty because they have some of the largest communities.
But they’re rightfully salty if Beehaw defederating themselves deprives this platform of a big chunk of content and users, especially during this month
That’s the thing. If someone defederates with you, and you wand a community on that instance. Then you are free to make the lost community in your instance. And if re-federation happens, both community can co exist without problems.
Also you can make an account on the instance that defederated. So you still can view the community you want.
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I disagree, they definitely don’t want their own mini Lemmy. They want a safe space they are happy with, and defederation the only way they can do that with Lemmy’s current mod tools.
Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works make up about 20% of the acitve users in the threadiverse (source). That is a lot, and it sucks, but it’s far off from making beehaw an isolated instance.
Imo for now new users should be discouraged from joining Beehaw, lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works, since all the content can be seen from other instances anyways.
Fair point. But I will say as a pretty new comer to Lemmy, it is hard to find an instance that you know will be a good fit.
“Safe space” for who?
They want a political echochamber.
When your life and right to exist as who you are is political, it’s nice to not have to deal with “debates” over that.
Beehaw is pretty explicitly a safe space for queer people and other members of minority groups, and their allies or just anyone who can take the time not to be bigoted or “Just Ask Questions”. They don’t exactly hide this fact ;p
They are much more proactive about it than other places, sometimes too much for my personal tastes (though I think about making an account there for when I don’t feel up for dealing with shit >.<) even if I respect what they are doing.
I don’t agree at all. The fact of the matter is I can’t even talk about my lived experiences being nonbinary in beehaw so to call it a safe space for minorities is blatantly false.
This is the “I have a black friend” of online communities.
From what I see, you said you said something about your ex “”“pushing”“” their daughter “into” LGBTQ. Which is stupid. 99.999% of the time this a bad faith argument from trolls and even if not you cant make someone queer just as much as you can’t make someone straight or cis. Queer people are exposed to intense social pressure to be cishet and yet we are still not. You can feel pressure into hiding or self-repressing or self-denying, but that’s a different thing >.<
Also, you can be bigoted while bieng a part of a minority group.
Choice is the point of federation.
I think a thing to note is that their community was here and well established well before rexxit. Rexxit put a lot of stress on many instances and their moderation ability, so it makes perfect sense that they might prioritize protecting their established community from abuse over being connected to every instance that intends to be a reddit alternative. There are plenty of instances they remain federated to that share their more careful moderation.
I expect that some time in the future they may reconnect with some more popular instances, as rexxit slows down and modding tools improve.
The nice thing about federation is you can choose to join more or less connected instances depending on what type of moderation you are looking for.
I think it’s also important for the this context to understand what beehaw is. They are an instance specifically created to be a more friendly, empathetic community. That made them a bit of a target when the migration started happening, as you might imagine.
Ultimately, they can do whatever they want. I understand that decision might rub some people the wrong way, but in the end it’s their community.
Frankly, after seeing the downfall of other reddit alternatives like voat, I think they’re justified. Young internet communities seem to be prone to being overrun by trolls and neonazis.
That’s not why voat is full of racists. Voats population surges came from racist Reddit communities getting banned. This is the first time there’s been a reason for other people to migrate off the site.
That’s not to say those racists don’t also share the same reason for migrating this time, too.
Thank you for the source
I don’t understand: did something serious happened, or it’s them overreacting?
It’s just down to Lemmy not having good enough mod tools yet. Beehaw is a carefully curated walled garden instance that hosts some high quality communities; they are availing themselves of the only real tool they have to curb an influx of bad actors from other instances.
Here’s hoping its temporary. The admin team here at sh.itjust.works clearly operates in good faith.
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but why bother? they can still enter from any of the thousands of other instances that allow free registration. if they want to troll, they are still able to do that.
I’m not an admin, so I’m partially paraphrasing and partially speculating, but my understanding is that we’re still in the whack-a-mole phase of lemmy moderation due to the immaturity of the platform and the tooling surrounding it. sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world were the most visible issues because they grew VERY quickly and have no barriers to registration - they became big enough and some users problematic enough to warrant a full, well-articulated post from the Beehaw admins regarding the defederation.
Take a look at the massive list of blocked instances on beehaw.org/instances and you’ll see that the level of care and attention regarding this specific defederation makes this situation fairly unique. Smaller instances probably just get banned near immediately. Sucks that the end result is for us to be lumped in with racists and the like, but it looks like all involved parties expect this to be resolved eventually.
Like I said, it’s just a matter of tooling. Our admins are doing an excellent job, considering. I know this because I watch the bullshit I report get dealt with in near real time. I don’t envy the work they’re putting in.
They defederated because they were both large Lemmy instances with zero review process for joining users, and they’d rapidly starting acquiring bots and bad actors. Because of federation, these accounts could interact on Beehaw’s server like they were locals.
Beehaw on the other hand, has a human-powered review process for signup. It isn’t strict, but it keeps out bots or low-effort users. Beehaw’s community goal means that reducing the amount of bots, bad actors, and low-effort users on the platform is a priority for them. Their moderating is also human-powered, and very involved - not outright banning/blocking. They reach out to users to discuss their content’s intent, and issue warnings/requests personally as needed.
That level of moderation is fantastic for fostering community and is compassionate for ignorance and error; but it isn’t scalable when being hammered by bots and an influx of new accounts. Beehaw’s only protection from instances that shelter bots and bad actors was to defederate from them until those instances were able to address them somehow.
The Beehaw admins have reached out to the admins of the other instances; their hope is to find a solution that reduces the amount of bots and spam accounts creating on .world and .works. They don’t want defederation to be a permanent solution, it’s just the only feasible one they had.
There sign up process was nearly successful in putting me off from ever trying Lemmy. I almost gave up finding instances which would let me join without filling in a completely stupid form where I have to state what communities I will join when I haven’t even had a chance to get to know what communities are out there!!.
Same here. The signup process for Lemmy sucks. It’s confusing and instances make no logical sense for account management. Personally I have no interest in other instances, so eventually I just picked the biggest and that’s what I’m sticking with.
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The admins of beehaw are more Liberal (if you are anywhere in the LGBTQIA+ space the other side’s content is largely considered offensive enough to defederate from) and presumably the other way around.
Annoyingly I guess it all comes around to politics and which side of history you want to be on. Personally I’m all for letting other people be in charge of whatever the fuck they want to do with their life - to an extent - but context matters
Boozilla’s comment explains in better detail and I 100% recommend a read to gain a better understanding. Basically the moderation tools on Lemmy aren’t quite up to stuff yet
I don’t know anything about the issue being that Beehaw is too liberal, only that some other instances were 1. Too easy to make accounts on and 2. Allowing an influx of super right/downright nazi punks to start spamming without any serious moderation.
Yeah I definitely wouldn’t call Beehaw “too liberal”, though I don’t personally see being “for freedom” as a bad thing - you’re definitely right. It’s more about the moderation tools and being able to separate opposing points of view from relevant communities
…and in case I have not made it perfectly clear I think the fact that Nazis still exist in the information age is absolutely fucking absurd
And this is why the fediverse will never work out - if I gamble wrong and set up shop on an instance that gets in a pissing match with other ones, I either have to make an account elsewhere (and then have to do it again later the next time two instances defederate each other) or live with only seeing some of my subscribed content.
Okay, guess I just won’t use it then if they defed from my primary instance. Glad they did this now and not later when they became bigger and more important.
If they’re that into making a safe space then fine. Hopefully some other people will also make more free spaces and both of them can exist and everyone can be happy.
I realize that is a highly optimistic outlook to put it mildly. I must remain hopeful to avoid losing my mind, if I haven’t already -.-
I disagree simply on the basis that they hope to refederate eventually, and it might be good to already be subbed. But yeah.
I’m sure it will be announced. It will be big lemmy news, hard to miss.
Can you help me understand exactly how this will affect me? I actually have accounts on both lemmy.world and beehaw.org (I signed up for both when I initially found Lemmy and was trying to figure the whole thing out).
If I’m on my lemmy.world account, will I no longer be able to browse beehaw communities? On the flip side, if I’m on my beehaw.org account, will I no longer be able to browse lemmy.world communities?
Am I understanding things correctly? If that’s the case, then is the only solution to flip back and forth between the two accounts depending on which server the community I’m wanting to browse is on?
Basically. You can browse them with the opposite account but you can’t interact.
So it’s like getting banned from a subreddit, except you can’t even browse with the same account after being banned?
Yes browse. No post.
If you get an account on an instant that isn’t involved in this mess like FMHY you can browse both without any issue.
This was my thinking.
Is there an easy way to check if anyone has defederated from your instance?
there should be an instances button at the bottom of the page that shows it.
I might have to go here. I’m already tired of defederation and its histrionic champions.
The first post I came across from another instance was on Beehaw. It was very confusing trying to figure out the federation concept with that community being my first visit.
