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.
I completely understand this decision, though I personally enjoy the freedom of being able to go to multiple instances. Hopefully, as the mod tools develop further and more limited forms of defederation are created, lemmy.world and beehaw.org may be able to come together again, at least slightly. For now though, I understand isolating your community to preserve its culture and community.
I’m not 100% certain as I’m pretty new here, but my account is with lemmy.ca and it seems like I can see and ineract with both beehaw and lemmy.world. If you’re interested in the beehaw communites but still want access to the defederated communities, just going with a smaller instance for your account seems to work fine.
I definitely do find this a little disappointing as I think the Lemmy community is too small at the moment to create unnecessary divides and schisms. Success in my mind is predicated on many communities from Reddit coming to servers and forming a common denominator community that achieves critical mass.
It’s clear to me that some of the communities on the 2 you are defederating from you instance have become more popular and are already the defacto “place to be” for certain subreddits.
All that said, I’m happy that my main server (infosec.pub) has not unfederated from those 2 instances so I am able to still participate on those 2 servers AND interact here on my “main” account. This lets me get the best of both worlds. It’s very exciting to see the Lemmy model working in that regard!
Just a heads up so you can try to plan ahead: on Reddit one of the tactics used by those with hateful agendas was to shut down progressive threads by purposely creating drama in that thread to overwhelm the moderators so that they had to lock the thread thus stopping all discussion. Sometimes they did this by being awful and dragging in well meaning users into fights, other times I they’d drop a few “I’m just asking questions” comments focussing on hot-button ideas that they knew would rile up arguments. It was very deliberate tactic and one that I don’t think moderators ever figured out how to deal with effectively, because short of babysitting the thread with their full attention from start to finish there was no way to prevent entire threads from devolving into attacks and arguments.
The crazy thing was how effectively one or two people with hateful agendas could derail an entire comment section of well meaning people and, by getting the thread locked, shut down the discussion and spread of progressive ideas.
I bring this up because Beehaw is perhaps uniquely vulnerable to this sort of ‘attack’, and you should expect to see it in the future. By joining other federated instances and using these tactics to stir up drama in Beehaw threads they can, by forcing your hand to defederalize, restrict the access of those other communities to the progressive ideals and ideas posted on Beehaw. The end result is isolating progressive ideas inside our walled garden, while users of the rest of the Lemmy instances start to only see more right-wing extremist views, normalizing them to otherwise everyday people.
I don’t have a solution to this. But it’s something to be aware of in discussions with the moderators of other instances, that a handful of people with this exact agenda can make their community look bad in order to restrict their users’ access to progressive ideas.
Has this taken place yet? I can still see community post from lemmy.world. Also, sending love to the mod team. Sounds overwhelming!
You will probably end up disconnecting yourself from every growing instance until you’re standalone. A standalone Lemmy instance, what even is the point ?
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This does much more harm than good IMO - splintering the community at such a sensitive time of growth is a bad idea.
Hopefully there’ll be the ability to block images in comments and posts, and better tools for blocking / detecting spammers, and cross-instance bans, auto-moderating hyperlinks, etc. soon.
But the demand for unilateral access to other communities’ content is disturbing. The Lemmy federation works because of reciprocity.
Definitely won’t be recommending beehaw for new users now.
Same I’m kinda disappointed. This feels to go against he whole point of having a federated ecosystem. I guess I’ll make an account elsewhere.
I understand, and appreciate the move.
My very first post on lemmy.world was raided by trolls from an alt-right instance(?). It was not a good experience, and a big reason why I immediately migrated here to beehaw.
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The moderators would rather have absolute power (controlling registration, community creation, all moderation, etc.) in their small fiefdom than foster a growing and open community. It’s sad, but hopefully lemmy.world will grow more.
I enjoyed lemmy.world communities like [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], and Skyrim [email protected]. Especially Skyrim mods that I used recently.
So I’m really sad to see this happen.
Dang this really sucks :/ i understand why it’s important from a modding perspective. I guess I’ll need to open an account elsewhere and get a client with multi account support
Yea. I’m going to be honest, I disagree with this decision immensely. There just aren’t enough posts and comments here alone to really keep my whole lemmy experience here.
The whole point of federation is to be able to branch out as I see it. Half of the communities I’m subbed to are on the places being banned, so it sorta breaks the whole point of federation to me at least. I get why mods are doing it and think it’s definitely their right to do so, but as an end user, it reaaaally sucks and will likely make me make an account elsewhere as my primary.
There are a lot of assholes on the internet, and I get wanting to have a space free of that. As a trans woman of 10 years now, trust me, I have gotten harassment online and off it. For me at least, I personally err on the side of having more freedom to look into places even if that means dealing with a couple of assholes. The mods say that strangers don’t walk in off the street and start trolling - from experience, I can say that is just not quite true. At some point, people really have to just roll with it and keep a positive attitude in the face of it. It’s better to deal with assholes from time to time to go out and have fun rather than sit at home.
I worry that a space like this can stifle a good thing by wanting to be too thorough. Shit always slips thru cracks, and while I get that it can suck for some, heavy restriction just kills the whole thing. In some ways, it just feels like some of the decisions here are very kid-glovey. Like, at least in subs like asktrans or mtf or other parts on reddit where trolls loved to comgregate, downvotes were how the community itself self regulated trolls - we don’t even have that option here. I’m not sure how I feel about such hands on moderation - it doesn’t give good faith users a ton of freedom
They have the right to do so, but it probably shows I don’t quite fit with the ethos of the instance.
My questions are:
Will you defederate from every instance that has an “open registration policy” if it floods beehaw’s feed with shitposts?
What type of trolling are you seeing?
What can you tell to mods of magazines/communities or admins of instances to look out for?Newbie user here. You’ve gotta do what you gotta do. Thank you for fostering this as a safe space, both for the users and also yourselves as admins. This community doesn’t work at all for anyone if it doesn’t work for you.
Full support on defederation from me - if we lose a couple folks jumping ship to other instances over this then maybe that’s also for the best too.
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?
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Yup. I guess they can have their safe bubble, and the rest of the fediverse can just keep growing. Shame to see a community cut themselves off from the world, but it’s their community and if a bubble / chamber is what they want, then we have to just shrug and move on.
Shrug.
Moved on.
I’m inclined to agree. But I also don’t think anyone should be forced to deal with these shitters coming in and causing chaos due to the lack of signup oversite. For instance Reddit could IP shadow ban you but that’s not an option on Lemmy. If the federated servers could share user data it would be fine but that would cause so many issues it’s not even funny.
This will become a lot less of an issue after account migration gets some eyes looking at it. Hopefully.
Disappointing, but understandable given the tools (or lack thereof) available for moderation at the minute. I’d like to see something like the Message Rewrite Facility system that Akkoma has, that gives you a lot more fine-grained control over what happens to incoming messages from other instances, although I’m not sure how some of that would work in this format. I’m sure something will come further down the line.
Personally I’m not bothered, I’m setting up my own single-user instance (to go with my current Akkoma one) so I can subscribe to whatever from anywhere without having to be responsible for the safety of other users. Then anything I see is my own fault.
Yeah, I think just like with email, systems will have to be built up to give instance owners more control of what other instances can do to their instance. I see a lot of infrastructure possibilities here, spam filters, relays, directories, so many things are possible and while it kinda sucks, it’s also great that the fediverse has grown to a size where this kind of thing is necessary already.
