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.

  • UnitCircle@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Well I was worried, but I can still access the communities I’m subscribed to from those instances so I can appreciate this more.

    My biggest issue with Reddit has been the lack of nuanced discussion. Everything is just black or white. If we can keep that element out of this instance I’ll be happy.

    • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      It looks like I can still see new beehaw content in instances like LW. Also, I can POST to beehaw communities in LW. For example: Beehaw folks didn’t see this post to beehaw News, but LW folks did.

      https://lemmy.world/post/158352

      Isn’t this super dangerous? Couldn’t I post a bunch of hateful content under a beehaw community flag that a large portion of the Lemmy user base would see. What’s stopping trolls from posting !lgbtq_plus@beehaw.org and making it look like c/lgbtq_plus is a place for lgbtq+ hate?

        • thgs@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Not entirely sure on what is the oversight.

          I’ve been reading for AP these days so it’s out of my understanding so far… I might be wrong.

          So from my understanding, the owner is the one that is responsible for holding the master copy. Given that the community is a owned by beehaw, all other places except LW that actually accepted the message(s) shouldn’t see it.

          Otherwise LW would have to ask beehaw every time if the message should be accepted, which would be very problematic and not close to federation but more like replication (“every server using activity pub is an active relay”).

          Imagine sending an email and your server not accepting until it receives a positive answer from the recipients server that your mail was accepted. You wouldn’t see your email at the sent folder up until 4 days. You wouldn’t even know if you actually sent the message after you click the send button.

          Also excuse my lengthy post, I think it’s because understanding AP is recent for me.

          If anyone that has a better understanding than me, please feel free to correct me

          • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            The concern is that, if you go to LW and are still subbed to beehaw communities over there, you can still post to those communities. Beehaw users will never see those posts from LW, and LW users will never see new posts from BH users, BUT LW users will see LW posts to the old community appendage.

            Meaning, you can now effectively impersonate a beehaw community on LW after it has been de-federated.

    • Synthclair@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      The posts and communities are frozen from the time the defederation took place onwards - only a “local” Beehaw copy remains.

          • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Ahh, that make sense now. Super confusing though. New users are going to think that content is coming from beehaw, but it’s not. Yikes.

          • OverfedRaccoon@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            So is this a defederation thing? I’m going to assume. Otherwise, what’s the point of being federated if I sub to another community on another instance and only the people from my instance can see those comments? Or am I missing something?

            • 1993_toyota_camry@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              Yeah, it’s because of the de-federation.

              A cached copy of the community exists on the remote instances, and users are able to engage with it.

              It seems de-federation stops the updates, but doesn’t remove remote copies of the communities. It’s not really an ideal situation, as I’m sure many users don’t realize they’re not engaging with the real community.

              I’ve actually seen some posts to that effect: “oh defederation isn’t so bad, I can still see everything / post”. Those users will be in for a surprise in a day or two when they realize.

              • OverfedRaccoon@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                Okay, cool. I appreciate the quick reply. I thought for half a second I didn’t really understand all of this like I thought haha. That makes way more sense. Thanks again!

    • kksgandhi@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Wait, so just to confirm, I won’t lose any of the communities I’m subscribed to?

      That’s a relief, I thought I was going to lose out on a lot of the Lemmyverse.

      • UnitCircle@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        So i’d read the rest of the posts to my message. It seems that you can still see the page, but an archived page that’s cached on the beehaw server. New posts won’t be seen.

        The problem seems to be that people from defederated instances can still comment on those communities. The community itself won’t see it, but others will. So you could theoretically make a community that’s been defederated from you look bad by posting offensive content.

        Huge issue