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.
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.
Dang this really sucks :/ i understand why it’s important from a modding perspective. I guess I’ll need to open an account elsewhere and get a client with multi account support
This is going to be a learning process I think for a lot of people. Not just on federation, but on community building as well. You all seem to be trying to build something here, and I am willing to be patient and participate while it grows. If we get down the road and it just isn’t working, I have faith that there will be open discussion on how to make this community grow while maintaining its ethos and we’ll be here to figure out what is best for each of us individually.
Good on you for taking decisive action at these early stages while we figure out what we want, where we want to go, and how we want to get there on this relatively new platform.
I agree, at first my knee-jerk reaction was against defederation, but I think actually this is one of the cool things about Lemmy and the way it works; you can have relatively isolated pockets and very open spaces, and users can move between them freely. It’s not like leaving Reddit and coming to Lemmy, for example. You can use Beehaw and other instances, and both can serve a specific purpose. I really appreciate this write up because without it I would not have felt good about this decision, but after having read it I get it and I appreciate it.
Defederation wouldn’t bother me so much if there was one decent unified user experience that would allow me to quickly pogo stick between separate instances and inboxes.
I’m on iOS, and Mlem is building that out, but the experience is still pretty early in development.
In Android you can use an app to clone apps so you can sign in to different accounts, maybe something like that exists for iOS also? I appreciate the frustration wrt not being able to see a fair amount of content, however I do think it’s a temporary issue – as you say Mlem is already working on that.
Ooo got an example? Would love this for discord and looked around but couldn’t find it
I just started looking at memmy yesterday, and it has multiple account capability as well
users can move between them freely
but… they really cant though can they? atm, every community on beehaw just lost a massive chunk of their userbase, and they can’t even move to a diff instance. Masto allows you to automatically move your followers to a new account on a new instance, but there just isn’t that option on Lemmy
I mean, you can create two accounts. I have my Beehaw account as well as my startrek.website account, for example. I use them both for different things, and they both have different vibes. I quite like it tbh.
kinda defeats the purpose of federation though.
Does it, though? Federation is not aggregation. It’s a model of interaction in which a community can curate what other communities they interact with. It can be more nuanced with limiting, as mastodon does, but that’s not an option here yet. I think this is precisely what federation is at its core
agreed, as someone who’s used fediverse platforms for a few years & seen cases of large scale raiding as well as just general infestation between some normal & some pretty bad servers, defederation is one of the main pros of the fediverse. without effective moderation, a community like ours cannot exist for long, & the only way to effectively moderate a foreign server full of literal tens of thousands of users who abide to a completely different law is to cut them off. while having to make an alt can be slightly inconvenient to some, the only alternative for a popular server like ours is to count down until it becomes too large to effectively moderate
I think this is an important point to consider. For a long time, I kept thinking that the fediverse was going to be the answer to the problem of keeping separate accounts on every site (because most places are isolated/walled-in networks). It took me years to accept that “one account everywhere” isn’t what the federation model is about.
I wish there was such a thing, but that’s going to require portable identities/user accounts, and I don’t know why but that seems to be progressing at a snail’s pace with a bunch of stagnated RFCs everywhere (but please let me know if there is progress happening somewhere, I may be out of the loop). Once we have that, it’ll make the fediverse a lot more convenient, since then you should be able to log in to other instances with the same account.
I think that will be something that comes down the road, but for now, it seems like it’s more of an answer to the problem of website admins running their site in a way you don’t agree with. On the Fediverse you have more flexibility to pick administrators you agree with their management style or to host your community and decide yourself how you want things to be
Sure, but maybe every instance doesn’t have to be tightly federated. There will be some instances where broad federation is their guiding principle, and some instances like Beehaw where their guiding principle is creating and maintaining a particular atmosphere.
Who is “they”? The users, or the communities? Beehaw creates the communities, that’s why there are relatively few, so I don’t see that Beehaw communities would have much reason to move anyway. Beehaw has no create community button.
For that reason I am glad I don’t have my account with beehaw now, though I understand their reasoning. Being cut off from these large instances is not something I’d want right now.
Moving an account to another instance is a feature being discussed afaik.
Can someone explain like I’m 5 for the new folks here what this means in terms of the user experience?
What are the restrictions around viewing and commenting on posts?
Does this impact, for example, beehaw to lemmy.world the same way as lemmy.world to beehaw?
What mod tools would beehaw need to remain federated?
This is the side I’m on. My initial reaction was alarm, but the most exciting thing for me when I first came over here from reddit was the prospect of higher-quality community participation. Negativity, generalizations, and just general unoriginality were so commonplace over there and it had been bothering me for a while well before the API drama.
I don’t want this to be an approximation of reddit, I want it to be better. And I think taking decisive action like this, like you said, works toward that goal, at least until Lemmy provides greater moderation control and the admins here can refine their approach.
we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space
Fully agreed. I’d personally rather have less overall content, if it means that the sense of community remains strong.
As a minor aside I’m working on another philosophy post about moderating specifically - what I’ve observed over the years, what I think works well in our vision, what extra work is needed in safe spaces and to prevent evaporative cooling, what I’m almost certain we need to do, and where my blind spots are.
Good on ya. I’ve already blocked several communities from those instances simply due to the sheer volume of low effort content.
The 196 community on shit just works was literally like half of the posts on the all filter yesterday before I blocked it.
Also blocking communities RULES. What a great feature! Like regardless of why, there are tons of things on the internet that I just have no interest in whatsoever! It’s cool to be able to very easily filter that stuff out.
I know exactly how you feel — I installed an extension in Chrome the other day for the sole purpose of blocking Quora from Google Search results. Fantastic 👍
Honestly my favorite part is that I can block risky communities very easily from the accounts I use at work. That allows me to surf the “all” page without worrying about NSFW subs or posts with NSFW language/text as the title. It maximizes how productively I can be unproductive while working. It’s terrific.
Is there one of those for pinterest?
Some possibilities here. There’s a Chrome extension mentioned; adding a string to UBlock looks the most promising to me, since I use FF.
Believe it or not, for some of us, 196 was the reason we came to lemmy in the first place. I can do without reddit, but I can’t do without a non-hateful meme stream.
I mean, I absolutely get that and wasn’t trying to shit on it. I was using it as an example for why blocking communities is cool. I like the idea of 196, I dig it, some even made me laugh out loud, and 196 explained to me what a tankie is because I was OOTL. The problem was that it got so saturated so quickly that it was making it hard to find non-meme content. So with two clicks - problem solved. The best part is it’s (almost) just as easy to reverse it! Just search the community, click, unblock. It’s a seriously convenient feature.
Enjoy your memes my friend!
The 196 community on shit just works was literally like half of the posts on the all filter yesterday before I blocked it.
tbh I’m not even sure what that community was for
It’s a meme community, the main rule is that when you visit you must post a meme. So, the more people visit the more posts it gets. No idea why the name though, likely an in-joke.
Because it was the successor to r/195, a meme subreddit started by some friends who lived in apartment 195 somewhere. Then it took off, privated itself a few years later, and 196 popped up to replace it and somehow became wonderfully infested with leftists and LGBT.
I strongly disagree with this decision – as lemmy progresses and stabilizes, open registrations will become normal and just blocking open instances will not be a viable solution.
I can’t say if this is just a need for better mod tooling or a fundamental problem with federation, but it’s certainly concerning.
This is absolutely a mod tooling issue. There’s about ten other ways I would have liked to handle this first, but none of them exist.
💯. The mod tooling is virtually non-existent so there aren’t any other viable options
Ideally there’d be options other than what’s essentially a binary on/off for inter-instance relations. Something like mastodon has: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/#limit-server
There just isn’t an equivalent in lemmy yet. Hopefully that will change sooner than later
They said in the post that this is because of inssuficient mod tools a Mastodon for instance is far better in that regard but even then when it exploded instances blocked mastodon.social and other due to moderation concerns once the reddit wave is given time to settle down and better tools are made available i think they will refederate with those instances
The decision is not an easy one - in large part this is due to the massive moderation overhead which federating with those two instances brought and the lack of tools available to address that. It’s an extreme maneuver, but it’s either that or nothing until Lemmy as a software improves.
It must be a problem with mod tooling. Mastodon federation works essentially the same way as Lemmy and small teams of admins seem to be able to keep instances with 10,000s of users under control.
Not a beehaw user directly, but I use many beehaw communities.
I appreciate the forwardness and transparency in this matter. As you’ve outlined, both in this post and in subsequent comments, this seems to be, rather than a full defederation, a conditional one. I’m totally for that, and I think the ability to do so is one of the key concepts that makes Federation such a useful and powerful tool. Those instances who cannot or do not moderate content that your instance doesn’t believe in can simply be removed from the equation.
I hope to see more of this accountability being held between instances in the future. At the end of the day, our communities are fragmented by nature, and there are times we should remove separate communities explicitly. A good example I can think of is on Mastodon all the instances with CSAM or nazis.
The Fediverse gives us a greater ability to fine-tune our communities and curate the experience members thereof get to have, as well as what content they can be exposed to. I’m glad to see people taking strong action in favour of their community, and so long as it comes from this perspective, with genuine communication with the community, everything will work out.
/rant
Just a heads up so you can try to plan ahead: on Reddit one of the tactics used by those with hateful agendas was to shut down progressive threads by purposely creating drama in that thread to overwhelm the moderators so that they had to lock the thread thus stopping all discussion. Sometimes they did this by being awful and dragging in well meaning users into fights, other times I they’d drop a few “I’m just asking questions” comments focussing on hot-button ideas that they knew would rile up arguments. It was very deliberate tactic and one that I don’t think moderators ever figured out how to deal with effectively, because short of babysitting the thread with their full attention from start to finish there was no way to prevent entire threads from devolving into attacks and arguments.
The crazy thing was how effectively one or two people with hateful agendas could derail an entire comment section of well meaning people and, by getting the thread locked, shut down the discussion and spread of progressive ideas.
I bring this up because Beehaw is perhaps uniquely vulnerable to this sort of ‘attack’, and you should expect to see it in the future. By joining other federated instances and using these tactics to stir up drama in Beehaw threads they can, by forcing your hand to defederalize, restrict the access of those other communities to the progressive ideals and ideas posted on Beehaw. The end result is isolating progressive ideas inside our walled garden, while users of the rest of the Lemmy instances start to only see more right-wing extremist views, normalizing them to otherwise everyday people.
I don’t have a solution to this. But it’s something to be aware of in discussions with the moderators of other instances, that a handful of people with this exact agenda can make their community look bad in order to restrict their users’ access to progressive ideas.
This does much more harm than good IMO - splintering the community at such a sensitive time of growth is a bad idea.
Hopefully there’ll be the ability to block images in comments and posts, and better tools for blocking / detecting spammers, and cross-instance bans, auto-moderating hyperlinks, etc. soon.
But the demand for unilateral access to other communities’ content is disturbing. The Lemmy federation works because of reciprocity.
Definitely won’t be recommending beehaw for new users now.
Completely agree with this decision, and it actually comes as a bit of a relief; I saw a statistically significant number of lemmy.world users who admitted to being denied from Beehaw because they didn’t want to “write an essay” or aggressively disagreed with the disabled downvotes (something that I’ve grown to appreciate).
I’m expect that the large influx of disruptive users is from the reddit migration, and I’m hopeful that the majority of the users will either adapt to the culture we’re trying to build here, or find their own niches in other communities. As you noted in your post, and in my own experience moderating real life groups, allowing a disruptive influence in a safe space can have serious negative effects on group cohesion that can persist for a long time, if it doesn’t alter the culture outright.
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.
This is a pivotal moment in the Lemmyverse, and I’m not sure if this will be better overall or not.
It might be a fundamental flaw of federated servers, or just something that should be expected and welcomed.
I guess time will tell.
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.
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).
