- cross-posted to:
- main@dataterm.digital
23
- cross-posted to:
- main@dataterm.digital
ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works - Beehaw
beehaw.orghey folks, weāll 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. ā we have been concerned
with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy isāparticularly with
federation in mindābasically since it began. i have already related
[https://beehaw.org/post/520044?scrollToComments=true] how difficult dealing
with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four
Admins, and increasingly weāre being confronted with external vectors we have to
deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below). an
unfortunate reality weāve also found is we just donāt 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 donāt scale well. we have a list of
improvements weād like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and
federation if at all possibleābut weāre unanimous in the belief that we canāt
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 whatās mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by
and large, boils down to: - these two instancesā 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 donāt care about what our instance stands for as Gaywallet puts it,
in our discussion of whether to do this: > Thereās a lot of soft moderating that
happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But itās not just
that, thereās a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust
and support to open up, and itās really hard to trust and support whoās around
you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when
thereās more hostility around them. Theyāll even shut themselves off when
thereās fake nice behavior around. Thereās a lot of nuance in modding a
community like this and itās 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 canāt
even assess that for people who arenāt from our instance, so weāre walking a
tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isnāt
sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a
short timeframe. > > Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically arenāt 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 itās in effect. but we hope you can understand why weāre 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 communityās owner, i should
addāwe just have differing interests here and thatās fine). in the future as
tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of
newcomers settles down, weāll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating
with these communities. thanks for using our site folks.
Interesting bit of news for the threadiverse. All three of these are fairly large lemmy instances
Some of yāall getting angry need to look at yourself in the mirror. The whole point of federation was to allow communities to do things like this if they want.
A lot of new people are going to see this mudslinging and rightfully turn around. Nobody is coming to Lemmy to see drama between instances.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it. The fact that federation has been the only discussion since the blackout is not good for the alternatives to reddit. My whole life is tech and if itās this distracting to me I canāt imagine any remotely average user being interested. The fact that this was the perfect time to be part of an alternative but the whole experience has mostly just proven reddits āgive it a weekā response true.
That was never going to happen, not even in the best possible case.
Far left and far right are always going to split off. Do you want to be having discussions about race with neo nazis? I donāt. Let them go to their own dark corner of the internet.
No. If an instance hosts toxic communities then your instance can choose to defederate from it. You donāt have to wait for the centralized authority to ban them. Itās about being able to choose your admins and form a web of āgoodā communities.
kbin is only live a month or soā¦ of course there will be problems and missing moderation tools - it wont be much better for lemmy.
There is no perfect time - some people will stay some will go back to reddit witout any change. thats a user thing not the fault of beehaw or the federation of servers.
I do think itās fair to criticize the decision to try to be one of the largest instances while only having four moderators. They should have accepted a place as a midsize instance with midsize communities in order to maintain their moderation goals. Or they could have worked to get more moderators. Blaming the defederated instances and mod tools seem disingenuous at best. That said mod tools undoubtedly need improvement.
To be fair, they said the reason they were defederating from those two instances in particular is because most of their moderation involved people from them. They didnāt expand beehaw beyond what they could handle, the rest of lemmy expanded beyond what they could handle. If this really is just a temporary measure, which is also what they said, then I think itās pretty reasonable.
Thatās because they defederated from the two largest competing instances. Iām talking about the communities users not the instances. The issue is that beehaw has the largest and therefore defacto default communities. The timing is bad and will likely affect wider adoption. The biggest problem is that it is entirely foreseeable and solved by either accepting a smaller community (closing signups) or improving moderation capabilities (getting more moderators or investing in an alternative moderation system) before it meant splitting the threadiverse in half.
Iām not denying that it sucks, but if youād told anybody this was going to happen a month ago theyād have just laughed at you. Of course they were unprepared. Everbody has more than they can deal with. Adding more mods isnāt as simple as picking some names out of a hat, and this isnāt a thing anyone was preparing for. There currently are no alternative moderation systems, everything is too new and until recently was all way to small for that to be important, and they just have more work then they can deal with trying to suddenly moderate all of the threadiverse.
This was a bad option that sucked, but every option was a bad option that sucked. Iām more concerned with how they deal with things as they normalize over the coming weeks and months than I am with how theyāre trying to put out the fires in the short term.
But they chose a nonstandard moderation strategy that limited their ability to scale moderation with users. The default system is that communities are moderated independently of admins (not saying admins donāt form communities or that thereās no overlap between admins and mods) whereas on beehaw only the admins can create communities and therefore are the primary moderators.
Now Iām not saying that thereās anything inherently wrong with the system theyāve chosen but the fact that it is nonstandard and in fact built into the core precept of beehaw means that this was easily foreseen.
Easily forseen if you knew that lemmy was suddenly going to have a hundred times as many users in the space of a couple weeks. That was the thing no one was prepared for though.
A couple of weeks is more than enough time to realize where things were headed and act. lemmy.ml managed to do it.
lemmy.ml has a completely different idea of how it wants to be run. That happens to have been hurt a lot less by a sudden massive influx of new users, but that wasnāt the reason it was different. What do you even think beehaw could have done that would have better given their goals?
The admins have always been clear that theyāre not trying to replace Reddit, and Iām quite sure they were not trying to be one of the largest instances.
If they werenāt trying to get large then how did that happen? Based on admin comments, beehaw was one of the more active instances when the first wave of migration happened; and a decent amount of the pre-first wave posts about lemmy I saw on Reddit were about how Beehaw was a good instance to join as it was defederated from lemmygrad.
Iām not saying this has anything to do with replacing reddit but it is bad for the larger threadiverse community. Notably there were several other instances that closed registration for the purposes of not growing quicker than they could handle long term (see lemmy.ml). Beehaw has most of the largest (and therefore defacto default) communities. Active steps to avoid that would have allowed them to maintain their moderation goals while growing in an organic and sustainable way that benefits the larger threadiverse community.
I was strictly replying to the part of your comment where you said they made a decision to try to be one of the largest instances ā imo they did not make a explicit decision to try to be that, but rather the growth was a side effect of the circumstances around reddit users checking out the fediverse.
Is closing registrations is better than having an application with questions that weed out low-effort users? IMO itās probably a wash. beehaw has only banned one user from the local instance that I know of, so the application process seems to be working overall. The issue is that other instances are growing too quickly and needing to moderate those users, not their own.
I do agree this isnāt great for the threadiverse and I wish it hadnāt come to this, both on a personal and community level. I was subbed to the knitting community on lemmy.world, it was the most active of those communities that I saw, and now Iām locked out. Idk if I want to move to an alt on a different instance, or self-host my own so that Iām fully in control of what I can see, or what. :S
No the issue is that four moderators for the whole instance was always unsustainable and allowing the communities to become the defacto defaults without growing the mod teams was a bad idea. This was easily foreseen and corrected. Blaming other instances is not at all fair.
you do not understand the problem. The growth was on every server of the fedivers - so moderationg users from different servers was to much work. how should they stop people from other servers? two options - block any individuell(which is to much work with so many open registration servers - they can just spamm new servers) or nuke the server where most of the trolls come from.
I DO understand the problem. They only have an issue with an influx of users because they are the largest (defacto default) communities. A position that was incompatible with their moderation system from the get go. Had they had more sustainably sized communities none of this would have been an issue.
The moderated, reasonable stance is that everyone is right! Beehaw probably could have done things differently, including making a stickied post that they donāt want to be the default large instance, and/or acquired a lot more mods to manage the federation of other large instances. On the other hand, Lemmy doesnāt have the same principles as Beehaw and prioritized the growth of their userbase over a filtering system. To you it looks like one is worse than the other, thatās because you want to see content from everywhere and donāt share the principles of the other federation - so youāre probably not a good fit for Beehaw atm (and if anyone is blindsided, I donāt get itā¦ I could see it written all over Beehaw that they are trying to promote certain principles over growth, I donāt share in those principles but I can respect that they were direct about it).
Everyone on the Fediverse should expect to see instances un/re-federate several times over especially in the growing stages. The critique is fine but it should definitely be tempered with reasonable expectations and not unnecessary ridicule.
The idea that people are missing content on Lemmy/Beehaw/Kbin instances that get defederated are looking at this from a āthis should be super convenientā mentality which, convenience is why Reddit expects youāll go back. Quality of content, genuine community-building, and/or responsible upper management doesnāt have as much value there, it is inherent in them being a VC, convenience is what matters most on Reddit/TikTok/Twitter/etc.
On the Fediverse, the one thing that should be said more is that the instance you join, you should prepare to be involved locally through that instance more than anything else. The idea you can or should just join anywhere was something I wrong wrong about, as was much of the Reddit people saying ājoin Lemmy it doesnāt matter where, itās all federated.ā I donāt blame them or myself, itās a newer concept and nuance is lost at the entry- level to anything. If people were coming to the Fediverse for fully federated, more convenient content than they should try Mastadon, because theyāre farther along and had their own issues to deal with during the Twitter migration that propelled them much like these instances that are still growing and learning will, in time.
There are 4 admins and 30-something mods.
exactly this; the whole point was so instances could pick and choose who they wanted to interact with
Iād always heard that federation was good because if you get an instance infested with fascists, you (and everyone else who doesnāt want anything to do with them) can just cut that instance loose and let it drift away
I guess others thought different?
I mean some people absolutely do love and feed on drama, but is that who we want to attract? Theyāre not the nicest bunch to have around in my experience.