I don’t get what the problem is? Anyone can elaborate.
Edit: Thank you all for shedding more light on this topic. I’ve never really used flatpak but I do understand it better now!
All of these services are very new. Exactly what people want out of them — including what the people operating instances want out of them — is still being worked out.
This is not a commercial production service that you have a contract with. It’s an experimental system run by volunteers who don’t all have the same ideas in mind. People aren’t just working out the kinks — the process of discovering what this is all really for is still ongoing.
Expect friction. Expect weirdness. Expect rapid growth and, therefore, rapid change.
Also, expect people to fuss when they get surprised they can’t do something they want to. That’s also normal.
To clarify a minor point, beehaw isn’t new. It was established in Feb 2022, and it’s been thriving with a relatively small community up until this months crazy growth. They’re not so much finding their feet as trying to maintain an existing communities safety in the face of rapid growth.
Seems they’re just discovering what being “federated” actually means.
Not at all. They’ve been one of the largest instances on lemmy for over a year, and they federated widely during that time. The issue is that lemmy is still a relatively immature platform in terms of moderation features. The workload on their moderators to sustain federation and community safety with rudimentary moderation tools whilst the threadiverse population increases in size over 1000 fold is incredibly high.
So until moderation tools improve, their options are
- Give up their safety focus. We can assume that’s not going to happen
- Find more admins, which is easier said than done, because at this point in time, one of the lacking moderation features is the ability to add instance moderators. Right now, the only instance elevated role is admin. You have to be able to trust the new admin with the keys to everything.
- Defederate with instances that threaten their high value on community safety
My point is, there wasn’t really all that much content on other instances that would have posed a problem from a federation perspective before Lemmy blew up due to the reddit stuff. They largely were used to being in their own bubble with limited outside influence due to the obscurity of the Lemmy platform broadly.
I respect their desire to form the community how they see fit. That’s the beauty of the fediverse after all. I think it’ll be confusing for new users though who aren’t used to federation, both from those outside the instance and those who only created an account there because it hosted several large communities without really thinking about the implications of what the admins desire for their instance.
The answer is to create communities that mirror their biggest on more general purpose instances. A lot of contributors to Beehaw’s communities who weren’t on their instance probably feel a little miffed that they were helping pump content onto the Lemmy platform broadly, and now they’ve been defederated. Kinda sucks, but a good lesson for choosing your instance and the instance of communities you choose to contribute content to and help build, I guess.
Everything you’ve said here though is very different to your previous comment about them not understanding federation.
This reply is closer to the truth. They understand it quite fine, but have different priorities, and those priorities probably weren’t clear to a lot of their new members
@ada Egad. Yeah. I’d be very worried if someone messaged me saying pls be --moderator-- er admin. I’d be worried.
It’s the other way around: new people and instances are learning that federation also means that other servers don’t want to federate with you, and that that’s okay. This is different from the usual ‘freeze peach’ stuff, this is just communities saying ‘we don’t want to hear you’.
Especially when by all accounts they only had 4 admin/mods running all of their communities…
Good point!
(Folks should still expect change, and be patient with the people running this stuff.)
@ada ie: not putting up with toxic redditors. Not just finding it’s feet, but now recovering from a 4 week bender and woke up finding it’s knee caps as well.
Beehaw is meant to be a safe space, mitigating toxicity, while other instances, by having registration open to all without moderation, causes that.
By being federated, they can interact with one another. Beehaw defederated them in order to avoid that. The main argument being that the modding tools right now aren’t good enough to help them do it any other way.
That’s a bummer. I really liked Beehaw but wasn’t able to sign up for whatever reason, which is why I signed up here. Sucks that hateful jerks can ruin it for everyone.
Sucks that hateful jerks can ruin it for everyone.
The history of humanity
Sucks that some bad actors caused the defederation, but I understand the reasoning. Modding is a difficult and largely thankless job, and without a good set of tools to keep that kind of behavior out and nothing else but the big “block 'em” switch, it seems to have left them at an impasse.
The short version is that beehaw was struggling with the (currently) limited toolset available to moderate user content, and they saw a heap of users posting things they don’t allow on their instance were coming from the two other big instances, so it was more effective for them to defederate to try and stem the tide.
I imagine regeneration will occur in future when the lemmyverse stabilises a little, and when better mod tools are available
lemmy.world has had a handful of back to back queerphobic trolls spamming hate across multiple groups and instances.
They would get banned and come right back.
The reason they were able to do that is because of the open signups on lemmy.world.
Beehaw is an instance that takes protecting their members as their highest goal. They value it significantly more than wide federation.
And so they blocked lemmy.world, as it was a source of bigotry towards their members, and there were no other moderation tools available to them to resolve the issue.
New to all this, does that mean lemmy.world accounts can no longer even see any beehive content?
Yep. Though it’s not intended to be a permanent change as I understand it
Hopefully, as these federations mature, community/magazine moderators get greater ability to moderate content.
And these sorts of defederations may also serve as a “hey, do something about this” smack to the defederated instances. Provided that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works don’t actually want to have trolls like that among their users they could implement mechanisms to make it harder for them to sign up.
If someone wants to deliberately run a 4chan-like free-for-all instance, that’s fine, but I expect nobody’s going to want to federate with it.
Beehaw is an instance that takes protecting their members as their highest goal. They value it significantly more than wide federation.
This makes a lot of sense – thanks for clarifying it like this.
Hopefully we can find a way to stop trolls like that without having to block an entire instance. One of the reasons I signed up for lemmy.world was because the rules ban queerphobia and trolls, so it sucks to see that people are abusing the open signup to spread their hate.
What instances don’t have open signup? I’m on kbin but also signed up to sh.itjust.works and another instance because I had no idea what I was doing. The only difference was that one of them required that I write a quick blurb on why I wanted to join. What does a closed signup look like?
The one with the blurb “why do you want to join” is the one with closed sign-ups.
Exactly like that quick blurb you had. It was manually read and approved by an admin. Open registration means it does not need manual approval. You get the account instantly, maybe after automated email verification.
It’s not just the open sign ups, it’s the combination of multiple factors
- Lemmy.world is the largest and fastest growing instance leading to a lot of low-effort content/spam
- Their size and open sign-ups mean trolls just make new accounts when they get banned, making bans ineffective
- Lemmy’s moderation tools are not yet up to the task of dealing with this problem at this scale
@beefcat Alas that used to be contained to reddit. But since reddit is having drama. They’re probably trolling and or trying to ruin other platforms who just want to tell puns that aren’t half bad, but are more full bad. Unfortunately the developers or communities didn’t see a need to have features to do something about them. Part of the sad thing, is these twits wonder why reddit didn’t tolerate them their either.
There are closed signups (no new folk at all), open signups (everyone can join instantly) and limited sign ups (you have to apply to join and be approved by an admin)
How long does it take, do you know, for Beehaw to approve sign ups? I signed up 3 days ago and have yet to receive a verification email. I originally signed up on lemmy.ml and received verification in about an hour, but ended up deleting that account do that instance’s… problematic nature. I’m on sh.itjust.works right now, but would rather be on Beehaw.
I signed up [on beehaw] a week or two ago and never got an email from them, but there was a thread at the time where people were praising the quick signup turnaround time (I want to say this was either just before or just after the creator of Apollo announced he was shutting down at the end of June, so signups were building but not as quickly) and I tried to sign in on a whim based on that and it worked.
Same here
Try to login with the creds you set. I never received a follow up email and on a whim tried my creds and it worked.
That being said, I know they also are having problems approving all of the new applicants given the influx and manual process. Keep trying though! While I’m on Kbin as well, Beehaw is my preferred instance so far given the structure and moderation.
I like how lemmy.ml is the ‘problematic’ community and not beehaw that not even a week in lemmy’s surge is trying to enforce it’s ethics on the whole lemmy community by de-federating newer instances.
Ethics you actually don’t meet by the way, they just don’t bother to ‘officially’ reject people they don’t approve, it’s on their FAQ.
It was a good call. Literally all my negative experiences with users have been from lemmy.world. It’s getting nasty over there.
They defederated with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works apparently due to trolls. We got a post over on our main chat by some asshat who claimed to have posted dick pics on a feminist community over there and has since been banned. It’s largely due to the open registration policy both lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works have. They are probably going to blanket ban any instances with open registration.
Soooooo, is this instance possible going to be defedarred? Isn’t kbin.social open registration?
It definitely could happen. I know there’s been a lot of focus on insufficient moderator tools on Lemmy. We’ll see if kbin has the same issue.
Sounds like they want a safe space, and federating with more lax servers makes it hard to do that, so they’ve essentially blocked everyone coming from lemmy.world
beehaw.org blocked lemmy.world. which works like you’d expect blocking someone would work. they can’t interact with each other, can’t participate in each other’s communities, etc.
So why do I still see posts from them in my subscribed feed?
lemmy.world still “has” content from beehaw before the block happened. you can still see it and interact with it, but anything you do on beehaw communities that you have copies of won’t get synced to beehaw, and thus can’t be seen by anyone else on the fediverse.
you shouldn’t be getting new posts from beehaw at all, other than comments inside of non-beehaw communities (such as in a kbin magazine where a beehaw user comments).
I get a lot of new still from beehaw
yeah that’s definitely odd. I wonder if lemmy.world is getting the content from a different federated instance?
can you post in the thread? and if so, can beehaw users respond to you? I wonder what’s up…
Yeah, this has made it super confusing to me as a new user this week, because I thought that if beehaw defederated from us, we just wouldn’t see them, but the community has a bunch of beehaw stuff, and I was subscribing to them in ignorance. There needs to be some way for new users to be informed of this, or the communities to not show up if they’re just going to be crippled for us.
I could up vote, so I’d assume I can post as well. Now, I don’t have a purpose for commenting. But like you said. It’s odd.
I have many of these posts from Beehaw still in my feed. 🤔
yeah you should be able to post to it and upvote and such, but it’s unclear whether that gets sent to anyone other than lemmy.world users.
Right. Gotcha! Thanks.
deleted by creator
Well that’s annoying, I was enjoying a lot of beehaw content and they never approved my registration application.
Anyone know of the next biggest instance that federates with them?
kbin.social is pretty nice, though not nearly as big. I have an account there and it’s enjoyable. The UI is better in some aspects, worse in others.
You can also see the instances beehaw federates with and choose your own here:
Interesting that in that list are sites like skinheads.uk
That’s because it’s a punk music site. I can’t say what type of people they are because I don’t fit their server (into specific punk types, from UK, Australia or NZ, among others), so I’m not even gonna try to join. For the most part, punk skinheads are alright. I’ve know quite a few in my life and they weren’t racist a bit. Not to say there aren’t racist skinheads, but from my experience the majority are not racist and anti-fascist. I’ve even been to a couple of punk shows and the crowd was wild but there weren’t any assholes as I saw, but again, that’s only my experience.
Thanks for the info. I was just scrolling through all the server names and that caught my eye. I was also amazed at the sheer number of servers listed. Some of these federated servers must have only a handful of users (if not just 1).
It’s understandable racist skinheads ruin it for everyone. Dead Kennedys even wrong a song for them, nazi punks fuck off.
https://youtu.be/-MkRuV0aCcI (lyrics are in the yt video description)
As for the servers, there are quite a few that are personal servers for themselves, friends and/or family, or specific hobbies. It’s one of my favorite things about the fediverse. Anyone can create an instance for whatever they choose. It’s great.
Content from another instance only shows up on lemmy.world and you can only participate there with your lemmy.world account if the other instance federates with lemmy.world. Beehaw is not a fan of the higher moderation workload with the influx of lemmy.world users, whether they’re real people or bots. That’s why they decided to stop federating with instances with open registration, like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Some people are pretty upset about the decision while others show more understanding or even welcome the step by the Beehaw admins.
Seems reasonable.
I imagine an influx of ~100,000 Redditors is gonna be stressful on any community.
