I think it’s easy to take this personally but I think it’s more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user’s bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.
I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit.
Agreed. They do deserve their own points if they want to be that type of community. I’d say for instance if places like AskHistorians arise within lemmy or kbin, federating with just those would be interesting.
There are always going to be more exclusive communities. Humans just work like that. I say we ride with it for now.
Federation should be a gradient. If they want to close themselves off why is it using ActivityPub to begin with?
its _ federation._ Some communities only want certain people. Once mod tools are better we will see changes. Let it grow.
Who else here is chilling on their own instance watching this shit unfold with some popcorn 😂
raises hand
Exactly the reason why Lemmy at scale will never work, since most people won’t run their own instance.
I don’t think running your own instance is required, just that the user base needs to be distributed across more instances. The happy median lies somewhere between “uber” instances and self-hosted.
Yes, but the common user would just register on the most popular instance. It will take a lot of effort to change that mindset.
I am a lurker over there so this decision literally changes nothing about how I use beehaw and my community is still awesome so I’m all good👍
Shh 🤫 they might defederate us too if we say too much
I’m on midwest.social and I’m a lurker so I got nothing to lose DEFERATE ME DEFERATE DIZ NUTS
Is there a SubRedditDrama community equivalent here?
There is a fediverse drama sub in lemmy.ca
Yet another reason why it’s great to be Canadian.
Sh.itjustworks is Canadian lol
Oh, that’s cool! Didn’t know.
Not cool actually 😂, but whatever 😂.
They made the users suffer for their unwillingness to cope with their situation.
Instead of planning ahead and only accepting a limited amount of users, which would have severed only a fraction of users from us, they decided to grow to become one of the biggest instances, and now took some interesting communities with them, along with cutting off their own users from communities here.
I hope their user base migrates to other, more open instances, and the communities lost will spring into existence elsewhere.
Wow… I’m new here so I’m still learning how all this works but I tried to apply to beehaw at first and they were having severe issues with their approval system so I either got denied or, most likely, got stuck in application purgatory.
Honestly, with how Lemmy is set up, it seems like it makes more sense to cater your instance to a more niche crowd than “all nice people” like beehaw was attempting to do.
I’m new here too, could someone explain the difference between Lemmy and Beehaw (and kbin which it looks like this is posted on?) and what it means that they’re defederated?
What’s most regrettable is the timing. Just when Lemmy had a big growth spurt, they cut off a big part of the community. We’ll likely see this happen again in 2 weeks, when Reddit shuts down all 3rd party mobile apps, and again when they close old.reddit. I hope that some of the issues Lemmy currently faces will be fixed by then.
I’d argue it’s perfect timing. Better that users across the broader fediverse know now that supporting Beehaw communities and helping them to grow with content won’t be in the best interests of the fediverse more broadly, and to put their time and effort into communities hosted elsewhere before they’d grown even larger.
I can completely understand why they did but it really sucks that it had to happen. Hopefully, as the Fediverse grows, better tools are made available so instances don’t need to defederate from each other.
With that said, I think it’s a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I also wasn’t aware that other instances vetted their users? This was the first one I picked. Is there a plan to address the issues beehaw brought up?
deleted by creator
I think it’s also important to note, beehaw has the largest amount of blocked communities
Reading through the comments in their post I’m losing the little sympathy I was feeling. It looks like the moderation tool they are hoping for is one that allows their users to access other communities while preventing the other communities from accessing beehaw. That feels shortsighted and selfish, and I would think most communities on that end on the block would block them reciprocally.
beehaw are trying to be a perfectly moderated and “high quality” community and they are struggling to keep up with it when federated to other large instances.
I think they might need to change their methods because it is inevitable that some crap is going to be going on in low effort posts and comments, but defederating one very large instance from other very large instances is against the whole idea the movement.
This is surfacing a fundamental division between mindsets in federation: the people who say don’t worry about which instance you’re on are bought into the promise that federation can “just work” like email. But the reality is that if you care about moderation at all (like, even to the extent of being for or against having any of it) then sooner or later you’re going to have to make harder decisions about instances.
It’s pretty normal for long-term fediverse users to change instances several times over the course of however long this stuff has been around. It’s unclear to me whether any existing Lemmy instances would be a good fit for me in the long term TBH and I would expect that to be true for some time, as so many instances are still figuring things out internally.
Defederation decisions like beehaw made are extremely normal and rational. With their level of moderation staffing and for their user base, they determined it was unsustainable to remain federated with instances that were generating more moderation workload. If it wasn’t them today it would be another instance tomorrow; this will keep happening.
Also, I see a lot of folks saying this is lazy for beehaw, but it’s important to understand that from their perspective, this problem wouldn’t arise if moderators here were keeping a cleaner house and preventing bad actors from using the platform. (Not saying either take is entirely correct.)
In a sense, moderation best practices on the fediverse are inimically hostile to scaling the fediverse up to new users. (And if you ask folks with smaller but prosperous instances that have healthy internal vibes, they’ll probably tell you this is good.)
This is much more fraught on Lemmy than it is on Mastodon, because you’re building communities hosted on a particular instance and there’s not currently a way to move the community. So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Similarly, to avoid endless duplication of communities, folks have been encouraged to participate with existing communities instead of starting a new one on their own instance everytime. But anyone here who has gotten involved with communities on Beehaw will now no longer be able to do so unless they move to a different instance. (Which may be hard, as open instances that are easy to join are the ones that are harder for small instances to handle, which is what caused this in the first place.)
Some of those folks are going to create their own alternative communities on their servers, which to any third-party servers not in the loop on the defederation drama will be potentially confusing. This has the potential to create a cultural tend toward polarization of community norms between everything goes and what we see on Mastodon as content warning policing, but of which are, to me, undesirable.
The best case scenario is that the majority of large communities end up being hosted on instances that have sufficiently rigorous moderation standards and sufficiently robust moderation staff to not impose an unsustainable workload on smaller instances. Then as long as everyone who’s not a nazi federates with those instances, things should go smoothly…ish. But that’s hard both because “sufficiently rigorous” is different for everyone and because moderation labor doesn’t grow on trees.
btw, e-mail servers regularly defederate/block domains that allow a lot of spam…
The part where things get tricky is that beehaw currently has ~15 of the top 50 communities across the entire fediverse and has become the defacto discussion grounds for gaming/tech/news/etc.
One could argue this goes against the whole concept of decentralized communication in the first place, and this may be a position beehaw doesn’t want to be in.
Beehaw has every right to foster a tight-knit community that adheres to its desires.
But there also is a level of responsibility and custodianship over these large communities they foster for the betterment and adoption of the fediverse.
It‘s the bubble concept I already curated for myself on Reddit by filtering out what feels like half the website. Except now I can sort of choose my pre-made bubble, which is more effort to be certain (have to research the admins of a chosen instance a bit and understand their rules and values), but I don‘t mind that.
as someone who just joined, and is still trying to understand “federated” can someone give me an ELI5 rundown of what this means? I thought it didn’t matter which instance you joined because they were all connected, does this mean that other instances can just… block an entire instance?
Correct me if I am wrong.
A “federation” is a form of state structure in which parts of a state are state entities with legally defined political autonomy within a federation.
Federation, in contrast to confederation, provides for a certain coordinating administration. That is, you still have no freedom here, and you don’t even know who pays the electric bill in your new entity.
I specifically just deleted my beehaw account and created one here because of this… This move makes me reconsider this whole lemmy thing.
yeah, was starting to like it here, but honestly if any instance will just defederate the second something inconvenient happens… we won’t have a site with good content that will keep people around
I find it really frustrating to build up a feed of content, only to lose it when moderator fights begin. What servers are next? Which one do I join to get the most content?
I want this to succeed but I don’t know how I can recommend it to people today, since they’re going to ask the same questions.
Power tripping as always. Give mods a little power and this is what you get. What they want 24/7
But isn’t that good? It means you have much more freedom now, you can make communities, post more stuff, don’t have to follow a non existant set of rules.
To an extend. It’s more concerning that I can build up my user, interacting with other communities, building my network and suddenly I loose all that because my server suddenly decides it no longer want to interact with other servers.
hate to say that’s on you, dude. You should look at how that instance works with others.
Apparently migration is in the works, so you should be able to keep your beehaw account.
Read access should be managed on the user level, not the instance level imo. I don’t want to inherit some collective blacklist, I want my own.
For write access, it’s more complicated and I’m not sure what to think.
Kbin (I’m on kbin.social) allows users to block entire instances, rather than leaving that entirely up to admins.
Good. Beehaw sucks
I agree. While they might have the larger communities (for now), they seem to have also absorbed the worst kind of judgmental pricks from Reddit. I was just thinking to myself earlier that Lemmy needs a way to block instances at the user level.
Ok so which instance is not slow and still has access to most content?
https://fedia.io does.
But bear in mind that this is just the knee-jerk reaction of the admins at Beehaw; they will likely defederate with any community that has open sign-ups.
Beehaw wants to promote a certain culture within their instance. That’s well within their prerogative - but I think they’re beginning to understand why the fediverse may not be the place to do such things.
The fediverse is designed to link instances with niche communities together. If I had an instance about model-making, there’d be communities for model trains and model rockets and dioramas and Warhammer blah blah blah. These would be a bunch of separate - but related - topics, held under one instance.
That’s how the fediverse is designed to work. You have a bunch of people who share a specific interest on a “home” instance, and if they wish to talk about other things then they connect to other instances and grab communities to assemble their custom homepage. Great examples of this are lemmy.blahaj.zone (LGBTQ-focused instance), rblind.com (accessibility-focused instance), and even the much-maligned Lemmygrad (tankie instance).
You focus on the communities you want and block the ones you are opposed to. Each instance has a discrete subject matter and specialty. You could have an instance which only allows verified scientists and historians to replicate AskScience and AskHistorians, and people who are “verified” will have it as their home instance.
What has actually happened is people want to make Reddit 2. And this isn’t the fault of the users; indeed, I’d say the fact that lemmy.ml exists as a dev-run general-purpose instance violates this very philosophy the fediverse has.
Beehaw wants to operate under the way the fediverse “should” work; i.e. Beehaw.org is a small community dedicated to a certain mission, with subjects that relate to that mission. The issue is that their mission is very close (but not quite) to being “be Reddit 2”.
They want to have a tight-knit community where everyone knows each other and everyone can look at all sorts of content, with strict moderation to prevent the worst of social media showing up on a platform. They want to be a “hub” where people make a home, and their users would be able to dip in to more specific instances if they needed something.
The issue is that the fediverse is a two-way street. I think Beehaw is just now realizing that. They set themselves up as a “general instance” and found wild success. But the “tight-knit community” part is hard when any rando can make an account on another instance and talk to them.
I think Beehaw mostly wants it to be a one-way interaction - their users can participate in other instances, but outside users can’t directly talk to their instance. That’s the only reasonable way for them to accomplish their goals, but that’s not how Lemmy really works, at least not right now.
Add to this that people are flooding in constantly. They want to be in “Reddit 2”. The fediverse supports such things - lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, fedia.io, kbin.social, etc. are all great examples - but that’s not how it was designed to be used. Beehaw is an older community, one founded with thoughts of the “ideal” fediverse… but it’s becoming obvious that (like Mastodon) users are going to gravitate towards the familiar and make everything general-purpose.
Not a good look. I get its the admins choice and all but it just wiped out a lot of my subscriptions. Its not a good look from the perspective of new users and increases the number of duplicate communities across instances.
I had hopes for it but I guess I’m one of the lucky ones who signed up for lemmy.world.
I think they should just ban problematic users not the whole instance.
Yeah, I can get their desire to vet users before they can join their instance, but for me (and I suspect a lot of other people who are just starting with Lemmy, or just shy people) the effort of making a social interaction with a stranger was enough of a turn off that I went elsewhere. Beehaw still seems nice, I may still make an account there at some point. But, to figure out if a place suits me, first I lurk, then I engage by voting, then I engage by commenting, and eventually I may eventually post. I get applications, but they feel intrusive to how I use the internet.
I also get why they defederated, frankly there’s a tonne of low effort from the big new instances. However, everyone should expect low effort right now because users are antsy from having left reddit, and the low effort posts are the anxious laughter of people new to the party who don’t know anyone yet. So the defederation isn’t a good look, and will cause bad feeling with and within beehaw, so their mods have my sympathy. Better to have enabled downvoting and let the community handle the low effort posts.
