What defederating would mean:
- We won’t see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.
Pros:
- There is less confusion, you can’t respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.
Cons:
- We won’t be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won’t see any of our content.
Summary
Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our ‘front page’).
beehaw.org users already can’t see our posts/comments anywhere so it’s not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn’t really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.
What do you think?
So what happens to the major communities like technology? Are we creating a new one here, or subscribing to a different instance version?
I join the largest existing alternative - for example for technology the lemmy.ml one is already very large so I just join that.
The problem is that since beehaw was the second largest instance before the reddit wave they had quite large communities already. So they naturally will attract subs. In fact they probably attracted quite a few from the two instances that now can’t access them and probably can’t actually unsub from.
With lenny.ml and other instances able to access them it’s likely they will be the community for at least some topics. Which we won’t be able to access. So it’s not as simple as let them do their own thing and we do ours.
This could lead to people leaving the blocked instances for others with access to the big communities. Till those instances run afoul of beehaws sensibilities. With lemmy as a whole losing users each time.
I still don’t understand the decision beehaw made
One of the benefits of federation is the ability to choose your sources. If one doesn’t fit your moderation style you remove it. It’s a feature, not a minus. Expect more of this until the mod tools mature and trolls make homes among the open servers.
I don’t either.
They were struggling with moderation, and a disproportionate number of people they were addressing were coming from those two instances, which happen to have open registration.
Not sure I agree or not, but thats what they said
Because echo chamber is awesome. When you say something, no one will disagree with you.
When you have a group that don’t respect the rules and you don’t want to lower yourself to their level of discussion, you cut them out. Why would they be tolerated? And who is at fault here? The people wanting civility or the trolls causing issues? Why are you blaming the people defending themselves?
Cutting the entire world out when there are a few bad guys out there is a stretch. For one troll there are ten meaningfully discussions.
Beehaw is aiming for zero trolls, I don’t think they care whether the trolls come with some good people too. They’re currently in a position to have zero trolls and I think it’s a good goal to strive for
They’re liberals that can’t handle any disagreements.
Stop pushing culture war bullshit.
Good example! This is exactly the type of low effort, high judgement user they probably want to avoid.
It’s been explicitly clear that beehaw’s very few moderators would protect their users from bigots spreading hate online. It sucks that better defederation options don’t exist yet within the platform but to boil down to softy liberals is so lazy and part of the problem.
The problem is the bigots are so stupid and deluded that they don’t perceive their actions as hate, but rather justified politically motivated actions. Then they turn around and misconstrue their hate as protected speech or political protest. They’re too dumb or willfully ignorant to even comprehend the difference between hate and healthy discourse.
It isn’t stupidity or ignorance. It’s a deliberate tactic used in bad faith. It’s the tactic of “I’m not racist but…” before spewing racist garbage. They know their arguments are bigoted and hateful, but they also believe it doesn’t matter because their targets are subhuman and not worthy of protection of any kind.
What I meant was that they are stupid for falling into such ignorant beliefs, and delusional in their justification for their actions. Yes, they know they’re racist. But they believe they are somehow morally justified (and some morally compelled!) to harrass others.
I was being tongue-in-cheek, but I agree with you and that’s what I was trying to allude to.
Nobody has even shown any evidence of what posts are so disruptive and you’re completely ready to boil it down to ‘they believe their targets are subhuman’.
Id say its a bit of both.
There are definitely people who don’t think what they are saying is bigoted due to ignorance or failure to understand why what they say is hurtful or wrong - i’ve met a fair few.
There are also people who know that its bigoted, and refuse to care because believe their bigotry is justified, despite the harm that it causes. - i’ve also met some people like that.
Neither of which should be tolerated, though.
Good example! This is exactly the type of low effort, high judgement user they probably want to avoid.
Well am I wrong?
We can’t tell if you’re wrong because you didn’t do anything but assert a stance. That’s what he meant my “low effort”. Show your work.
I’ve been perfectly polite up until now in my posts on the beehaw instances.
I didn’t suggest you were being impolite. I said you didn’t back up your stance so we can’t judge whether it’s incorrect or not. It’s literally just an assertion you made without any attempt to back it up.
The obvious potential error in your stance-- again, which you have not even attempted to support-- is that this was to prevent “disagreements”. Can you support that? Do you make a distinction between a disagreement and trolling and harassment, or are all of those lumped together for you?
C’mon man; you cared enough to make the assertion, support it.
Absolutely
“Liberals” that want the entire instance moderated by only 5 people - managing all user registrations, community creation and the moderation of every post and comment on every community.
It’s crazy. We left Reddit to get away from powermods and admins.
They want to protect their users from trolls. Blame the trolls.
If you are so fragile that you need to be protected from a troll then maybe the internet is not the right place for you.
I don’t know how “Liberal” came to be synonymous with fragile snowflake. People have been misusing the word for ages … especially in the US. The original Liberal (and I’m proud to claim to be one) puts free speech front and center of their world view. It’s the cornerstone of democracy. And free speech also means the freedom to offend … it’s a price well worth paying.
Now im sitting here wondering if I offended anyone over there lol. It’s hard to imagine, but since I’ve seen no bad actors myself, I’m starting to think that it’s possible I did, unknowingly, with zero intent to do so, and they just have a really strict thing going on. I doubt it’s the case, or I hope not at least.
No it wasn’t you. There were a couple of accounts that went in and spammed a whole bunch of bigoted posts.
Ahh whew. Lol. Ya that’s messed up. 😕
It isn’t the case.
The first problem was actual trolls using were using lemmy.world’s open and automated registration (beehaw makes you write why you want to join and manually approves registrations based on that) to troll Beehaw.
The second problem was that the moderation tools aren’t mature enough yet to deal with problem one with anything between manually banning every troll (which will immediately come back by creating another lemmy.world account) and total defederation from the instances most of those trolls are coming from.
Because Beehaw’s mission statement is to be a safe space, it was decided to go with the defederation option.
However, the defederation isn’t planned to be permanent. Improvements in mod tools and/or maturing of communities are said to be reasons to refederate again.
Edit: spelling
Thanks for the info. I can see the logic on their part.
Doubtful you offended anyone. I think beehaw was seeing serious things like child porn and anti-LGBT posts, and traced them back to lemmy.world or the other one.
OK thanks for reassuring me, I know people are pretty sensitive anymore, and I’m out of the loop ftmp on PC culture, and while I’m extremely progressive in every facet of my life, I still worry…but I think that’s just a me problem tbh.
That’s I feel after every message I send online ever :)
Yea I got in the habit of ignoring my inbox on reddit due to anxiety.
I am making an effort to be mindful, and honest, and I’ve been checking my inbox!
Now I just have anxiety about me saying “too much” as far as personal experiences, and emotions etc.
Either way I figure if I’m honest, and people hate, f em.
Yeah, exactly, it’s on them, if they hate
They circled their wagons due a perceived threat to a small population of their user base, of which they feel is their responsibility to protect.
I constantly shit on Beehaw, however I can’t blame them for this. There is a huge influx of random people joining all these federated sites and high potential for pieces of shit coming in to troll sensitive individuals.
Please don’t defederate. Just have it reserved for actually intentionally malicious or negligent instances.
My choice as well. Take this with a grain of salt tho as I’m new to lemmy so have little history to go on.
I just like it here a lot, and I’m saddened to think that some of my fellow newcomers have crossed the line.
I’m not using beehaw and probably never will. I don’t want to be in a “safe space” as they put it. That said, I totally understand that some people want that sort of community, it’s their decision, and thanks to federation anyone who disagrees can just leave. If you’re complaining about them defederating from you - you’re probably part of the reason they did.
That said, it would be really helpful to have some sort of icon next to posts/comments that are defederated from your instance, just so you don’t waste your time responding to them when they can’t see it.
Edit: I think I might be wrong here
Honestly I think this is an interesting real-world experiment in the entire federation paradigm. It’s going to happen again and again, there’s no escaping it. How does the ecosystem work when two large instances can’t communicate directly? We’re going to find out.
It was an issue in Mastodon originally too, but Mastodon added more flexibility to the platform and the nuke option wasn’t the only option.
My gut feeling is that defederation should be done as little as possible. I’m quite new to all this, but to me, it feels like it should be user preference instead of admin/mod preference. I have no clue whether that is even possible though. Perhaps there should be more filters than just Subscribed, Local and All to alleviate certain issues.
One problem atm is that a user can’t block by instance, just by community or individual users. It seems a lot of people are requesting this ability though so hopefully it gets added in the future.
I think that would be great feature. Do I understand correctly that if a user would want to do that now that they have to set up their own instance and determine what to federate and what not?
Yeah, I’m not sure how complicated it is. With the cloud, getting a server is pretty cheap and easy nowadays and maybe someone already has a Docker image set up to make it as simple as possible. There are step-by-step instructions somewhere.
There sure are and it’s as easy as ABC if you know what to look for. 👍
They might also remove the block again in the future when moderation tools have improved and/or lemmy.world does a better job at vetting users, and then it would work better to have never blocked them.
That’s basically what they said they’d do
Except their perspective of “when moderation tools have improved” is “when our users can use other instances but their users aren’t allowed here”
I don’t see any problem with that. They want their own little community.
Then they could have that but still contribute to the wider “threadiverse”.
This keeps coming up but like… So? If beehaw users are putting good content up on a sh.itjust.works community, and making good replies and stuff, who cares if I can’t go do the same on their semiprivate instance? I’m just happy to have the user.
Go ahead and defederate them, they’re the ones that want to be closed off in their little centralised liberal safe zone.
I don’t think not wanting fascists and trolls galore makes it a liberal safe zone, they just don’t want the truly wild west. There’s a lot of people out here now which weren’t just a month ago.
They might claim it’s about ‘fascists’ but all of the drama so far has been about communists.
I think you mean trolls.
One can be a communist without being a troll. Many of us pull it off, like, 80% of the time.
These people seem to consider basically all disagreement as ‘trolling’.
I’m not quite a raging lefty, but I’m definitely a lefty.
I would not class the goings on over at lemmygrad as “communism” at all. It’s absolutely unhinged pro-Russian flavour fascism. Marx would be rolling in his grave; nobody in their right mind should be glorifying anything Stalin did, ffs.
Yeah I’m very far left and tankies piss me right off. They give socialism a bad name.
Stalin was of course a traitor to the revolution, however, there’s a complete double standard with how commies are always existed to answer for every bad thing that ever associated with socialism, but you don’t see anyone who self identifies as an American, liberal, etc etc ever be demanded to answer for slavery, genocide of the natives etc
This is one of the most exhausting parts of being a lefty online. I wish the term “whataboutism” had never entered the common parlance.
Modern Russia is capitalist. Putin represents capitalism just as much or more than Stalin represents communism.
It’s their decision and you should respect that. I also don’t agree with the defederation and the rest of their policies but you can just not use it. No need to turn this into a political conflict.
But it is a political decision.
There is nothing political about people not wanting to waste unnecessary time moderating social media.
But this is political. Beehaw mods have said so
Safe spaces and freedom of trolls/bigots is not political. No where in the beehaw explanation do they cite politics as a reason for this. If someone kept calling me a idiot commie and I blocked them, I’m not blocking politics I’m blocking trolling.
I’m not sure that you can separate the concept of safe spaces out from politics, in much the same way that you can’t separate your individual identity from politics. I’m not saying that they’re a bad thing, but I do think that they’re inherently political. People tend to want to segregate into spaces where they don’t have to constantly keep their guard up.
A community of like minded people with similar values is not political. A community where a gay person can expect not to be made fun of for being gay is not political. The fact that people’s sexualities and genders and world views are politicized and used by trolls as means to attack is the problem, not the people wanting refuge from that. Things being politicized does not make my existence political. If someone can’t separate me the being from their politics that is on them.
People just shouldnt enter conversations to put people down for their looks or beliefs or enter conversations that otherwise aren’t for them. Not everything is for everyone and that is ok. Not everyone needs to hear every opinion as not every opinion holds equal weight in every forum.
Except their excuses are pretty poor. Modlogs are always public info, and you can see that there were only one or two trolls. That doesn’t warrant blocking hundreds of other users.
So then you agree? It’s not political?
Whether it was the right decision or not, they said they made it because trolls were coming from those communities and those communities have open sign ups. They also said it’s not permanent so it’s not like they’re trying to silence a group of people perceived to mostly be on those servers. Just a group of mods/admins that took maybe too severe of a step to protect their base/their time/their own mental health.
Them wanting to be an echo chamber doesn’t mean we should do that too
Or… here’s a wild idea… let instances do what they want?
If an instance wants to act the fool or allow trolls to overrun their space, then another instance can choose to not want anything to do with it.
They can do what they want though. But so can lemmy.world
dang it, now I regret deleting my comment.
Context: “Or… here’s a wild idea… let instances do what they want? If an instance wants to act the fool or allow trolls to overrun their space, then another instance can choose to not want anything to do with it.”
I also edited to add “If you simply don’t jive with how one instance does things, you can [defederate from them] too. And if I don’t like that, I can move.”
I deleted my comment because… hey, I’m not on lemmy.world, so this doesn’t affect me.
Hey, I agree with you BTW. That’s kinda how the Fediverse works. I don’t need access to everything and everything doesn’t need access to me-- and that’s true for everybody.
That’s why I stuck around, I guess. If I really want to access an instance that badly, there’s always RSS.
Lets avoid defederating. I am not to sure why beehaw.org defederated Lemmy.world, i understand it’s not a final decision but more of a quick mitigation to deal with de difficulty related to the reddit exodus. Right?
But surely we hope that this level of users is permanent? I think it’ll be in place until lemmy has better moderation tools, which could be quite some time. It has the benefit that it is Open Source though so anyone can help.
the level of users is hopefully permanent, but the lack of moderation to adequately deal with it, both from beehaw and lemmy.world, is not
its also a cultural problem, at the moment the culture of the fediverse is still settling and folks are poking and prodding and seeing how much they can get away with
The problem is mainly that open registration allows quick ban evasion, making it very hard to remove bad actors that are using instances with open registration (without admin approval).
But admin approval just slows it down right? Like how is the admin going to know you aren’t a bad actor?
It also really slows down the sign-up process which will cripple the growth of the Fediverse.
It slows it down sufficiently that both sides can deal with it.
I don’t think normal approval of accounts slows down the growth of the fediverse. No single instance alone can manage thousands of users signing up the same time anyways, so admin approval also helps balancing the load by making impatient people sign up somewhere else that is not overloaded with applications.
Yeah, it’s a pity, this is the worst time for defederation, when the userbase is seeing a boom in growth.
It’s their own prerogative, but considering their “restrictive” registration process with that application box, I’m not sure Beehaw will grow much in the future.
Yeah, it seems some are happy to burn down the whole thing if it means they can rule over the ashes.
That’s not what’s happening at all. They have site rules. Remotr users aren’t following them, and aren’t beholden to them. Why should they continue to federated with instances that have incompatible rules?
That’s not “burn[ing] the whole thing down”. That’s community management.
The other side of federation is that instances are communities in their own right. And you don’t get to show up in someone else’s yard, shit in their pool, and then expect to be invited back.
But they can ban those users, exactly the same as they ban users on their own instance.
They are waiting for better moderation tools yeah :)
I think we need to avoid defederating as well, should only be used for the most problematic, habitual cases of malicious intent imo.
We need to let this grow and solidify a bit more before we start to really get in the weeds as far as our identity as a community.
What happened? Why are they making this move? I think it’s a bad idea to start defederating, especially this early.
Edit: How effective or practical, for lemmy.world in the future, would a voting system be for defederating? In case it comes to that for us.
Cause it seems like a very dramatic approach, with only a few people making the decision to drop a ton of content yknow.
Not sure if it’s possible even, I know it comes down to our admin, but they seem pretty cool. I dunno just thinking aloud.
They said they couldn’t deal with the level of abuse and spam that came from lemmy.world users. They have a much more restrictive content policy and smaller, centralised moderation team than most other instances which exacerbated the problem.
Just like kbin, on beehaw the communities are fixed, and only admins can create communities, right?
Yep. It has the benefit that it concentrates the userbase in the existing communities. But it also creates a really static site and is at more risk of moderator abuse.
If reddit taught me anything, it’s a question of when; not if.
What’s even the point then? I guess it’s either Reddit or no reddit.
here on kbin users can create communities freely. on beehaw, they cannot.
Anyone can make a magazine on kbin.
Tbh, that’s kinda hard to believe. I have seen zero malicious activity in my 4 days here. Maybe their standards are just higher than mine, not sure that’s a good thing in this case but whatever. Damn that sucks, beehaw had some good stuff.
from what i understand you will still be able to see their content, they just wont be able to see content from lemmy.world or shitjustworks
Yea same. Well we can still interact with each other on their posts I suppose 🤷
you can interact with me on their posts, however they will not see your comments ik pretty sure
Same, I’ve found the attitude really positive here. It reminds me of early Reddit in like 2008.
Yea I’m having quality discussions, the kind that get zero traction on reddit.
Exactly. Relevant discussion has continued to decline and be suppressed by stupid memes and puns. Can barely find any relevant discussion in comments anymore.
On reddit, it wouldn’t be unusual that someone would talk shit to me for having a thought-out, long reply to someone.
It feels like 60% of the users are pissy teenagers spreading anti-intellectualism and another 30% are bots. Aside from a specific few niche subreddits, I don’t miss reddit at all…
One sub I was subbed to literally turned into memes, where even the comments were just links to memes and people carrying out full length discussions that way.
I sort of missed the meme culture period. And I always enjoyed writing, so it’s pretty nice here.
I went and checked reddit for first time today since the 11th and I left right away.
From what I saw on their post, it seems there are bad faith actors registering in lemmy.world just to harass beehaw.org.
Sigh.
Who tf comes online just to troll “beehaw” some obscure instance on an obscure platform? That’s crazy to me lol.
Alt-righters and 4-chan users. They often feel justified thru their delusions and rationalizations.
“Who tf are these people?” Is a question I find myself asking quite often lol.
I mean, there are trolls on Reddit to be fair, it’s not terribly surprising that if a lot of Reddit users move to some place, a bunch of trolls will come with, either because they too don’t like reddit’s changes, or because they see new communities to mess with. And I can imagine that, if someone is a troll and gets enjoyment out of bothering people and causing anger, that a community that is pretty restrictive in it’s rules and tries to maintain a “calm” and “safe” sort of vibe is probably going to be a more satisfying target?
Beyond that, I do think I recall seeing one of the beehaw admins saying something about not wanting theirs to be the place all the redditors move to, because they don’t want keeping the community run and moderated to be a full time thing and because they want quality over quantity, in terms of their community. If they feel like they’re reaching the limit of how big a community they can comfortably handle and dont want it getting much bigger, then a controversial move like this that might lose them some users isn’t going to be a problem for them.
I’m not saying I like this move, I don’t personally have any real stake in it obviously not being hosted on either instance involved but I worry that fragmentation like this while people are starting to really look into the platform as a whole isn’t a great look for lemmy, -but I do get where they are coming from.
That’s fair. I don’t really have a horse in the race, just curious about the whole situation.
Yeah, some people are really werid.
What’s dumb is that if someone wanted to troll them they could just make an account on any number of smaller instances that they federate with. I mean, eventually they will have to be completely siloed off to prevent outside trolling.
Yeah, I suspect they will move to a whitelist the moment that functionality becomes available. Or just defederate entirely from everything and become a walled garden.
thats pretty unfair, theres no reason to think that they intend on cutting themselves off from the fednet entirely
according to them this is a temporary measure until they have better tools for moderation, more mods or until things have calmed down a bit, I dont see any reason to question that
A whitelisting feature already exists.
I hope they ran this defederation thing by their users first.
They did not. It was just dumped on everyone earlier today
I’m all for protecting users from bigoted assholes, but I would be very unhappy as one of the users they aim to protect due to feeling as tho they believe they know how to act in the best interest of their users, when they don’t give their community a seat at the grown-ups’ table to make the decision.
I’d rather not be part of an instance in which drastic, sweeping actions are taken without consideration or feedback from their userbase. I’m not even arguing that they are wrong in doing what they did; just that I wouldn’t appreciate being treated like they know what’s best for me. Feels like being treated like a child.
I don’t want to be part of an instance in which I’ll suddenly lose access to content across Lemmy because it’s ‘in my best interest’ according to internet strangers.
With that said, hopefully we stop accruing bigoted assholes here, we get better mod tools, and things can be refederated.
I had an account on beehaw and once I saw the post I immediately created a new account on lemmy.world for the exact reason you described. I don’t want to be cut off or told what I can and can’t see.
That was my thought as well. Seems like a bad idea this early in the social experiment.
Well, we’re the new ones to the social experiment, they were here first :) Disappointing decision though.
That’s fair. Need to check my reddit privilege lol.
So I have an account on beehaw and pointed this out earlier to the admins. Got snapped at because how dare I try and say what they will do in the future. I was also told if they were going to defederate from everyone they already would have. Didn’t really get a response as to what they would do once people start to trolling from other instances. They don’t think it’ll be a problem from what I gathered
If anything this is just going to make them an even larger target for trolling. I don’t have a good solution for what they should do. But it seems that fediverse is antithetical to their goals.
I know. It’s not hard to lie your way into their instance if you really wanted to or one that has criteria to join. I really don’t think they know what they got themselves into with this decision because you’re right, they put a huge target on their backs.
they could, but in practice it would never amount to the level of trolling and toxicity they are receiving from .world and justworks
folks are taking this too seriously imo
What happened? Why are they making this move? I think it’s a bad idea to start defederating, especially this early.
- Beehaw admins explained the move in this post: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
- This post explains what it means for
lemmy.worldandsh.itjust.worksusers: https://lemmy.world/post/149743.
I’m not sure we will be able to read beehaw comments & posts, see :
https://lemmy.world/post/149743
or :
https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/24341/How-the-beehaw-defederation-affects-us
We see them on other instances, from that post:
Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?
That’s because the “true” version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn’t defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.
The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.
so, if I understand correctly, we wont see them on their own instance, but elsewhere
Yes. We won’t see their own instance at all. What we see from beehaw atm is the outdated copies we have from prior to defederation.
Yes, however they won’t be able to see your responses.
So we’ll still see posts from beehaw users on other instances that beehaw still federates with?
Will we be able to interact with the above posts (vote / comment)? I’m guessing yes, because the posts would be hosted on those 3rd party instances still federating with beeehaw, not beehaw.
If I inderstand correctly, I’d be in favor of keeping the federation, which in short means “keep interaction with beehaw users through other instances”, even if we lost sync and interaction with “communities / posts in those communities. hosted by beehaw”
Yeah, we can see them and interact with them. But the beehaw users won’t see our comments, the other users on the instance will. So it could be confusing if you were expecting a reply from a beehaw user - as they won’t even be able to see your reply.
I’m not sure how voting works, I guess our votes would count? As the copy is held on the instance? But maybe beehaw users wouldn’t see them.
This is still confusing though. Ideally there’d at least be a warning in the UI that you are replying to a user who won’t see your comment.
Yeah, Lemmy is open source so maybe this will get added. This was meant to be quite a rare edge case unless you were like from some Nazi/racist instance or something though.
You’d be able to see and interact with comments/posts made by BeeHaw users on other instances. However note that the BeeHaw user will never see it. Everyone else will.
What’s the deal with beehaw? Can anyone Eli5?
They defederated from lemmy.world and another large instance as they said there was an influx of abusive users from these instances and their small, centralised moderation team was unable to manage it.
What kind of abusive users?
Chi1d p0rn posters, among others. According to them, and I have no reason to doubt them.
It’s essentially assholes that are taking the quickest route to being toxic. It’s not that the instances are inherently toxic, more that they’re the easiest way for someone who wants to be toxic.
The main thing is that beehaw has an application process for creating a new account, while most lemmy instances do not. They defederated because they were struggling to keep troublesome people out since banned users could just create a new account on another instance and get back in.
Their moderation/admin policy is very strict, and they only have a few admins to manage it.
