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?
With that said, I think it’s a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I've been calling it a double-edged sword from the moment I knew that could happen in Mastodon and after I joined Lemmy, we see as normal to block lemmygrad from the beginning and that's understandable, but if an owner goes block-happy they could leave a lot of people stranded and inside their echo-chamber.
They'd be losing everything then and would be forced to migrate to other instance or create their own which may be too much as time goes by and people post more and more.
I said this from the beginning but until we get migration tools to carry our content with us to other instance, think of your account as disposable.
The software right now is extremely lacking in many aspects that it's hard to pin point which priority should be higher than other (specially since I ain't helping to it), but yeah I assume there appeared so many bugs when the waves started that we can only be patient.
I saw some advice saying "don't overthink it, just choose one" and I'm glad I didn't take it because it seems like it couldn't be any further from the truth. Until migrating your account is an option, this just seems like a bunch of Reddits talking to each other, you can still lose everything if your local admin goes on a power trip.
Would be nice if there was a Link funciton. Not just on lemmy but on the fediverse as a whole. That way, you can create an account anywhere and "link" it to other instances so that everything is mirrored. That would mean that each time you post something it would have to travel toward all the instances
lots take issue w/ that due to the whole decentralized, free vibes thing, but I think people will largely not want illegal content so communities will probably take federation as a very serious thing as we grow.
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.
Very cogent writeup, seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw's decision in my eyes. People are getting really angry, and I wonder if those were the same people who bought into the whole "lemmys great because no one has 100% control" idea, only to be upset when the person in control of a slice they like decides they want to do something disagreeable with it. In the first place, one community shouldn't have carried the burden of the entire content and community of the "Gaming" or "Technology" sphere, it just kind of turned out that way because once they gained momentum, everybody else just flocked to it. And you can't blame them, that's where the content is, and the content is why they're here.
On the whole, though the software doesn't really restrict you to one or the other, instances are very quickly separating into two camps - viewer and host. Viewer instances are instances like mine, where the majority of users are consumers and not creators. Yeah, I like to run my mouth around these parts but most of the content on my instance doesn't originate from it. The host instances host communities, and so they carry the burden of having to moderate those communities and the servers/sysadmins carry the burden of having to relay all that communication to all the other instances. I think it's this part that needs work as we grow, because the best analogy for a Lemmy community is an email group. Can you imagine an email group with tens of thousands of subscribers all just emailing each other over and over again? Lemmy is pretty much just that, but displayed differently.
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.
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?
Maybe moving a community to another instance will be possible at some point in the future. Who knows?
I think this is pretty unreasonable. They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with the existing moderation team. That was never going to work. Placing the blame on the open registration instances and mod tools seems silly. That said I hope this does lead to an improvement in mod tooling.
I think they should have made a deliberate attempt to remain outside of the top three biggest instances like lemmy.ml. Considering the conscious decision to only have the admins be the only mods (that is there are four mods site-wide that moderate ALL communities) these issues were easily foreseen and they should have accepted that they could not realistically compete for the largest instance while maintaining their moderation goals.
They've existed as a small community for a year and a half. In all that time, surely they have met/interacted with some people they trust enough to delegate mod duties to.
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.
I think they should just ban problematic users not the whole instance.
When the vast majority of the problematic users come from 2 instances with open registration, trying to do that is like stopping a flood with a bucket. I think theirs is a perfectly reasonable response to the troll attack they were just subjected to.
They could also just use a whitelist of users who are allowed to comment/post on there. I have suggested as much but we will see how they respond. I might try and contact a mod over there if that's possible.
Edit: I've been told by another user that this isn't currently supported. I think it would be a good feature to add to lemmy.
But why would it disrupt your subscriptions if lemmy.world and SJW are still federating beehaw? Can't one instance federate another without it being mutual? Is that the difference between a non-federated instance and a blocked instances, where blocked instances cannot even read your content?
Edit: Actually I think I understand. I checked the blocked instances and they are not blocked just delinked. So in that case, you must be a beehaw user who lost your subscriptions to communities on lemmy.world and SJW.
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.
"I wonder if the type of community you're trying to build wouldn't be easier with a more traditional forum software like discourse. The infrastructure and moderation tools there have had much longer to mature."
I think they've picked the wrong tool for what they're trying to do.
Yeah. In the explanation they say that four people are taking the load of moderation, that can't scale. If the rest of the communities keep growing they may end up isolating themselves for not being able to adapt.
I honestly think it's somewhat irresponsible to have allowed themselves to grow as they did with only four moderators. Other instances have closed registration to maintain healthy growth. That should've happened long before this point.
I can see why they need to do it, they apparently only have 4 main mods for the entire server. with the limited mod tools available at the moment that is completely impossible to manage.
As far as I know there are no automod functions currently, so until a human mod manually deletes or bans that user, it will just stay there.
Tools will come, the code for the platform is fully open and the API well documented, so it wont be long before large communities can function fully federated with reasonable moderation.
It doesn't help that notifications are pretty nonexistent at times. You have to actively go to an instance via browser, or open jerboa to find out anything is going on. Well, I haven't found any other way to get mod notifications, and I've tried a couple of times.
So, for non admin mods to help out there, they'd have to commit to a higher degree of focus than what most people can offer.
I honestly doubt they'll open again, they'll get so used to their safe-space that they won't be able to handle all the shitposting.
And we know mod tools can only do so much, if they couldn't handle it with not so many users, I don't know what are they going to do later if more instances keep appearing and growing.
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?
eh I just read through the post over there, I suppose their concerns are somewhat valid, to a point, but there really isnt a "safe space" anywhere except between your ears.
My problem with Beehaw in general is it reeks of overzealous and manipulative mods. The internet is full of awful people but to pretend you can make an island of purity where you get to decide what is pure is going to be a worse idea in the long run.
I find it ironic that they say fake niceness will only scare people off, but all the “ethos engineering” only promotes a culture of fake niceness. I don’t buy all this “walled utopia” idealism, especially since this place isn’t like Discord with private servers, but a public interconnected forum. Why choose to set up on the Fediverse if you’re not open to ”strangers” accessing your community? But oh well, I think they’ll probably defederate more and more over time (or switch to whitelist).
Reminds me a bit of parents who want the benefit of just putting their kid on the internet so they don't have to entertain the kid themselves but then try to censor everyone when the kid finds anything online they didn't want the kid to see.
Yeah, somewhat agree (they only had 4 main mods, that's rediculous) but they do raise a good point in the difficulty of maintaining a friendly and safe community with limited moderation possible.
What we need isn't large instances splitting off and defederating, it's better moderation tools and more volunteers.
I'm on a smaller instance and am still fully federated with all three instances involved, so it doesn't affect me, but that also means if I chose to be a dick and spam/troll on beehaw communities they would have to moderate me manually, or defederate from my instance too.
I suspect this will be reversed when better moderation is possible, or perhaps they will eventually be able to block posts and comments from other instances without defederating entirely if they want to remain as clean and high quality as they are attempting to be.
i suppose that's true - i guess the main concern that I have with the top-tier instances defederating is that each instance becomes its own insular echo chamber - lemmygrad is a good example of this.
That's one of the main points of federation, if you as an admin don't like an instance you block them, if as an user you don't like the instance you're in you go to another one.
There are some key features missing here, the ability to silence entire instances so you don't have to defederate completely and account migration so you can just pick up your stuff and leave.
We'll see, I guess. It's very early days. Reddit could be like that in places already. On the other hand, there were subs that were pretty open-ended, like r/askreddit (although I'm bummed they're not blacking out).
I suspect users will flock to instances that are more trusted if given the choice, since nobody wants to be left out.
I wouldn't take this too seriously. If they can't handle the amount of new users then so be it, and the whole point is to not rely on a single instance. I could see the larger instances becoming closed safe spaces over time, in which case people will just leave them for other instances anyway. Nothing is constant but change.
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.
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.
Was this in the comments of the defederation post or one of the other ones? I’m just curious to read it myself.
Jerboa doesn't take me to the comment directly but I'm going to assume this is the one lol
It was part of the annoucement .
After reading many comments I think my 'outrage' came, as it often does, from misunderstanding. Also, because when singing up most people say don't overthink it, it doesn't matter much. But now I'm seeing that it does matter to sign up for an instance with like minded people. As I see more of what seems to be the drive behind beehaw, it doesn't really resonate with what I want, but that doesn't make it wrong. It is ok for that group of people. We just need to make sure that communities of general interest that were taking off there because they were one of the largest instances are also present in a more open and accessible place, so we are not restricted to collaborate.
They are actively trying to be as clean and friendly as possible, and that's admirable but the tools don't exist for them to maintain that if they are fully federated. they are woefully undermoderated for how much traffic they are having to filter.
Once better mod tools arrive they may be able to re-open to other large instances.
Perhaps an option in the future would be for them to remain federated but somehow implement post/comment restrictions on outside instances to keep it under control.
I'm not really keen on their reasons for defederating, but this makes no sense to me. What do I care if a beehaw user is posting good content on my community but I can't go to their instance? It's still more content and engagement for my community.
I see your point. I was seeing it from the perspective of discouraging stuff to be shared on other communities because it's already in beehaw, but you'd need an account to participate there.
But I see what you say, allowing them to contribute to other instances isn't bad even if they don't allow those instances to contribute on theirs.
That's each instances choice to make I guess, and it's part of the freedom of the platform.
beehaw would be within their rights to do it (effectively going read only to the outside, not currently possible but a requested feature is to have private or invite only communities), and if they are intending to be the clean family friendly option, it would be a valid choice to make if it were possible.
many of those are imported from the tier0 Fediblock list, which includes all the instances any decent human being would want to block as well. I don't see myself wanting any content from pedo dot school or teenagegirls dot biz.
many of those are imported from the tier0 Fediblock list, which includes all the instances any decent human being would want to block as well. I don't see myself wanting any content from pedo dot school or teenagegirls dot biz.
When an instance has a specific rule, no NSFW for instance, it can't be receiving that content from other instances and serving it to its users because it breaks its own rules. You might want NSFW content but your instance's users agreed to that rule, probably because that's what they wanted out of the instance.
The problem is that read access for a user means the content is cached on the instance of that user, making the instance owner potentially liable if we are talking about content illegal in their jurisdiction.
Good point, I hadn't considered that. But an instance can still strive to keep its blocklist as small as legally possible. This wouldn't be a big issue in most liberal countries anyway I think.
That's a bit of a silly equivalence to make, beehaw admins even said it wasn't a permanent or moral decision, they just need to figure out how to manage that from a moderation perspective, which is probably fair.
i always browse defederated instances like a TV catalog, i'm glad there are instances like this where i can find some of the funniest instances on the right hand side, look at that there's a troll cafe, a shitposter club, pooper social, and lmao gangstalking services, lots of piss and poop yes, and lotsa feminists, which i imagine are terfs cuz afaik that's the only feminists that end up banned from lgbt friendly places
I understand why they did it, four mods is not enough for the traffic. However, I think they could've anticipated this better than just removing one of the largest instances. Hire more mods. It seems beehaw has banned so much that I am honestly unsure why they want to be federated. I like the idea of beehaw, some things, like limited communities and no downvotes are really smart. But the closed community mindset may kill it.
They do want to refederate when they get more granular options, but the federation options for lemmy right now is basically federate or not, which is kind of sucky, also I don't think reports bubble up to the origin server like they do on mastodon, I'm sure it will get there in time, but for now there isn't that many.
I'm just some dude observing this space and migrating from reddit - but I looked at Beehaw when all of this started and I immediately thought it was an idea begging to turn into the internet version of Animal Farm. If the goal is to moderate and ban based not on what is said, but on the interpretation of what someone thinks was said or implied...in a straight text based communication medium....?
That's a problem waiting to happen.
If there are interesting things happening there - and I never tried to join so I couldn't say - I think they may well become an echo chamber full of cliques.
I don't know what this space will turn into, but I personally like the idea of a semi open ended reboot.
It's a recurring fediverse issue - Mastodon has it too. Basically, there are levels of blocking at various points in the hierarchy and you block or get blocked to your tolerance zone. This means that certain norms get squashed(and there are some reasonable concerns about who this helps), but it also tends to self-moderate to the conversations people want to engage with. The "invasive free-speech" instances of Mastodon tend to end up isolated, but it can also be hard to get situated and find an instance and follows you're happy with.
Something I'm looking forward to with the forum model being added to the mix is a greater ability to browse for organized discussions.
liked beehaw but didn't join because they seemed overloaded and now I cant interact :/ shame on anyone from here that was heading into their communities and being assholes.
Their biggest complaint was something I found odd as a new user to the fediverse too. When I was looking for a home instance, I saw that beehaw required an application, but I could just create an account elsewhere and interact that way, skipping it.
It seems like (at least one of) the tools they want is to allow federation to other instances, but external accounts must still "apply" before being able to comment or post. That'd allow users on both instances to still view each other's content, but it's not as cut-and-dry as blocking all posts from external accounts like limiting would (if implemented) or worse, defederating and siloing from all.
Lemmy does not seem to include any kind of authentication on the user level (such as a user keypair and signatures using that on their posts and comments client-side) so allowing one user from a remote instance would at least trust the owner of that instance to not impersonate the user who is allowed to post.
In fact, how does ActivityPub in the threadiverse even ensure that the instance is who they say they are? The W3C document on it seems to indicate that there is no standardized way to authenticate servers to other servers yet.
That's a good point about the user authentication, but I'm not quite sure we'd need it quite yet to reduce spam in this way. It is absolutely something to keep in mind though.
I think the other instances allowing federation in the first place grants "I trust the owner to not impersonate users" part of the chain. In Reddit there's that trust too, the whole "I trust the admins to NOT edit my comments silently at the database level"...
I think it's totally fine for instances that want to be small and community-focused to not be federated with the greater pool of the internet. Especially when, as they've said, the moderation manpower and tooling isn't there to handle the extra users.
Personally, I wouldn't want to join a place like that (I've never been a fan of message boards or other niche communities), but it's their place and their rules.
Basically they stop receiving or responding to updates from your instance. That means their instance won't receive new posts or comments from yours, and any communities hosted on your instance won't be searchable on theirs.
It's the basis of federation. Think of it like regular SMS. You can try to send a message to someone, but if they have their phone switched off or blocked you, they won't receive it.
I'm not hugely familiar with how federation works or why it works the way it does, but why is this better than say instances only hosting what is put on their instance and the browser fetching from multiple instances? So when I want to view something posted on instance A with my account on instance B, instead of instance B keeping a cache of the post my browser just fetches the content directly from instance A?
Well, all the instances kind of acknowledge the originating instance as the OG and it's also the relay. For example, this reply goes from my instance, to sh.itjust.works, to your instance. If sh.itjust.works defederated from my instance you wouldn't see this at all even though you're not on sh.itjust.works.
In a nutshell, beehaw's server and the servers of the other listed instances are not talking to each other anymore. If new posts are made from either one, beehaw won't see them and vice versa. You can still pull up older, non-updated versions of beehaw communities/posts from before they defederated, but you won't be seeing any more beehaw-related activity on them. You might even be able to comment there(?), but no one on their side will see it.
Until they decide to refederate, any further communication is cut off.
If you're not signed up to any of these you may actually be in the best position because as long as your instance isn't defederated by any of them you can view it all.
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.
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
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.
That's true but there are nuanced social consequences for the entire group because of the actions one or a few individuals. The moderation model of Lemmy will be different and needs to start at the home instance. Because all it takes is a few people to act up and suddenly your instance has no content.
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.
Yeah, me as well. Seems kbin has a way more open minded view on things. They don't defederate from anyone, which suits me just fine. I wouldn't like to defederated from anyone, including lemmygrad. There are some interesting reads over there (at least for me).
Congratulations, you are the first Lemmy user I have recognized from earlier as an asshole. What's with the shouting and the pointlessly provocative language? Do you feel an irresistible drive to get attention?
Now I have to decide if I want to actually use the Block User feature.
If you want to call people faggots for no reason like it's 2003 just >>>/b/ dude, it didn't go anywhere. They'll probably reply to you with a bunch of (images of) dicks though. If it quacks like a duck...
Ironically enough I had just added several communities from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works to my feed on Beehaw. Luckily I can still see them on my "Subscribed" list - not the content, the community names - so I'm adding them to my kbin subscriptions instead.
I'm glad to see that kbin has gotten stable. I'd been trying to use it for days, but it kept freezing and crashing!
I actually am a little curious what TheDude’s opinion is on open vs closed registration policy. If having a closed registration policy is all that is needed for beehaw to refederate then perhaps that is an option, otherwise let us just hope the necessary mod tools (or more than 4 beehaw mods) happen to allow for refederation. It’s a shame since I feel like this is a really important / formative time and I do not think larger instances defederating is productive.
I don’t think we should reevaluate our policy just to get 1 specific instance to refederate us…. Anyway, Beehaw’s mindset has always been exclusive and restrictive, despite being a larger instance. Even if we switch to closed registration, they may disagree with our vetting process. It’s just part of their community ideals of creating a “safe space” aligned with their “community values”. I completely disagree with their course, but it’s their instance, so whatever, their call.
Yeah i started trying to register at .ml then Beehaw and was immediately put off about the user registration. Like dude let me join or don't but open questions with unclear reasons and motives is super off putting, especially when questions are like:
how do you wish to contribute?
I don't know I have not stated using your space yet, I don't have a feel for the server, nor the types of posts or communitiea available.
What communitiea are you going to join/use?
I don't know, whichever ones stand out as interesting, seriously get out of my business lol.
Beehaws just weird honestly, at that point they would be running this instance and how we accept and moderate users. I agree it's a very poor time and I bet reddit admins and redditors are laughing at us struggling to form a community.
Having neutral instances defederating each other over how they accept users isn't a good look. We don't need to be centralized that's why we are federated.
Isn't that the whole point of federating though? Each server can decide what is acceptable and what isn't. In that case, for whatever reason, beehaw decided that sh.it and lemmy not having user vetting is a no go for them.
From a user perspective (who've been active on Masto for a while)
Closed registration because it's what the instance can handle : Fine and part of the fediverse.
Moderated registration : How do you define who can join ? It's fine and even intended to have small instances for the admin and their friends, but if you go bigger, how do you deal with a real newcomer, not someone who's been on slashdot/reddit/mastodon for decades and just have to send a couple of DM to get an invite ?
I wonder if we'll get to something resembling the system used by private BitTorrent trackers. Invites and open registration periods where interviews or "proofs" of being a good internet user are required.
Well, in their case they are looking for proof that the applicant is a responsible torrenter. Typically what is accepted is screenshots showing one's private user page at other reputable private torrent sites showing upload-to-download ratio, whether they had any warnings etc. The major sites have highly experienced mod teams with accounts at a huge range of sites and can often cross reference the information in the screenshots if they care enough to.
I do find it a bit odd that they didn't defederate from all open ones, if the problem is ban evasion then people can just change. I don't think their ban evasion preventative plan is going to work at all. Some of the "restricted" registrations are really just delayed and some are more gatekeepy so it's not really a solution for them
Disappointing but I understand it in the sense that their goal has always been "safe, controlled community" way before they accidentally became one of the largest instances.
I had an account there first, and then made one on kbin since the federation issues with kbin could have potentially lasted awhile, but after this I think it's best to leave beehaw behind if this if going to be any indication of how they're handling their inability to properly moderate at scale. Big red flag IMO.
Well, look at the bright side: the evolution of descentralized federation now depends on the moderation topic. I wouldn't be surprised if someone takes federation to the next level and creates a moderation tool which would work out of the box for the fediverse, at the technology level (e.g. ActivityPub).
If and when this happens, federation has a bigger chance in replacing current centralized social networks.
I've been kicking around an idea in my head of making a Lemmy fork that has Tildes' ideas about modding baked in. (I would fork Kbin but I don't know PHP.)
In my experience, it's always been the best approach to select new moderators from the people known as active, high-quality members of the community. My goal with the trust system on Tildes is to turn this process of discovering the best members and granting them more influence into a natural, automatic one.
...
Trusting someone is a gradual process that comes from seeing how they behave over time. This can be reflected in the site's mechanics—for example, if a user consistently reports posts correctly for breaking the rules, eventually it should be safe to just trust that user's reports without preemptive review. Other users that aren't as consistent can be given less weight—perhaps it takes three reports from lower-trust users to trigger an action, but only one report from a very high-trust user.
This approach can be applied to other, individual mechanics as well. For example, a user could gain (or lose) access to particular abilities depending on whether they use them responsibly. If done carefully, this could even apply to voting—just as you'd value the recommendation of a trusted friend more than one from a random stranger, we should be able to give more weight to the votes of users that consistently vote for high-quality posts.
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Another important factor will be having trust decay if the user stops participating in a community for a long period of time. Communities are always evolving, and if a user has been absent for months or years, it's very likely that they no longer have a solid understanding of the community's current norms. Perhaps users that previously had a high level of trust should be able to build it back up more quickly, but they shouldn't indefinitely retain it when they stop being involved.
Between these two factors, we should be able to ensure that communities end up being managed by members that actively contribute to them, not just people that want to be a moderator for its own sake.
Combine that with things like AutoModerator (the person behind Tildes is the one who built AutoMod on Reddit) and it seems like a reasonable way for a platform to promote good stuff and cut down on bad.
You'll have to deal with per-community "power users" with a lot of power, but the alternative is unelected mods who can be just as bad.
I don't know if I'm ever going to get around to making that fork. But I think taking Tildes' approach to mods is novel and fresh, and I quite like it.
Wait, I'm confused, it's beehaw that defederated with us?
this is also not a permanent judgement. 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.
It’s easy to miss where something is coming from. I didn’t realize this was talking about shitjustworks until I went back and looked at the tiny parentheses next to the title.
I kinda wish they made it a bit more noticeable - maybe a different background if a post is from outside of kbin?
yea you cant see it by default on that app without clicking through to a user or magazine page and reading the details. I can see what they are trying to do in smoothly combining everything, but instance-specific posts need to have a clear source visible.
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.
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.
Good to know. I’m sure there’s a metric shitton of QoL improvements like that in the pipe, along with multisubs, account (and community) migration, etc. I don’t envy the devs - lemmy wasn’t ready for this lol. I’m excited to see where it grows from here though!
I’m honestly amazed by all of this, watching the birth of a platform unfold. I think I’ve been chronically online on Lemmy for the past few days xD Here’s hoping Lemmy will really take off.
Edit: one other thing I really hope to see is ex-Reddit 3PA devs picking this up! I’m not sure how many devs will ever want to make that gamble again after being brutally fucked over by Reddit, but I can only hope someday.
I was never able to sign up or log into Beehaw. It's very limited in terms of who it allows to sign up, and the waitlist is probably incredibly long.
This cutoff means that I'll have to live without being able to participate in a lot of discussions, which defeats the purpose of joining the fediverse entirely.
It's just as useful to me as using Reddit right now, even less so with how much less popular Lemmy instances are currently.
I was able to sign up. I am still not able to log in. None of the lemmy style sites work for me. Account created, go there to login and when I do it just sits there with the green button spinning forever. Same with sh.itjust.works which is ironic.
beehaw has a really insular culture that's strictly moderated. they have invite-only signups, are quick to remove things that are "off-brand", etc. their complaint here is basically: the amount of ex-redditors flooding lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works basically makes it difficult for them to moderate the way they want (cracking down on content that doesn't match their community), so they defederated, which removes those posts from their site.
Indeed the point of the "fediverse" is to have content between sites shared. but beehaw is a bit... special. and I have a feeling they'll defederate more and more instances as the fediverse grows, because their ethos is pretty much the opposite of it.
well the cool bit about the fediverse is that if you're not on beehaw, then you can still access sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world stuff. and if you're not on sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world you can still access beehaw stuff. so us on kbin can still view all three instances just fine. we're essentially the fediverse swiss lmao
If this were mastodon or akkoma i'd say that sh.itjust.works could get beehaw posts from any other intermediary, but im not sure if lemmy works that way
Yeah, we still can. If I type beehaw directly in my search engine I can view all their posts and stuff, just anonymously and unable to comment or interact.
What I mean by search engine is literally just Google, I don’t mean my sh.it search function. If you’re not accessing Beehaw through one of the defederated instances then it won’t know you’re from a defederated instance, no?
Your describing the limited mode that mastodon allows and Lemmy does not. Its effectively the biggest moderation tool Beehaw is saying they wish they saw in Lemmy. Some users in this thread are saying that's Beehaw being selfish. The posts you are currently seeing are outdated ones
Would this mean that there'll be no access to communities on Beehaw?
Could someone list the popular communities in Beehaw and their alternatives on other instances?
I think that'd be useful.
As far as I can tell, I can already do that on Lemmy. Not sure about Kbin. My own instance is linked with 486 other instances right now and Lemmy.ml is linked with 3577. Considering those numbers, I'd think manually whitelisting all of them would be a huge pain. So admins would be faced with a dilemma: whitelist and miss the point of the "Fediverse" or blacklist and give in to playing a never ending game of Whack-a-mole.
My best guess is there will be community-run blacklists that instances can automatically subscribe to in the future, similar to ad blockers, to make this part of instance administration less of a pain.
Yes, exactly. I don't know how email spam filters work. Looking up DNS RBL, I now understand it better. I agree, something similar to that would be more elegant and effective than something like ad blocker lists.
i suppose I could do that but honestly only like the Chat, Science, and Technology communities on beehaw. the rest of them are either too niche or just pointless
Well, it's unfortunate, but it's not baffling. It's quite understandable that there's no single sign-on for a system like this.
If you want to have both decentralization and a shared "identity" across all of the decentralized servers then you're probably going to need something like a blockchain to accomplish that. But people are already complaining about how complicated the Fediverse is, so adding a blockchain into the backbone will likely be challenging to pull off. Not to mention the knee-jerk reaction a lot of people have to the word "blockchain" or "cryptocurrency" regardless of what the actual practical application of it might be.
Hard disagree. You're stating a subjective opinion about the experience you want to have as a hard fact about the experience everyone else should have. You don't get to tell other people what they like.
Being on an instance that is well-moderated without you having to do that work yourself is one of the selling points of fedi apps. I am sure a huge number of people who signed up on Beehaw wanted exactly this.
It's very consistent on SDF, unfortunately. I can see in console it's not sending any internet traffic on submit, and the users themselves are displaying on here without any @'s.
There's a possible future where major fediverse sites switch to whitelisted federation to deal with spam etc. At that point, your small instance would have to petition all the major players to be let in. That would probably kill off most small instances.
My biggest fear is if some corpos decide to set up mega instances and start dominating Lemmy by doing this, since corpos probably have the best budgets to set up massive server infrastructure. I think the more Lemmy grows the more attention it’ll get from corpos, which is not great.
The alternative is already corpo owned from the start. The nice thing with Lemmy is that a server can choose to federate or not that said corpo owned federated server.
Big corpos will always try to get their greasy hands on anything that they feel can make them money. But at least we have tools to not see those servers if so is the wish.
I can imagine that something like approval instances make sense. Larger instances could connect to these to automatically federate with all the small instances that get approved by them. If an approval instance doesn't handle spam well, large instances could still defedarate.
big instances are more likely to stay up. smaller instances may just be some random user who might not be as interested in maintaining the site and may end up closing it. this happened to me when I used mastodon, I joined a smaller instance and they ended up shutting down.
it's extremely useful to newbies and less tech-savvy people who don't know how to find communities on other instances
at the current moment when federation is still a bit wonky due to the influx of new members, it's good to have the bulk of content you want to see be on your own instance. I can't login to lemmy.world, but I can log into kbin. But until recently I was only able to see posts 5 hours old on other instances from kbin.
True. The larger the instance the more likely some other user has already searched a community that you’re interested in, so the more results you’ll probably get through your instance’s native search. One way I’ve found to get around it is sites like lemmyverse.net, but it can be a bit inconvenient to use a separate site for your search engine, then paste the link back in to the native search feature.
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.
My understanding is that the subscriber count shown for a community is always exclusive to your own instance. Like if I go to ![email protected] I only see subscribers from midwest.social. But I still see posts and comments from lemmy.world users because my instance federates with both lemmy.world and beehaw.org.
The home instance for the community shows all the local and remote subscribers. Subscribing instance only show their own subscribers. It's moderately confusing.
I don't know if the home instance updates its subscriber count on defederation. It certainly should.
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.
Well I’ll take this opportunity to invite everyone over to The Garden : a bed for gardeners and everyone else to grow their roots and thrive. We have open registration and community creation.
It is confusing to create an entire instance that is devoted to one thing. I would much prefer joining The Garden as a community @ whatever instance you choose. I think you are going against the basic design intentions of the fediverse. All the best.
I think this is actually a great way to use the fediverse. At least from what I understand, a major principle of the fediverse is to give instances the freedom to build their communities in a way that fits the creators' visions.
I was just thinking that it'd be interesting to see a whole Lemmy instance dedicated to one community, and here it is!
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?
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.
The TL;DR of this is that the admins of Beehaw are extremely sensitive and their "safe space" isn't virtuous enough for them. Nothing of value was lost.
Looking at the blocked instance list of beehaw, they blocked mostly just tankie, rightwing and porn related instances. Far from being extremely sensitive IMO.
You mean they are blocking you and lemmy.world. I am on feddit.de.
And beehaw is blocking you, because your easy registration process allowed a bunch of trolls to wreak havoc. A better vetting process could prevent future instances of defederation.
lol! I was kind of looking at them like a cult yesterday. The argument about safe spaces, and supporting minorities seems like a red herring to me considering I got banned 2 days ago for expressing a minority experience. This isn't about "tolerating intolerance", they want an echo chamber.
The authoritian push is why I left Reddit. Beehaw can do what they want, but I want to talk to a people with differing opinions, and perspectives. I want to argue with people I disagree with, I want to learn new things and challenge my beliefs. I want to see people analyse, and break down discussions to show their flaws, I want to see ideas scrutinized.
Reddit use to be be a great hub for that kind of content, now any heated topic just gets locked.
Current internet culture makes me feel like Dennis Leary in demolition man.
Quote: You got that right. See, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy. Cause I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind if guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I've seen the future, you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sittin' around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing "I'm an Oscar-Meyer Wiener". You wanna live on top, you gotta live Cocteau's way. What he wants, when he wants, how he wants. Your other choice: come down here, maybe starve to death.
Judging by the insane amount of downvotes on my TLC, no one here wants that either. Seems to be mostly kbin users that are trying to be the self-righteous “voices of reason” in the comments here. If anyone should be defedded it’s kbin.
Is that your position based on the actual content over there, or is that just a reaction to an instance (any instance) defederating? Because that would feel like a pessimistic carryover attitude from reddit.
Lemmy isn't reddit. Everyone, including mods who have been doing this for more than the past week, is adjusting to the reddit migration & inpouring of users who expect it to function the same as reddit, and may be frustrated that it doesn't. /edit
I don't quite vibe with the comments in the thread that seem to say Beehaw's four mods should have had server structure and manpower "long before now" just because the instance has been around for 18mos. That's a stupidly brief period to try and evaluate through the lens of a flood of new users.
I'm not sure I blame anybody who wants to hit the panic button this week. None of us know what the traffic in any instance will look like in another seven days.
Oh? No surprise I guess. But I took that to be their meaning, yeah lol.
I was nearing the end of my rope that day with reddit evacuees, 48 hours into their acquaintance with Lemmy and dropping reactionary snark at the Beehaw thing instead of listening and learning about what the Fediverse is.
The Beehaw threads felt like they disproportionately full of day-old accounts saying "good riddance," and I was annoyed.
I think you may be misunderstanding me, edit: or I may be misunderstanding you, but if you're actually that juiced up about the Beehaw mods then I won't get in your way :)
Ideally the community of instances would take action against beehaw and defederate them en masse, strengthening the wall they decided to erect. Until they write up an apology letter.
But hey, that ain't gonna happen.
I'm not juiced up, I'm just watching the drama, and honestly, this is nothing unexpected. The type of people who like to suppress any deviation from the party line just can't act otherwise.
I mean, they said it in their post, they want to be a safe space so... VERY different from what reddit was, someone else already said it, but they'd be better using a forum than the fediverse (specially with so little mods).
Admittedly, it was a knee jerk reaction. I was annoyed since I had just read a bunch of comments/articles that basically said Reddit had completely reverted to normal. Once I really read what they said and poked around, yeah, no big loss there.
But for the average person, would new mods opening everything up be worse than staying shut down? The average person doesn't inherently care about mods.
And from comments here, people have either turned against the blackouts, Reddit brass has fixed commenting to seem that way, and/or bots have made it seem that way.
Sounds like the issue is too many users for beehaw specifically to handle — doesn't seem to be an issue for other servers, comparatively. All things considered, this is going really well!
I'm on antemeridiem, a smaller instance in comparison. Because neither beehaw nor sh.itjust.works have de-federated with my instance, I can access both to my liking.
Touche. I explained elsewhere, but I was frustrated after hearing that everyone in Reddit had turned against the blackouts. There were a few other reasons, but none worth getting into.
For what it's worth, while I haven't deleted my main Reddit account, I currently have no plans to go back. I've always been a proponent of having multiple options, so everything being at Reddit alone never sat well with me. I had tried lemmy and a few other things some time ago - usually when everyone protested Reddit - hoping something caught on. It usually ended up the same way - influx of people, fighting due to old vs new members, fracturing, quick abandonment, and everyone leaving.
I'm really hoping that doesn't happen in this case, even if Reddit goes back to normal.
Users will rush in, there'll be a high-water point, and the tide will roll back.
It's too early to guess how many folks will remain vs return to reddit, but I doubt anything that happens on Lemmy this week can possibly be representative of what things will feel like one, two weeks from now.
At any rate, reddit's numbers are way too artificial these days due to bots & spammers for their user metrics to be very meaningful, just like Twitter.
Stay the course where you want to see change. For me, that's no longer reddit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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?
I've been calling it a double-edged sword from the moment I knew that could happen in Mastodon and after I joined Lemmy, we see as normal to block lemmygrad from the beginning and that's understandable, but if an owner goes block-happy they could leave a lot of people stranded and inside their echo-chamber.
They'd be losing everything then and would be forced to migrate to other instance or create their own which may be too much as time goes by and people post more and more.
I said this from the beginning but until we get migration tools to carry our content with us to other instance, think of your account as disposable.
The software right now is extremely lacking in many aspects that it's hard to pin point which priority should be higher than other (specially since I ain't helping to it), but yeah I assume there appeared so many bugs when the waves started that we can only be patient.
So literally "Suffering from success"
Yeah I think a migration tool would be very helpful. I basically just signed up for the first instance that looked good without doing much research.
Having to do so much research just to join an instance is one of the biggest problems of the fediverse.
I saw some advice saying "don't overthink it, just choose one" and I'm glad I didn't take it because it seems like it couldn't be any further from the truth. Until migrating your account is an option, this just seems like a bunch of Reddits talking to each other, you can still lose everything if your local admin goes on a power trip.
Yes
Would be nice if there was a Link funciton. Not just on lemmy but on the fediverse as a whole. That way, you can create an account anywhere and "link" it to other instances so that everything is mirrored. That would mean that each time you post something it would have to travel toward all the instances
If we look at a similar but much more mature tech, email accounts either require something traceable to meatspace or another email account to set up.
Maybe it won't go that far, I don't know. We'll have to see how much fuckery the Fediverse attracts.
lots take issue w/ that due to the whole decentralized, free vibes thing, but I think people will largely not want illegal content so communities will probably take federation as a very serious thing as we grow.
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.
Very cogent writeup, seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw's decision in my eyes. People are getting really angry, and I wonder if those were the same people who bought into the whole "lemmys great because no one has 100% control" idea, only to be upset when the person in control of a slice they like decides they want to do something disagreeable with it. In the first place, one community shouldn't have carried the burden of the entire content and community of the "Gaming" or "Technology" sphere, it just kind of turned out that way because once they gained momentum, everybody else just flocked to it. And you can't blame them, that's where the content is, and the content is why they're here.
On the whole, though the software doesn't really restrict you to one or the other, instances are very quickly separating into two camps - viewer and host. Viewer instances are instances like mine, where the majority of users are consumers and not creators. Yeah, I like to run my mouth around these parts but most of the content on my instance doesn't originate from it. The host instances host communities, and so they carry the burden of having to moderate those communities and the servers/sysadmins carry the burden of having to relay all that communication to all the other instances. I think it's this part that needs work as we grow, because the best analogy for a Lemmy community is an email group. Can you imagine an email group with tens of thousands of subscribers all just emailing each other over and over again? Lemmy is pretty much just that, but displayed differently.
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.
Maybe moving a community to another instance will be possible at some point in the future. Who knows?
This may be the most well thought out response I've seen yet.
Extremely well put. Community migration should be something that would definitely be needed.
I think this is pretty unreasonable. They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with the existing moderation team. That was never going to work. Placing the blame on the open registration instances and mod tools seems silly. That said I hope this does lead to an improvement in mod tooling.
might be a dumb question, but how could've they prevented this?
I think they should have made a deliberate attempt to remain outside of the top three biggest instances like lemmy.ml. Considering the conscious decision to only have the admins be the only mods (that is there are four mods site-wide that moderate ALL communities) these issues were easily foreseen and they should have accepted that they could not realistically compete for the largest instance while maintaining their moderation goals.
They've existed as a small community for a year and a half. In all that time, surely they have met/interacted with some people they trust enough to delegate mod duties to.
And if they haven't.....well, that's telling on it's own, too.
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.
Exactly, they got rid of actual voting in order to power moderate. This is all on them, users could also block whatever communities they didn't like.
When the vast majority of the problematic users come from 2 instances with open registration, trying to do that is like stopping a flood with a bucket. I think theirs is a perfectly reasonable response to the troll attack they were just subjected to.
They could also just use a whitelist of users who are allowed to comment/post on there. I have suggested as much but we will see how they respond. I might try and contact a mod over there if that's possible.
Edit: I've been told by another user that this isn't currently supported. I think it would be a good feature to add to lemmy.
Their post explains why your suggestions are not actionable.
But why would it disrupt your subscriptions if lemmy.world and SJW are still federating beehaw? Can't one instance federate another without it being mutual? Is that the difference between a non-federated instance and a blocked instances, where blocked instances cannot even read your content?
Edit: Actually I think I understand. I checked the blocked instances and they are not blocked just delinked. So in that case, you must be a beehaw user who lost your subscriptions to communities on lemmy.world and SJW.
I just unsubbed from anything that was with them. Fuck em.
Who else here is chilling on their own instance watching this shit unfold with some popcorn 😂
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.
I posted this there, but since you can't see it
"I wonder if the type of community you're trying to build wouldn't be easier with a more traditional forum software like discourse. The infrastructure and moderation tools there have had much longer to mature."
I think they've picked the wrong tool for what they're trying to do.
Yeah. In the explanation they say that four people are taking the load of moderation, that can't scale. If the rest of the communities keep growing they may end up isolating themselves for not being able to adapt.
yea, four people is not enough for even the smallest community.
Glancing at my one-member Poetry community here:
Poetry people are honestly pretty aggressive about their shit, so
I honestly think it's somewhat irresponsible to have allowed themselves to grow as they did with only four moderators. Other instances have closed registration to maintain healthy growth. That should've happened long before this point.
Exactly. Moderation abilities are just as important as hardware requirements.
They also spend more time chatting on discord rather than modding lol
It was inevitable, though. Hopefully we see instances segregate nicely into tiers of lawlessness rather than just chaos.
I can see why they need to do it, they apparently only have 4 main mods for the entire server. with the limited mod tools available at the moment that is completely impossible to manage.
I hope they can get past this hurdle.
I've got to learn Rust like a madman so I can help implement mod tools. That's honestly the main bottleneck alongside discoverability.
Elsewhere in the thread right now there's an open troll. On Reddit you get silenced at -100 karma. What happens on Lemmy? Anything?
As far as I know there are no automod functions currently, so until a human mod manually deletes or bans that user, it will just stay there.
Tools will come, the code for the platform is fully open and the API well documented, so it wont be long before large communities can function fully federated with reasonable moderation.
It doesn't help that notifications are pretty nonexistent at times. You have to actively go to an instance via browser, or open jerboa to find out anything is going on. Well, I haven't found any other way to get mod notifications, and I've tried a couple of times.
So, for non admin mods to help out there, they'd have to commit to a higher degree of focus than what most people can offer.
Why would they think that would be enough to withstand the waves from reddit? That was just a disaster waiting to happen.
happened too fast for them I guess.
once better mod tools or possibly an invite only read-only sort of solution is available they would re-open to other large instances.
I honestly doubt they'll open again, they'll get so used to their safe-space that they won't be able to handle all the shitposting.
And we know mod tools can only do so much, if they couldn't handle it with not so many users, I don't know what are they going to do later if more instances keep appearing and growing.
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.
I ate soup with a fork once. Was it the smartest choice...absolutely not. Did it work... sort of.
eh I just read through the post over there, I suppose their concerns are somewhat valid, to a point, but there really isnt a "safe space" anywhere except between your ears.
really just reads like excuses to being lazy.
My problem with Beehaw in general is it reeks of overzealous and manipulative mods. The internet is full of awful people but to pretend you can make an island of purity where you get to decide what is pure is going to be a worse idea in the long run.
I find it ironic that they say fake niceness will only scare people off, but all the “ethos engineering” only promotes a culture of fake niceness. I don’t buy all this “walled utopia” idealism, especially since this place isn’t like Discord with private servers, but a public interconnected forum. Why choose to set up on the Fediverse if you’re not open to ”strangers” accessing your community? But oh well, I think they’ll probably defederate more and more over time (or switch to whitelist).
Reminds me a bit of parents who want the benefit of just putting their kid on the internet so they don't have to entertain the kid themselves but then try to censor everyone when the kid finds anything online they didn't want the kid to see.
Yeah, somewhat agree (they only had 4 main mods, that's rediculous) but they do raise a good point in the difficulty of maintaining a friendly and safe community with limited moderation possible.
What we need isn't large instances splitting off and defederating, it's better moderation tools and more volunteers.
I'm on a smaller instance and am still fully federated with all three instances involved, so it doesn't affect me, but that also means if I chose to be a dick and spam/troll on beehaw communities they would have to moderate me manually, or defederate from my instance too.
I suspect this will be reversed when better moderation is possible, or perhaps they will eventually be able to block posts and comments from other instances without defederating entirely if they want to remain as clean and high quality as they are attempting to be.
Totally unfiltered internet trash is just about as useful as being alone, though.
disagree - if there's "trash" coming in then you know you're not alone, just awash in detritus.
Either way you're not usefully communicating, though.
You've got to strike a balance where you're getting information just filtered enough you can usefully digest it, but no more.
i suppose that's true - i guess the main concern that I have with the top-tier instances defederating is that each instance becomes its own insular echo chamber - lemmygrad is a good example of this.
That's one of the main points of federation, if you as an admin don't like an instance you block them, if as an user you don't like the instance you're in you go to another one.
There are some key features missing here, the ability to silence entire instances so you don't have to defederate completely and account migration so you can just pick up your stuff and leave.
We'll see, I guess. It's very early days. Reddit could be like that in places already. On the other hand, there were subs that were pretty open-ended, like r/askreddit (although I'm bummed they're not blacking out).
I suspect users will flock to instances that are more trusted if given the choice, since nobody wants to be left out.
I wouldn't take this too seriously. If they can't handle the amount of new users then so be it, and the whole point is to not rely on a single instance. I could see the larger instances becoming closed safe spaces over time, in which case people will just leave them for other instances anyway. Nothing is constant but change.
There should be a way to export and import your subscriptions and saved posts so that you can easily transfer accounts to different instances.
Agreed. I'm not excited to have my history tied to one instance.
I think it's also important to note, beehaw has the largest amount of blocked communities
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
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.
Was this in the comments of the defederation post or one of the other ones? I’m just curious to read it myself.
https://lemmy.one/comment/177082
https://beehaw.org/comment/177082I believe this is the comment being referenced
Edit: They both link to the same comment, take your pickI think the comment they were referring to is this one: #264724
BTW FYI the two links you posted are not to the same comment. The second one is from a total different discussion too.
The comment id varies from instance to instance.
Jerboa doesn't take me to the comment directly but I'm going to assume this is the one lol
It was part of the annoucement .
After reading many comments I think my 'outrage' came, as it often does, from misunderstanding. Also, because when singing up most people say don't overthink it, it doesn't matter much. But now I'm seeing that it does matter to sign up for an instance with like minded people. As I see more of what seems to be the drive behind beehaw, it doesn't really resonate with what I want, but that doesn't make it wrong. It is ok for that group of people. We just need to make sure that communities of general interest that were taking off there because they were one of the largest instances are also present in a more open and accessible place, so we are not restricted to collaborate.
They are actively trying to be as clean and friendly as possible, and that's admirable but the tools don't exist for them to maintain that if they are fully federated. they are woefully undermoderated for how much traffic they are having to filter.
Once better mod tools arrive they may be able to re-open to other large instances.
Perhaps an option in the future would be for them to remain federated but somehow implement post/comment restrictions on outside instances to keep it under control.
But that is an issue too. Why would other instances allow them full access while being prevented from collaborating in theirs ?
I'm not really keen on their reasons for defederating, but this makes no sense to me. What do I care if a beehaw user is posting good content on my community but I can't go to their instance? It's still more content and engagement for my community.
problem is you don't have to start slinging slurs to troll people. People can still be nuisances and say bigoted things.
I see your point. I was seeing it from the perspective of discouraging stuff to be shared on other communities because it's already in beehaw, but you'd need an account to participate there.
But I see what you say, allowing them to contribute to other instances isn't bad even if they don't allow those instances to contribute on theirs.
That's each instances choice to make I guess, and it's part of the freedom of the platform.
beehaw would be within their rights to do it (effectively going read only to the outside, not currently possible but a requested feature is to have private or invite only communities), and if they are intending to be the clean family friendly option, it would be a valid choice to make if it were possible.
many of those are imported from the tier0 Fediblock list, which includes all the instances any decent human being would want to block as well. I don't see myself wanting any content from pedo dot school or teenagegirls dot biz.
many of those are imported from the tier0 Fediblock list, which includes all the instances any decent human being would want to block as well. I don't see myself wanting any content from pedo dot school or teenagegirls dot biz.
or youjo.love, for that matter
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.
When an instance has a specific rule, no NSFW for instance, it can't be receiving that content from other instances and serving it to its users because it breaks its own rules. You might want NSFW content but your instance's users agreed to that rule, probably because that's what they wanted out of the instance.
Kbin (I'm on kbin.social) allows users to block entire instances, rather than leaving that entirely up to admins.
The problem is that read access for a user means the content is cached on the instance of that user, making the instance owner potentially liable if we are talking about content illegal in their jurisdiction.
Good point, I hadn't considered that. But an instance can still strive to keep its blocklist as small as legally possible. This wouldn't be a big issue in most liberal countries anyway I think.
That's a bit of a silly equivalence to make, beehaw admins even said it wasn't a permanent or moral decision, they just need to figure out how to manage that from a moderation perspective, which is probably fair.
I just wouldn't take it so personally lol. Your number is probably in the middle of utter filth in the phone book (if those still exist)
we're on what list now?
True
i always browse defederated instances like a TV catalog, i'm glad there are instances like this where i can find some of the funniest instances on the right hand side, look at that there's a troll cafe, a shitposter club, pooper social, and lmao gangstalking services, lots of piss and poop yes, and lotsa feminists, which i imagine are terfs cuz afaik that's the only feminists that end up banned from lgbt friendly places
I understand why they did it, four mods is not enough for the traffic. However, I think they could've anticipated this better than just removing one of the largest instances. Hire more mods. It seems beehaw has banned so much that I am honestly unsure why they want to be federated. I like the idea of beehaw, some things, like limited communities and no downvotes are really smart. But the closed community mindset may kill it.
They do want to refederate when they get more granular options, but the federation options for lemmy right now is basically federate or not, which is kind of sucky, also I don't think reports bubble up to the origin server like they do on mastodon, I'm sure it will get there in time, but for now there isn't that many.
I'm just some dude observing this space and migrating from reddit - but I looked at Beehaw when all of this started and I immediately thought it was an idea begging to turn into the internet version of Animal Farm. If the goal is to moderate and ban based not on what is said, but on the interpretation of what someone thinks was said or implied...in a straight text based communication medium....?
That's a problem waiting to happen.
If there are interesting things happening there - and I never tried to join so I couldn't say - I think they may well become an echo chamber full of cliques.
I don't know what this space will turn into, but I personally like the idea of a semi open ended reboot.
It's a recurring fediverse issue - Mastodon has it too. Basically, there are levels of blocking at various points in the hierarchy and you block or get blocked to your tolerance zone. This means that certain norms get squashed(and there are some reasonable concerns about who this helps), but it also tends to self-moderate to the conversations people want to engage with. The "invasive free-speech" instances of Mastodon tend to end up isolated, but it can also be hard to get situated and find an instance and follows you're happy with.
Something I'm looking forward to with the forum model being added to the mix is a greater ability to browse for organized discussions.
liked beehaw but didn't join because they seemed overloaded and now I cant interact :/ shame on anyone from here that was heading into their communities and being assholes.
Their biggest complaint was something I found odd as a new user to the fediverse too. When I was looking for a home instance, I saw that beehaw required an application, but I could just create an account elsewhere and interact that way, skipping it.
It seems like (at least one of) the tools they want is to allow federation to other instances, but external accounts must still "apply" before being able to comment or post. That'd allow users on both instances to still view each other's content, but it's not as cut-and-dry as blocking all posts from external accounts like limiting would (if implemented) or worse, defederating and siloing from all.
Lemmy does not seem to include any kind of authentication on the user level (such as a user keypair and signatures using that on their posts and comments client-side) so allowing one user from a remote instance would at least trust the owner of that instance to not impersonate the user who is allowed to post.
In fact, how does ActivityPub in the threadiverse even ensure that the instance is who they say they are? The W3C document on it seems to indicate that there is no standardized way to authenticate servers to other servers yet.
That's a good point about the user authentication, but I'm not quite sure we'd need it quite yet to reduce spam in this way. It is absolutely something to keep in mind though.
I think the other instances allowing federation in the first place grants "I trust the owner to not impersonate users" part of the chain. In Reddit there's that trust too, the whole "I trust the admins to NOT edit my comments silently at the database level"...
I think it's totally fine for instances that want to be small and community-focused to not be federated with the greater pool of the internet. Especially when, as they've said, the moderation manpower and tooling isn't there to handle the extra users.
Personally, I wouldn't want to join a place like that (I've never been a fan of message boards or other niche communities), but it's their place and their rules.
Can someone ELI5 what happens when another instance defederate us? None of those are my main instance, so nothing has changed on my end with them...
Basically they stop receiving or responding to updates from your instance. That means their instance won't receive new posts or comments from yours, and any communities hosted on your instance won't be searchable on theirs.
This seems like a sweet mess, having different copies of everything lol.
It's the basis of federation. Think of it like regular SMS. You can try to send a message to someone, but if they have their phone switched off or blocked you, they won't receive it.
I'm not hugely familiar with how federation works or why it works the way it does, but why is this better than say instances only hosting what is put on their instance and the browser fetching from multiple instances? So when I want to view something posted on instance A with my account on instance B, instead of instance B keeping a cache of the post my browser just fetches the content directly from instance A?
Well, all the instances kind of acknowledge the originating instance as the OG and it's also the relay. For example, this reply goes from my instance, to sh.itjust.works, to your instance. If sh.itjust.works defederated from my instance you wouldn't see this at all even though you're not on sh.itjust.works.
In a nutshell, beehaw's server and the servers of the other listed instances are not talking to each other anymore. If new posts are made from either one, beehaw won't see them and vice versa. You can still pull up older, non-updated versions of beehaw communities/posts from before they defederated, but you won't be seeing any more beehaw-related activity on them. You might even be able to comment there(?), but no one on their side will see it.
Until they decide to refederate, any further communication is cut off.
And what happens when they refederate??? all the backlog of comments/posts will spam them?
See https://lemmy.world/post/149743 for the dirty details about how asymmetric defederation impacts us. It's stupid complicated.
Yeah, I read that thread, it helped me a lot!
If you're not signed up to any of these you may actually be in the best position because as long as your instance isn't defederated by any of them you can view it all.
I specifically just deleted my beehaw account and created one here because of this... This move makes me reconsider this whole lemmy thing.
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.
Exactly! And the idea that I fully cannot see other servers, or never interact with them anymore feels like wasted time.
Power tripping as always. Give mods a little power and this is what you get. What they want 24/7
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
My thoughts exactly
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.
That's true but there are nuanced social consequences for the entire group because of the actions one or a few individuals. The moderation model of Lemmy will be different and needs to start at the home instance. Because all it takes is a few people to act up and suddenly your instance has no content.
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.
Sure is on me for choosing poorly. However I'm happy to hear that migration is in the works.
Can’t predict the future. Can’t control where new communities end up growing organically.
Migration is in the works, but it's not a priority.
But muh freedoms
Yeah, me as well. Seems kbin has a way more open minded view on things. They don't defederate from anyone, which suits me just fine. I wouldn't like to defederated from anyone, including lemmygrad. There are some interesting reads over there (at least for me).
Congratulations, you are the first Lemmy user I have recognized from earlier as an asshole. What's with the shouting and the pointlessly provocative language? Do you feel an irresistible drive to get attention?
Now I have to decide if I want to actually use the
Block Userfeature.Have you tried 4chan? Because I'm pretty sure you make a great chan stan and would love all the childish channing.
Also, maybe try updating your vocabulary? Learn more words so you don't have to always sound like an angry, edgy, child.
First person I've seen actually go negative on Lemmy, good reason too.
You might be part of the reason behind their defederation with your vocabulary.
So you?
What? No, that was Voat. You know, the place all the insane racists went before it collapsed.
If you want to call people faggots for no reason like it's 2003 just >>>/b/ dude, it didn't go anywhere. They'll probably reply to you with a bunch of (images of) dicks though. If it quacks like a duck...
Ironically enough I had just added several communities from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works to my feed on Beehaw. Luckily I can still see them on my "Subscribed" list - not the content, the community names - so I'm adding them to my kbin subscriptions instead.
I'm glad to see that kbin has gotten stable. I'd been trying to use it for days, but it kept freezing and crashing!
I actually am a little curious what TheDude’s opinion is on open vs closed registration policy. If having a closed registration policy is all that is needed for beehaw to refederate then perhaps that is an option, otherwise let us just hope the necessary mod tools (or more than 4 beehaw mods) happen to allow for refederation. It’s a shame since I feel like this is a really important / formative time and I do not think larger instances defederating is productive.
But that’s just my uneducated 2 cents :p
I don’t think we should reevaluate our policy just to get 1 specific instance to refederate us…. Anyway, Beehaw’s mindset has always been exclusive and restrictive, despite being a larger instance. Even if we switch to closed registration, they may disagree with our vetting process. It’s just part of their community ideals of creating a “safe space” aligned with their “community values”. I completely disagree with their course, but it’s their instance, so whatever, their call.
That's why I'm here, actually. I like the idea of a safe space, but asking to join them to look at memes felt too much like applying for a job.
Yeah i started trying to register at .ml then Beehaw and was immediately put off about the user registration. Like dude let me join or don't but open questions with unclear reasons and motives is super off putting, especially when questions are like:
how do you wish to contribute? I don't know I have not stated using your space yet, I don't have a feel for the server, nor the types of posts or communitiea available.
What communitiea are you going to join/use? I don't know, whichever ones stand out as interesting, seriously get out of my business lol.
Beehaws just weird honestly, at that point they would be running this instance and how we accept and moderate users. I agree it's a very poor time and I bet reddit admins and redditors are laughing at us struggling to form a community.
Wouldn’t say it’s struggling, things will naturally fall in place. Doesnt need to be as centralised as reddit was
Having neutral instances defederating each other over how they accept users isn't a good look. We don't need to be centralized that's why we are federated.
Isn't that the whole point of federating though? Each server can decide what is acceptable and what isn't. In that case, for whatever reason, beehaw decided that sh.it and lemmy not having user vetting is a no go for them.
From a user perspective (who've been active on Masto for a while)
Closed registration because it's what the instance can handle : Fine and part of the fediverse.
Moderated registration : How do you define who can join ? It's fine and even intended to have small instances for the admin and their friends, but if you go bigger, how do you deal with a real newcomer, not someone who's been on slashdot/reddit/mastodon for decades and just have to send a couple of DM to get an invite ?
I wonder if we'll get to something resembling the system used by private BitTorrent trackers. Invites and open registration periods where interviews or "proofs" of being a good internet user are required.
How exactly do those BitTorrent trackers ‘prove’ that someone is a good internet user? It seems like it would be quite an onerous task.
Well, in their case they are looking for proof that the applicant is a responsible torrenter. Typically what is accepted is screenshots showing one's private user page at other reputable private torrent sites showing upload-to-download ratio, whether they had any warnings etc. The major sites have highly experienced mod teams with accounts at a huge range of sites and can often cross reference the information in the screenshots if they care enough to.
I do find it a bit odd that they didn't defederate from all open ones, if the problem is ban evasion then people can just change. I don't think their ban evasion preventative plan is going to work at all. Some of the "restricted" registrations are really just delayed and some are more gatekeepy so it's not really a solution for them
Disappointing but I understand it in the sense that their goal has always been "safe, controlled community" way before they accidentally became one of the largest instances.
I had an account there first, and then made one on kbin since the federation issues with kbin could have potentially lasted awhile, but after this I think it's best to leave beehaw behind if this if going to be any indication of how they're handling their inability to properly moderate at scale. Big red flag IMO.
Well, look at the bright side: the evolution of descentralized federation now depends on the moderation topic. I wouldn't be surprised if someone takes federation to the next level and creates a moderation tool which would work out of the box for the fediverse, at the technology level (e.g. ActivityPub).
If and when this happens, federation has a bigger chance in replacing current centralized social networks.
I've been kicking around an idea in my head of making a Lemmy fork that has Tildes' ideas about modding baked in. (I would fork Kbin but I don't know PHP.)
Combine that with things like AutoModerator (the person behind Tildes is the one who built AutoMod on Reddit) and it seems like a reasonable way for a platform to promote good stuff and cut down on bad.
You'll have to deal with per-community "power users" with a lot of power, but the alternative is unelected mods who can be just as bad.
I don't know if I'm ever going to get around to making that fork. But I think taking Tildes' approach to mods is novel and fresh, and I quite like it.
That's also how it works on StackOverflow and HN. The more karma you have the more access to moderation tools.
Link
Wait, I'm confused, it's beehaw that defederated with us?
This is c/[email protected] federated onto Kbin. Beehaw is defedding from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
Edit: So that is how you make a working link across the fediverse.
Just when I think I understand. Where was I supposed to see that when on kbin?
Right at the very top of the page in pretty small print (on desktop).
Where on mobile in my screenshot though? That's a big usability issue for kbin mobile.
The kbin mobile ui really does have a ton of flaws. I wouldn't have known this was beehaw if it wasn't in the title.
It’s easy to miss where something is coming from. I didn’t realize this was talking about shitjustworks until I went back and looked at the tiny parentheses next to the title.
I kinda wish they made it a bit more noticeable - maybe a different background if a post is from outside of kbin?
Yep, I don't see anything either. I once again am glad I went with Lemmy.
yea you cant see it by default on that app without clicking through to a user or magazine page and reading the details. I can see what they are trying to do in smoothly combining everything, but instance-specific posts need to have a clear source visible.
Jerboa crashes when I click on that link 😳
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.
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.
It’s a feature that’s already been requested that the Lemmy devs are looking at iirc
Good to know. I’m sure there’s a metric shitton of QoL improvements like that in the pipe, along with multisubs, account (and community) migration, etc. I don’t envy the devs - lemmy wasn’t ready for this lol. I’m excited to see where it grows from here though!
I’m honestly amazed by all of this, watching the birth of a platform unfold. I think I’ve been chronically online on Lemmy for the past few days xD Here’s hoping Lemmy will really take off.
Edit: one other thing I really hope to see is ex-Reddit 3PA devs picking this up! I’m not sure how many devs will ever want to make that gamble again after being brutally fucked over by Reddit, but I can only hope someday.
I know the dev of Reddit is Fun said they are NOT interested in making a similar app. Couldn't speak to the others.
🤣
lol
this is why y'all got defederated lol
I was never able to sign up or log into Beehaw. It's very limited in terms of who it allows to sign up, and the waitlist is probably incredibly long.
This cutoff means that I'll have to live without being able to participate in a lot of discussions, which defeats the purpose of joining the fediverse entirely.
It's just as useful to me as using Reddit right now, even less so with how much less popular Lemmy instances are currently.
I was able to sign up. I am still not able to log in. None of the lemmy style sites work for me. Account created, go there to login and when I do it just sits there with the green button spinning forever. Same with sh.itjust.works which is ironic.
I am out of the loop. Is there a specific reason why? I thought the whole point was that it is a "fediverse"?
beehaw has a really insular culture that's strictly moderated. they have invite-only signups, are quick to remove things that are "off-brand", etc. their complaint here is basically: the amount of ex-redditors flooding lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works basically makes it difficult for them to moderate the way they want (cracking down on content that doesn't match their community), so they defederated, which removes those posts from their site.
Indeed the point of the "fediverse" is to have content between sites shared. but beehaw is a bit... special. and I have a feeling they'll defederate more and more instances as the fediverse grows, because their ethos is pretty much the opposite of it.
It sounds like not much of value will be lost, after all is said and done. It can't be that hard to migrate communities out.
well the cool bit about the fediverse is that if you're not on beehaw, then you can still access sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world stuff. and if you're not on sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world you can still access beehaw stuff. so us on kbin can still view all three instances just fine. we're essentially the fediverse swiss lmao
If this were mastodon or akkoma i'd say that sh.itjust.works could get beehaw posts from any other intermediary, but im not sure if lemmy works that way
on kbin we also see mastodon posts. idk if we get the content of one instance reshared from another though...
Yeah, we still can. If I type beehaw directly in my search engine I can view all their posts and stuff, just anonymously and unable to comment or interact.
Those are outdated posts. See https://lemmy.world/post/149743 for explanation.
What I mean by search engine is literally just Google, I don’t mean my sh.it search function. If you’re not accessing Beehaw through one of the defederated instances then it won’t know you’re from a defederated instance, no?
Your describing the limited mode that mastodon allows and Lemmy does not. Its effectively the biggest moderation tool Beehaw is saying they wish they saw in Lemmy. Some users in this thread are saying that's Beehaw being selfish. The posts you are currently seeing are outdated ones
mod tools arent adequate (for now) to handle the influx of users basically, i believe. this comment about it is great: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/22433/Beehaw-defederated-us#entry-comment-90015
Would this mean that there'll be no access to communities on Beehaw?
Could someone list the popular communities in Beehaw and their alternatives on other instances?
I think that'd be useful.
only to people on the instances they are defederating from, so smaller instances and selfhosters will be unaffected.
Gotta wait for better modding tools and scripts to become available, wont take long.
but I can still access beehaw from lemmy.world and post on beehaw - so it has yet to occur or something's fucky
You will be able to see and post to anything pre-defederation, but it won't leave your server.
They did use future tense in the post. That's nice, it gives things a chance to move.
I mean, you can just have multiple accounts, no? I think a little redundancy is good in the early stages.
Or self host and just use one account
Until it will be easier for them to whitelist instead of blacklist and your own selfhosted server will be blocked.
As far as I can tell, I can already do that on Lemmy. Not sure about Kbin. My own instance is linked with 486 other instances right now and Lemmy.ml is linked with 3577. Considering those numbers, I'd think manually whitelisting all of them would be a huge pain. So admins would be faced with a dilemma: whitelist and miss the point of the "Fediverse" or blacklist and give in to playing a never ending game of Whack-a-mole.
My best guess is there will be community-run blacklists that instances can automatically subscribe to in the future, similar to ad blockers, to make this part of instance administration less of a pain.
Nice to see your view on it. It really helps understanding the workings of the fediverse.
It might just be similar to DNS RBLs in email.
Yes, exactly. I don't know how email spam filters work. Looking up DNS RBL, I now understand it better. I agree, something similar to that would be more elegant and effective than something like ad blocker lists.
Self hosting would be nice, but not everyone can.
i suppose I could do that but honestly only like the Chat, Science, and Technology communities on beehaw. the rest of them are either too niche or just pointless
Sure, it's just inconvenient.
Maybe making an account in a big instance is not that great of an idea after all. What benefit does it actually have?
100%. The best instance to be on is actually your own. Failing that, a small one where the admins are easy to get a hold of.
Big ones that offer extra goodies might become a thing ala Gmail, but I expect they will vet and monitor their users so nobody has to block them.
Edit: Annoyingly, I can't respond to Kbin users,
At some point they will change to whitelist, which will ban all single user instance as well.
The root problem is that identity is tied to an instance at all. For a federated system, the lack of federated identity / single sign on is baffling.
Well, it's unfortunate, but it's not baffling. It's quite understandable that there's no single sign-on for a system like this.
If you want to have both decentralization and a shared "identity" across all of the decentralized servers then you're probably going to need something like a blockchain to accomplish that. But people are already complaining about how complicated the Fediverse is, so adding a blockchain into the backbone will likely be challenging to pull off. Not to mention the knee-jerk reaction a lot of people have to the word "blockchain" or "cryptocurrency" regardless of what the actual practical application of it might be.
Hard disagree. You're stating a subjective opinion about the experience you want to have as a hard fact about the experience everyone else should have. You don't get to tell other people what they like.
Being on an instance that is well-moderated without you having to do that work yourself is one of the selling points of fedi apps. I am sure a huge number of people who signed up on Beehaw wanted exactly this.
It's very consistent on SDF, unfortunately. I can see in console it's not sending any internet traffic on submit, and the users themselves are displaying on here without any @'s.
There's a possible future where major fediverse sites switch to whitelisted federation to deal with spam etc. At that point, your small instance would have to petition all the major players to be let in. That would probably kill off most small instances.
My biggest fear is if some corpos decide to set up mega instances and start dominating Lemmy by doing this, since corpos probably have the best budgets to set up massive server infrastructure. I think the more Lemmy grows the more attention it’ll get from corpos, which is not great.
The alternative is already corpo owned from the start. The nice thing with Lemmy is that a server can choose to federate or not that said corpo owned federated server.
Big corpos will always try to get their greasy hands on anything that they feel can make them money. But at least we have tools to not see those servers if so is the wish.
I can imagine that something like approval instances make sense. Larger instances could connect to these to automatically federate with all the small instances that get approved by them. If an approval instance doesn't handle spam well, large instances could still defedarate.
big instances are more likely to stay up. smaller instances may just be some random user who might not be as interested in maintaining the site and may end up closing it. this happened to me when I used mastodon, I joined a smaller instance and they ended up shutting down.
it's extremely useful to newbies and less tech-savvy people who don't know how to find communities on other instances
at the current moment when federation is still a bit wonky due to the influx of new members, it's good to have the bulk of content you want to see be on your own instance. I can't login to lemmy.world, but I can log into kbin. But until recently I was only able to see posts 5 hours old on other instances from kbin.
True. The larger the instance the more likely some other user has already searched a community that you’re interested in, so the more results you’ll probably get through your instance’s native search. One way I’ve found to get around it is sites like lemmyverse.net, but it can be a bit inconvenient to use a separate site for your search engine, then paste the link back in to the native search feature.
Can't bothered beehaw users just simply block the instances they don't like by themselfes? Does this have to be instance-wide?
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.
Do subscribed users from the blocked instances still count against their communities' totals?
My understanding is that the subscriber count shown for a community is always exclusive to your own instance. Like if I go to ![email protected] I only see subscribers from midwest.social. But I still see posts and comments from lemmy.world users because my instance federates with both lemmy.world and beehaw.org.
The home instance for the community shows all the local and remote subscribers. Subscribing instance only show their own subscribers. It's moderately confusing.
I don't know if the home instance updates its subscriber count on defederation. It certainly should.
That would limit the issue, I thought the different sub counts was the instances not being up to date.
Good question
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.
Well I’ll take this opportunity to invite everyone over to The Garden : a bed for gardeners and everyone else to grow their roots and thrive. We have open registration and community creation.
I love gardening. Thanks.
Do you have a list of instance rules?
It is confusing to create an entire instance that is devoted to one thing. I would much prefer joining The Garden as a community @ whatever instance you choose. I think you are going against the basic design intentions of the fediverse. All the best.
I think this is actually a great way to use the fediverse. At least from what I understand, a major principle of the fediverse is to give instances the freedom to build their communities in a way that fits the creators' visions.
I was just thinking that it'd be interesting to see a whole Lemmy instance dedicated to one community, and here it is!
Lemmy.fmhy.ml is pretty open and no silly essay to sign up
I think it's actually Beehaw
I was really enjoying some of Beehaw's communities... Can TheDude request a re-federation?
Why is this happening?
Here's the announcement link viewable on kbin
Essentially the influx of users able to register without an application process is too much to moderate for them rght now.
Thanks for the quick explanation.
Read the post at c/[email protected].
Edit: Oh shit, I forgot. Go the instance itself over normal internet if they've pulled the trigger by when you read this.
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?
Oh well
rip guys. not surprising though given how they are over there.
So, different communities will just be made on federated servers?
Seems well justified based on the announcement post
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.
The TL;DR of this is that the admins of Beehaw are extremely sensitive and their "safe space" isn't virtuous enough for them. Nothing of value was lost.
Let's not create an instance war already...
Looking at the blocked instance list of beehaw, they blocked mostly just tankie, rightwing and porn related instances. Far from being extremely sensitive IMO.
Look again, they are also blocking us and lemmy.world.
You mean they are blocking you and lemmy.world. I am on feddit.de.
And beehaw is blocking you, because your easy registration process allowed a bunch of trolls to wreak havoc. A better vetting process could prevent future instances of defederation.
Check where you are posting. "Us" is sh.itjust.works.
Thanks captain obvious.
I don't want a curated space with a vetting process. Those that do can join those spaces, better off that way.
You can tell from that novel they wrote what their true intentions are. Read between the lines and pay attention.
I'm retarded what are their true intentions?
lol! I was kind of looking at them like a cult yesterday. The argument about safe spaces, and supporting minorities seems like a red herring to me considering I got banned 2 days ago for expressing a minority experience. This isn't about "tolerating intolerance", they want an echo chamber.
The authoritian push is why I left Reddit. Beehaw can do what they want, but I want to talk to a people with differing opinions, and perspectives. I want to argue with people I disagree with, I want to learn new things and challenge my beliefs. I want to see people analyse, and break down discussions to show their flaws, I want to see ideas scrutinized.
Reddit use to be be a great hub for that kind of content, now any heated topic just gets locked.
I don't know how to end this, but yeah!
Current internet culture makes me feel like Dennis Leary in demolition man.
Quote: You got that right. See, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy. Cause I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind if guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I've seen the future, you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sittin' around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing "I'm an Oscar-Meyer Wiener". You wanna live on top, you gotta live Cocteau's way. What he wants, when he wants, how he wants. Your other choice: come down here, maybe starve to death.
Scene.
You couldn't be more on point with this reference. I hate modern oppressive internet culture.
Judging by the insane amount of downvotes on my TLC, no one here wants that either. Seems to be mostly kbin users that are trying to be the self-righteous “voices of reason” in the comments here. If anyone should be defedded it’s kbin.
Finally a smart person. This is a good read on the situation.
test
Is that your position based on the actual content over there, or is that just a reaction to an instance (any instance) defederating? Because that would feel like a pessimistic carryover attitude from reddit.
Lemmy isn't reddit. Everyone, including mods who have been doing this for more than the past week, is adjusting to the reddit migration & inpouring of users who expect it to function the same as reddit, and may be frustrated that it doesn't. /edit
I don't quite vibe with the comments in the thread that seem to say Beehaw's four mods should have had server structure and manpower "long before now" just because the instance has been around for 18mos. That's a stupidly brief period to try and evaluate through the lens of a flood of new users.
I'm not sure I blame anybody who wants to hit the panic button this week. None of us know what the traffic in any instance will look like in another seven days.
//
And the announcement is hardly a novel.
I take that to mean "mingling with the minds of those who are ok with such an action is not worthwhile anyway".
Then again, the original comment is deleted by creator, so what do I know. Looks like the entire account is gone, dude left.
Oh? No surprise I guess. But I took that to be their meaning, yeah lol.
I was nearing the end of my rope that day with reddit evacuees, 48 hours into their acquaintance with Lemmy and dropping reactionary snark at the Beehaw thing instead of listening and learning about what the Fediverse is.
The Beehaw threads felt like they disproportionately full of day-old accounts saying "good riddance," and I was annoyed.
Well here's an account equal to yours in age saying good riddance.
I think you may be misunderstanding me, edit: or I may be misunderstanding you, but if you're actually that juiced up about the Beehaw mods then I won't get in your way :)
Ideally the community of instances would take action against beehaw and defederate them en masse, strengthening the wall they decided to erect. Until they write up an apology letter.
But hey, that ain't gonna happen.
I'm not juiced up, I'm just watching the drama, and honestly, this is nothing unexpected. The type of people who like to suppress any deviation from the party line just can't act otherwise.
I need more popcorn.
You’re right, the Beehaw post of is more of a compendium. Your comment is a novel.
I like how lemmy wanted to replace Reddit, but within days it's starting to completely crumble.
Growing pains
Beehaw seems like they're trying to be something different than a reddit replacement
I mean, they said it in their post, they want to be a safe space so... VERY different from what reddit was, someone else already said it, but they'd be better using a forum than the fediverse (specially with so little mods).
Yes it's called a cult
100% 🤣
Admittedly, it was a knee jerk reaction. I was annoyed since I had just read a bunch of comments/articles that basically said Reddit had completely reverted to normal. Once I really read what they said and poked around, yeah, no big loss there.
Meanwhile, the protest is not even done and Reddit is already booting out mods that have shutdown their subreddit. So Reddit is crumbling too.
But for the average person, would new mods opening everything up be worse than staying shut down? The average person doesn't inherently care about mods.
And from comments here, people have either turned against the blackouts, Reddit brass has fixed commenting to seem that way, and/or bots have made it seem that way.
Sounds like the issue is too many users for beehaw specifically to handle — doesn't seem to be an issue for other servers, comparatively. All things considered, this is going really well!
How's it collapsing? Beehaw's the only verse that's falling apart.
and it's not even falling apart, they just defederated temporarily
Oh they're falling apart. Just have a look at their modlog and discord.
I'm on antemeridiem, a smaller instance in comparison. Because neither beehaw nor sh.itjust.works have de-federated with my instance, I can access both to my liking.
That attitude on a three day old account surely isn't engaging with a sense of longevity.
Touche. I explained elsewhere, but I was frustrated after hearing that everyone in Reddit had turned against the blackouts. There were a few other reasons, but none worth getting into.
For what it's worth, while I haven't deleted my main Reddit account, I currently have no plans to go back. I've always been a proponent of having multiple options, so everything being at Reddit alone never sat well with me. I had tried lemmy and a few other things some time ago - usually when everyone protested Reddit - hoping something caught on. It usually ended up the same way - influx of people, fighting due to old vs new members, fracturing, quick abandonment, and everyone leaving.
I'm really hoping that doesn't happen in this case, even if Reddit goes back to normal.
I figure it's like any other flood.
Users will rush in, there'll be a high-water point, and the tide will roll back.
It's too early to guess how many folks will remain vs return to reddit, but I doubt anything that happens on Lemmy this week can possibly be representative of what things will feel like one, two weeks from now.
At any rate, reddit's numbers are way too artificial these days due to bots & spammers for their user metrics to be very meaningful, just like Twitter.
Stay the course where you want to see change. For me, that's no longer reddit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm in the same boat, which is why I both got aggregated and why I'm still here.
🤣