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 am a moderator on the lemmy.world sailing community through my Beehaw acct. Will this affect that?
oh dear, probably yeah. you might have to register over there and get re-appointed
New users: “I’m tired of Reddit telling me what I can’t see! Top-down decision-making is ridiculous! I’m going to check out Lemmy!”
Beehaw: “Hold my beer and watch this.”
Disappointing to see the largest lemmy instances fracturing so early. But this also confirms my decision to self host my own instance - to avoid this sort of thing.
Well, what happens when whitelisting is being introduced?
If it comes to that why even bother with federation?
Yeah, that’s why I am not too happy with Beehawk’s decision. I think it’s definitely a possibility that we end up with things like whitelists. Defederating from large instances that are not clearly not abuse/spam/trolling/extremist should never be done lightheartedly. When one of the largest instances, defederates with two of the other largest instances, that lowers the threshold for other instances to make even more rigid defederations. And then whitelists are only the next step.
I don’t really know enough about this lemmy thing to comment on the merit of your decision… let me just thank for putting so much thought on this for my sake too.
Could you clarify what “defederating” entails precisely? Does this affect only the communities @beehaw.org (as if all users from those servers had been banned), or does it mean that I won’t be able to see communities, posts and comments from those servers through beehaw.org (as if those servers didn’t exist)? is the effect retroactive (ie. do already existing posts and comments disappear)?
Defederating means that for all intents and purposes beehaw and lemmy.world dont exist to each other its like if you and another person just agreed to not talk anymore and deleted each others phone number the posts that have federated over still exist but they wont be updated in any way
Thanks.
I was confused because https://beehaw.org/c/[email protected], which I subscribed to, still exists and has contents and no warning whatsoever about it being outdated (I’ll make sure there’s a ticket on the lemmy github about this).
How ironic! I had just subscribed to several communities on those instances this evening. Go figure. I guess I should reproduce my community subscriptions over on kbin. But wait, does this mean I can’t even SEE that I subscribed to those communities here?
I understand and respect your decision here. Are there any plans to defederate from the porn instances?
not as of now, no. while we can’t personally accommodate porn (in part for the same moderation reasons lined out here), we don’t have an objection to NSFW so we’ve only defederated with instances that host content that’s illegal or legally dubious
Wait, wdym by “illegal”? Does that include piracy instances?
no, we very literally do just mean like, porn communities that allow for shotacon/lolicon and similar–the context here is porn instances
That’s not illegal, though, or even especially legally dubious.
quick vibe check: i am extremely not interested in you trying to debate me on whether content like lolicon and shotacon is or is not legally dubious–even if i somehow ceded this point to you, it’s not going to change our judgement because it’s at best incredibly fucking weird and we want nothing to do with it. please read the room here.
Though it’s not something I personally enjoy, it is very important to me that I make a point of sticking up for even the weirdest and grossest content out there that isn’t hurting anyone, because a) freedom of expression must include art that disturbs me personally or it is meaningless, and b) if you ignore people going after art just because it’s gross, eventually someone will decide the art YOU like is gross. But even if I disapproved of lolicon and shotacon, I would still not be down with you lying about its legality, because I happen to have principles.
Ban me or whatever if you must, but someone has to point out bullshit when it crops up.
So, i partially agree in principle thanks to Neil Gaiman, the law should not punish people for what’s essentially victimless crimes (unlike IRL CP there’s no one being hurt here, just people drawing… things…), but on the other hand this is not about laws and the government not arresting you, is about this particular community. You’re still free to host all that up to what the law allows you where you are, but this particular community has no obligation or desire to let this pass here.
I’d say let it be legal, let the people create, host and distribute that to people who care about it, but that doesn’t mean everybody is obligated to welcome it. I for one don’t, I’ve been a weeb for decades and have seen many things i cannot unsee, and would like to avoid all of that if possible.
Also, like the alt-text of that XKCD strip says, defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession: you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.
I respect your decision, and the transparency behind your thought processes. Beehaw’s stated values, and the culture that you have grown and maintained were what led me to choose it initially. I’ve enjoyed reading and interacting with the people and content here, and the extra thought and effort that goes into typical posts compared to other similar servers.
I hope you’re able to find people you can trust to share the administrative burden, that improved moderation tools are not far off, and that this decision will be earnestly reconsidered in the coming days/weeks as growth from the Reddit Exodus stabilizes.
I believe the Fedverse as a whole will be a poorer place for being defederated from Beehaw.
That said, based on this decision I’ve decided to migrate my primary account to a regional instance. I want to continue to participate in and interact with the Beehaw community, but I’d also like the freedom to explore the wider fediverse and find diverse communities for my niche interests and hobbies. I just hope bad actors from my, and other instances don’t cause further defederation and fragmentation.
You are being incredibly selfish and should revert this change immediately
Seems a bit much. Get moderators.
This is disappointing considering how popular some of the beehaw communities are (for instance beehaw.org/c/gaming) and now they have been completely ostracized from part of the lemmy community. Or at least the fastest growing part. (mostly because they have open registration). Personally I think this will only hurt the platform as a whole and fragment further, what is by nature, an already fragmented community.
I get why it is being done though. Especially with there being no verification for those servers. They become easy ways to make troll accounts.
Lemmy needs better federated mod tools to say the least (or so it appears to be). There has to be a better way to do this.
Well I won’t fault you but that seriously hampers my experience using Lemmy so guess I’ll go make another account on another instance.
Edit: the more I recreate my account the more annoyed I am by this, you literally have the communities everyone joined and just ripped them away from most of Lemmy’s user base. Not cool.
yeah ngl this is kind of a dick move. the fediverse is just starting out and the worst thing anyone can do is pull thousands of users out rn. admins should have asked for help with moderating instead of doing this.
I’m personally gonna block all beehaw communities. I want the fediverse as a whole to thrive.
It’s certainly not cool. They could have just put out the call for some help instead of deciding to fuck a bunch of Lemmy users who’ve just been joining the biggest community for a given topic - a community frequently on beehaw. But they want a walled garden so I guess that’s what they’re going to get. It sucks because I joined this instance specifically because I felt like it wouldn’t be infested with fuckin’ Nazis and hateful people like every other reddit alternative since forever, I didn’t think that meant it would be walled off because of that pursuit. Here we are though, I personally will avoid beehaw communities from now on even when they refederate with the instance I’ve moved to, I don’t want to post a bunch in the music community (like I have been) just to wake up and find it gone. I know I said I don’t fault them but the more I get into moving and seeing how it affects non beehaw users the more yeah I really kinda do.
Edit: I’ve removed my content from this instance, I will leave this here as reasoning.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
