hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one:
we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.
we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).
an unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.
aside from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:
- these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
- the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
- our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
- and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for
as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:
There’s a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it’s not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can’t even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.
Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.
and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.
this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.
thanks for using our site folks.
As a temporary solution de-federation is a fine idea. Permanently, I fear you guys may be shooting yourself in the foot. I joined a few days ago after seeing you were federated with most of the larger instances, and you had a decent number of communities similar to subreddits. Again, I understand how you can see this as necessary to maintain a safe space, but it will most definitely be the death of Beehaw in the long run. I’ll probably swap to another instance for now.
how can I see how instances are federated? Or more specifically, which instance mine might not be federated with?
Edit: found it, on an instance there’s a link “instances” at the bottom, which separately lists linked and blocked instances. Also the awesome-lemmy-instances github has columns with counts for *blocked *and blocked-by, to get a quick idea (but no idea how up to date those are).
@alyaza I think the “solution” here is worse than the problem.
I am not going to stand for this.
I didn’t come here into the fediverse to have instances dictate on their whim that I’ll not have access to something.
This goes completely against the idea of having an unified platform. You can of course do whatever you want, but I’ll not be part of a closed garden.
I think your idea of what federation should look like is not quite right, which is okay, it’s not an insult, it’s new to many of us.
The idea isn’t that everything is open, with a unified platform that shares everything, everywhere. The Lemmy software is open source, but the way instances are moderated is highly customizable, and that is an intentional design decision.
You’re probably used to common moderation styles on Reddit, where users have more control over content via up/downvotes, and some Lemmy instances may run just like that, taking a more hands-off approach to moderation. But Beehaw is not like that. The goals and moderation style here are different. Beehaw is looking to create a different kind of space, with more control over what’s posted. There are pros and cons to this, which are beyond the scope of this comment to explore. The point is this: different Lemmy instances are run by different people, with different visions and styles. If you don’t like how Beehaw is run, it’s probably going to be a better experience for you, as well as the people here who do like how it’s run, if you find an instance that more closely aligns with what you’re looking for.
But coming onto someone else’s instance and aggressively demanding things conform to your desires or trying to inform the owners of what you will or won’t “stand for” is rude, though. There’s a better way to communicate with people, and in the future I hope you choose grace.
Very well said. Federation is supposed to be for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that individual servers have to cater to everyone.
Very well said. I wish I could write out my thoughts as eloquently as this!
The idea isn’t that everything is open, with a unified platform that shares everything, everywhere. The Lemmy software is open source, but the way instances are moderated is highly customizable, and that is an intentional design decision.
I dunno, that’s like saying “various mailservers choose to have different rules for their users, and we choose to block some of those mailservers because we disagree with how they’re ran”.
And while that’s technically in your power, and might make sense if it actually is a mailserver that’s sending 100% just spam, it doesn’t really make sense if you block any significant number of normal users.
I think the ideal way forward would be having individual blocklists, where each instance would have defaults for its users, but the user could choose to un-block the remote instances if they wish. Defederation should be reserved only for extremely disruptive instances, and even then there should be an appeal process or a yearly (or so) re-evaluation.
(obligatory I’m not on beehaw but still think this sets a dangerous precedent and should be discussed)
I think that the whole point of federation is that you, the end user, have the option of choosing where you want to go. You want to use those other instances, nobody is stopping you. You can actually use as many as you want. The instance owner gets to choose what is displayed on their instance, and that’s OK as well. You even have the option of making your very own instance and displaying everything from everywhere. Nobody is dictating what you can or can’t see. They’re just choosing not to be the ones to show it to you.
I’m a bit new to this whole federation thing. As I understand it, it’s supposed to be like email?
I don’t think I’ve ever heard something similar happening in email space. For example: Hotmail can suddenly decide that Hotmail users can only email other Hotmail users going forward.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the admins’ concerns. Just trying to understand about federation more.
It absolutely does happen with email, you just don’t notice it. You could just start sending porn to as many emails as you can find. If you use a reputable email provider like Gmail or Yahoo, it won’t take them too long to ban you. If you stand up your own email server and do the same, your whole server will be blocked.
Mostly this ends up as transparent to users, but it does happen and is actively managed.
It’s a bit of a tangent, because public communities are different from private email, but the defederation concept exists in both.
I think the imortant difference to email here is that communication is open to everyone, not person to person. This creates the need for moderation and selection.
“I’m not going to stand for this” Dude just move to another instance. Literally no one is stopping you. It’s the whole reason for the fediverse. They can manage their instance as they see fit. You sound like a complete keyboard warrior, get over yourself and move on.
They’re on lemmy.ml, not even on any of the effected servers.
If it’s a bad decision, the fediverse will move on without fragile instances like beehaw. If it’s a good decision, beehaw will be even better from now on.
Just wait and see. The invisible hand of the free market will set things right!
I agree in theory, but if we want to attract regular people from Reddit, this is really bad - if one day they wake up and don’t see half of the communities they expect they’ll just be pissed and probably leave entirely.
I would like to point out to you, this decision doesn’t impact you at all. Your account appears to be on lemmy.ml. the only thing this decision does is prevent users on Beehaw from interacting with content on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works and vice-versa.
As a user of beehaw.org, I’m fine with this choice. If I discover content I want to engage with on a defederate instance I will create an account that can interact with it along with my existing account on Beehaw.
I had missed that, and have been spending the past few days wondering why my feed got so serious (and, well, kinda boring). Beehaw has a lot of solid content to be proud of, but a number of the most interesting and thought-provoking subreddits were re-created on lemmy.world’s side. This is your prerogative of course, and I support every decision you take as an admin team, you can only do what you can do; but with this, it seems to me like having an account on Beehaw doesn’t seem to have much of a point anymore…
I just created my new account on lemmy.world, and I’ll keep this one around just in case the decision gets reverted, but this post also serves as my farewell and good luck to this community. 👋
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This is really hard to process.
I came to beehaw because it seemed to very welcoming and the fediverse provided freedom which was excellent. It is difficult to process because now users on beehaw are being told “you can be open and welcoming as long as you don’t dare integrate your beehaw and lemmy world experience”. Hopefully the beehaw staff understand that ultimately, users desire freedom to choose how they want their online experience.
I can only see this hurting beehaw in the future and hopefully this is a short misstep and not a permanent decision. The only reason that beehaw has seen massive growth is because of the association with lemmy world and other popular instances. This fragmentation will only hurt Lemmy when Reddit was seen as a “one stop shop” for all posts.
I came to beehaw because it seemed to very welcoming
I think they’re trying to preserve that
users desire freedom to choose how they want their online experience
This hasn’t curtailed that freedom in any way. You can sign up at one of many other instances (lemmy.ml for example) and interact with beehaw and lemmy.world and wherever else. In fact you might say this move affords additional freedoms for people to choose their own experience because beehaw will be free fro mthe noise coming from the instances they’ve defederated from.
I can only see this hurting beehaw in the future
This assumes that the objective is continued rapid growth. Like every instance wants to be a reddit alternative. The opening post pretty much says that’s not the objective.
I would also add that you seem to have overlooked the difficulties OP mentioned in administrating the instance. That’s easy to do coming from commercial sites where people are being paid. It sounds like there are four people who have a little experience, but very little time and resources to spend running the site. Additionally as they said in the post they’re running into the limitations of lemmy’s ability to moderate a large community. One of the fundamental characteristics of volunteer contributors is they’re free to curtail or discontinue their services at any time. I saw one of the admins of beehaw in another post say that it’s been more than a full time job over the last few weeks, on top of all their existing full time jobs. Imagine you’d poured 80 hours over the last fortnight into supporting a community, then telling that community that it’s not sustainable, and that community saying “I can only see this hurting […] hopefully this is a short misstep”
Thank you for this in the short term. Not gonna lie, I was a little grossed out by all the furry / anime porn / gone wild stuff that was crossing my feed when I hit all. No matter how fast I blocked the communities, I couldn’t get them all. I’m not a prude person at all but I also don’t come here to surf random porn.
I hadn’t seen any of that. Doesn’t the unchecking “Show NSFW content” in settings prevent that?
If that stuff was properly marked as NSFW, then yes. In any case, NSFW is a broad term and does not have to mean gore/violence/copulating furries.
Hmm. I see. How do other sites manage that then?
On the-website-that-shall-not-be-named, I didn’t see it perhaps because the only unsubbed section I would look at was “Popular,” which probably self moderates pretty well.
Still trying to figure out how to curate well on Lemmy. Federated Top Day seems decent and I haven’t run into NSFW (yet).
I am not even sure whether Reddit allows NSFW subs to appear on /r/Popular.
r/popular is the default frontpage subs. It’s like 15 or so subs. r/all is the one that’s “everything.” Neither allow NSFW subs (but do allow NSFW posts submitted to posts that are in that set of popular subs / “all” subs)
That explains it. Thank you.
But i presume it all depends on classification. I’ve never posted NSFW, but I presume not checking the box means the only way it goes down is via moderation both on Lemmy or over on reddit.
Do whatever y’all need to do, appreciate the transparency.
Thank you.
I know what it’s like to try to build up something good only to have trolls try to take it over. It’s nice to think that kindness and guidance can make everything shiny and happy, but the reality is that sometimes you just have to shut the door to bad actors and lock it behind them.
Some people have a need to try to ruin things for others. There’s no reason to give them a platform. Actions have consequences.
Yeah, I’m perfectly fine with this decision. And if I want to see content from and interact on those instances, I can (and have already) create accounts on those instances. No harm no foul.
Commenting sure. But until some instance agnostic subscription feed comes out it looks like there is no reddit alternative to a reliable subscription feed right now.
Having to juggle multiple accounts to keep track of subscription feeds instead of one unified feed is a pretty big con. Not so much on the commenting end since that I do understand the reasons for.
The alternative it looks like for now is to subscribe to an instance thats both not blocked by beehaw and doesnt block lemmy.world
it looks like there is no reddit alternative to a reliable subscription feed right now.
Lemmy was not built for scale, and the everything from large-community moderation to federation message copying is going through problem identification and optimization.
The Beehaw.org website is regularly malfunctions for me, showing the Lemmy 0.17.x problem of getting the wrong voting data on postings. Hopefully the forthcoming 0.18 removal of websockets will eliminate a lot of that.
Lemmy, as it stands today, really isn’t ready for anything near like the activity of from page /r/all community on Reddit.
I don’t mean so much in activity. Just the subscription to communities part.
Like knowing I could subscribe to like gamedeals and pcgaming and knowing that I can rely on my feed to contain posts from those communities as opposed one of them defeding from each so now having to subscribe to separate instances of pcgaming and gamedeals to see activity from those communities in my subscription feed. So now having two subscription feeds as opposed to one unified one to keep track of.
I think you might just not be interested in federated services. The whole point is that it’s a network of independent services, not a single unified platform. For some people that works well and for others it doesn’t. The fediverse solution would be to create a new account on an instance that federates with both instances, but you’re probably going to end up playing whack-a-mole until things settle down and I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to do that.
I wish we could federate our own user accounts on unrelated instances with each other, separate from the instance federation? So beehaw and lemmy.world can be unfederated, but if I have an account on beehaw and another account on lemmy.world, then I can connect those two accounts so that I can see the posts from both accounts in each one? Is something like this possible?
That way individual users wouldn’t be so inconvenienced, but beehaw would still be isolated from lemmy.world’s unrestricted signups/different culture in the same way.
I’ve been seeing a lot of low-effort content lately, and I suspect it’s coming from users who want their Reddit alternative, and they want it now. So, they see that Beehaw has a large community, and decide it’s a perfect place to start content-barfing.
I think the admins have been clear that they’re not trying to create a replacement for Reddit here, though. Everything under the sun does not have to be re-posted, just content that you actually want to discuss with this community specifically. When I see five posts created by one user in under a minute, I can’t help but think that the intent there is not to spark discussion. And, of course, the volume is problematic for the mods when they don’t have the tools they need to manage it.
I was seeing that, too. And it was turning me off. I’ve definitely been spending more time on more discussion-based platforms, instead of on Beehaw. I’m tired of reddit’s constant one-like jokes and drive-by memeing that’s so common, even in more discussion-based subs.
There’s certainly a time and place for having some fun – and I’ve done my fair share of memeing on reddit – but it doesn’t have to be everywhere. It is disappointing since it’s a loss of easily accessible content, but I’m sure we’ll be able to find that elsewhere. Even if it means going to those instances on a separate account.
I think I’m starting to observe that I define lurking and contributing differently than a lot of redditfugees. To me lurking is browsing, reading, and consuming without ever commenting or submitting. That was how we used the term back in 2010, 2011 anyway. And it seems like the call to action to contribute is interpreted by many to just dump all the thoughts, memes, shitposts, and whatever else into the threadiverse regardless of quality.
I want to make it abundantly clear, if that’s what people want, that’s great, I’m glad they can find that (196 on blahaj seems particularly hot for that) but it’s not what I want. I’ve immediately noticed myself far more engaged with beehaw than I’ve been with reddit in a long time and I attribute that to the thoughtful nature of the community that’s been cultivated by the administrators. I can understand that people who were on beehaw and were subscribed to communities on these other instances are frustrated and disappointed. I’m one of those people. But I’d rather create an alt on another instance to interact with those communities than have administrators not build the communities they want.
And to anyone saying that beehaw is engaging in censorship, let me ask you this. Would you like it if anyone and everyone could enter your backyard and say anything they want to you? These online communities are an expression of our human right to associate. All beehaw is going is saying there’s a particular vibe they want in their backyard and that to walk through the gate you have to abide by certain rules. That’s not censorship. That’s community building
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God, I. I don’t know why, but just you bringing up the ability to have a post last for more than a few hours… It hit me for some reason.
I never really realized, but reddit always felt so fast, looking back. A constant, unending stream of novelty. And the only way to be heard was to get in before the rushing tide. It’s nice here. I can reply to the people who talk. I’ll post and people will engage, I can engage. It’s obvious now but I can’t believe I didn’t notice for so long.
I agree. Beehaw has a different goal (which is thoroughly explained in the stickied FAQ post), and it is not to be a Reddit replacement. I’m actually a fan of the environment and goal here - I’ve actually found myself responding to posts from a week or two ago because I actually wanted to contribute, whereas I wouldn’t bother on a Reddit post more than a couple of hours old because it would just get drowned out by a flood of low-effort content.
Yes!! I’ve also found myself actually reading articles that are posted rather than just skimming headlines because people actually seem to want to engage beyond the same few points that were repeatedly made on Reddit
Exactly - the best way I can think to describe it is that I no longer feel like I’m going to be locked out of discussion because I took too long to actually read what the conversation was about. For me personally, that turned into me becoming a terminal lurker, but others wind up skimming headlines or pieces of longer comments and trying to rush to respond. In the latter case, that wound up translating into shallower, briefer discussion points in an effort to keep up and try to be seen. Overall, it seems like Beehaw is steering more towards longer-form, slower discussions (as demonstrated by the long posts written by the various admins and mods). I won’t say this is an objectively good or bad thing, it’s a matter of personal preference, but it’s definitely more my speed since I try to be deliberate with what I post and tend to take a while to digest what I’m reading and try to form a more substantial response. I do definitely see why that wouldn’t be what people might be looking for though - it’s kind of the difference between quick-witted banter or more meandering navel-gazing (for lack of better descriptions).
A few years back, there was a short-lived site that attempted to be a better site like Reddit. Unfortunately, they started up around the time that The_Dipsht and alt-reich subreddits were starting to get quarantined. Amusingly, many of them tried to move to Voat, who by then had become so toxic that they were called poseurs and told to go away.
So they showed up at the door of the new site - who handled them very gracefully. There were suddenly a pile of alt-reich white supremacy communities on the site. The admins basically told them and their creators, “Gee, thanks for stopping by. We’re so glad you thought of us. Here’s your hat. Sorry you can’t stay longer. Bye now, have a nice day!” and deleted all the communities, the people who created them, and those who had subscribed. And that was that.
Unfortunately, people weren’t yet fed up enough with Reddit and the new site didn’t get enough people to stick around. It was a lovely little place, not unlike what Beehaw is trying to do.
Newbie user here. You’ve gotta do what you gotta do. Thank you for fostering this as a safe space, both for the users and also yourselves as admins. This community doesn’t work at all for anyone if it doesn’t work for you.
Full support on defederation from me - if we lose a couple folks jumping ship to other instances over this then maybe that’s also for the best too.
Disappointing to see the largest lemmy instances fracturing so early. But this also confirms my decision to self host my own instance - to avoid this sort of thing.
Well, what happens when whitelisting is being introduced?
If it comes to that why even bother with federation?
Yeah, that’s why I am not too happy with Beehawk’s decision. I think it’s definitely a possibility that we end up with things like whitelists. Defederating from large instances that are not clearly not abuse/spam/trolling/extremist should never be done lightheartedly. When one of the largest instances, defederates with two of the other largest instances, that lowers the threshold for other instances to make even more rigid defederations. And then whitelists are only the next step.
Fuck this. Now is a time for that downvote button.
Beehaw is not meant to be a direct Reddit replacement. Please read more carefully on how the site’ admins are wanting to run it, before clicking on the signup button. It is frustrating perhaps that this step (defed) has been deemed necessary, but it is not needed to cuss and ask for another feature we on purpose do not have here. The latter too, has been quite transparently and elaborately explained on the site even before you sign-up (please, lurk better before joining).
Oh I have been lurking boy :* Get a grab on yourself and relax. This is the FUCKING internet!
you’re welcome to disagree both with our decision and the person replying but this isn’t acceptable conduct for doing that
You will probably end up disconnecting yourself from every growing instance until you’re standalone. A standalone Lemmy instance, what even is the point ?
I think this is very disappointing, and exceptionally selfish, to split up some of the largest Lemmy communities while a mass Reddit exodus is ongoing. We should be sticking together and trying to grow the Fediverse as a whole, rather than trying to wall off any one single community at this point. That said, I hope this is the end of this approach, and that smaller instances, particularly ones that support a particular community won’t be pushed aside as well (hello from Lemmy Portugal).
This is all well and good, but in practical terms it means that if your account is not on beehaw then you should divest your involvement with beehaw communities because it is less likely to remain federated with your home instance. Which may be what the beehaw community wants, from the sound of it.
