This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.
Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.
Two months on, I’m wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I’m just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?
Hi,
I’m speaking on behalf of the admin team of Lemmy World - we feel like we have to step in here and give some feedback to the things being said in this thread and give our perspective.
About “Supporting nazi’s”:
So we support nazi’s because it took us ‘long’ to defederate from exploding heads? That’s straight up false. We were one of the first instances to defederate with them and advocated heavily to have them defederated on other instances. FYI Lemmy World as a whole is just over 2 months old and so is this post: https://lemmy.world/post/747912
There was an issue early on with the original moderator of the Lemmy World https://lemmy.world/c/conservative community which was handled instantly:
- The problematic moderator https://lemmy.world/u/OptionHome that was posting misinformation (and worse) was banned
- The https://lemmy.world/c/conservative community was given to other moderators.
- We asked people to stop bombaring the /c/conservative community with anti-conservative posts as to allow civil discourse. https://lemmy.world/post/149519
- The https://lemmy.world/c/maga community was also banned
We take a hard stance on extremism from both sides of the political spectrum, and we believe that civil discourse should always be the first option. We ban hate communities on sight no matter whose side they are on, and we work hard to resolve the hundreds of reports we receive each day. As of today, 3733 users were banned from Lemmy.World, and that number will probably have gone up by the time you read this comment. We follow-up on moderation teams if we see reports that stay open for too long and if communities are abandoned we actively look to replace the moderation team.
So we ask everyone to keep sending in reports when you see any post that breaks the Lemmy World rules which can be found here: https://lemmy.world/legal.
About Beehaw’s decision to defederate with us: Even though we don’t agree with it, we have always been supportive of Beehaw and their choice to defederate with us until the mod tools improve. Even when the question gets posted in our community we defended the decision: https://lemmy.world/post/895811.
But wether or not Beehaw will refederate with us is ofcourse 100% your decision.
We ban hate communities on sight no matter whose side they are on
Can you please give examples of liberal or left-leaning hate groups you have had to ban?
Can you please give examples of liberal or left-leaning hate groups that even exist?
Here are my two cents as an outsider looking in. I spend ~15-30 mins a day on Lemmy (usually while doing other things), so I see a decent amount of content but I am not at the leading edge of posts. When I look at posts, I rarely, if ever see spam. For the most part there is civil conversations and those that attempt to derail them are downvoted and, in some cases, banned.
Does this mean that moderation isn’t a problem? No, I am but one user. However, it does indicate it is not a chronic issue. Personally I would like to see you guys refederate, as that could only increase the quality of discussions throughout the fediverse.
Thank you. And if you should see anything that goes against the Lemmy World rules (https://lemmy.world/legal) please report it.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !conservative@lemmy.world, !maga@lemmy.world
From where I’m standing, I can’t really much has changed unfortunately… which really sucks…
Lemmy.world has grown substantially meanwhile the moderation tools have not improved at all. All I can say about the moderation tools is that we now know that the tools suck more than they used to.
Here’s a list of moderation problems that we have discovered since then:
- If a Berson is reported on another instance, we never get the report.
- If a mod is banned from the community they mod, they can still take mod actions
- If you get site-banned from Beehaw while you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from that instance and kbin can see your posts
- People from other instances can’t know who if someone is an admin on the instance they’re interacting with
- People from other instances can’t see when we use the shield function to signal we’re talking “officially / as a mod”
- The modlog is not chronological
- The modlog breaks if you ban someone for more than 4 digit days.
- A banned user’s description is still visible so if they link to a scat image in their description, it is still visible to moderators.
Despite these newly known problems, there have been exactly no improvement whatsoever to the moderation tools. It is honestly unsettling and terrifying.
I just finished writing a small book in a thread about federation on literature.cafe yesterday, the thrust of which is that moderation, not federation is the threadiverse’s killer feature, and when in doubt smaller instances shouldn’t federate with larger ones. This list makes a perfect post-script to my point. Do you mind if I crib it? I’m a big fan of what you’re doing here. I’d also love your feedback on my observations if you have time.
No, you are definitely right. There is a time and place for federation, it’s like a town deciding to incorporate with a larger region. If the town is too early in its infancy, the overall culture and debate will be drowned out by larger servers. But the risk of also not federating the town means that there is a chance of the community dying off. I’m thinking there should at least be a snaller period of considering the effects of opening up your server to the network, and consulting other instance admins about the idea.
JFC there are a lot of typos in your comment! No worries since most of it is discernible. I’m in agreement with all of these points regardless.
I think I corrected them - feel free to tell me more specifically if you still see some.
Despite these newly known problems, there have been exactly no improvement whatsoever to the moderation tools. It is honestly unsettling and terrifying.
It’s bewildering how the development team has ignored the problems with data not federating properly and the performance of the app.
If a mod is banned from the community they mod, they can still take mod actions
Why not remove them as mod? I don’t understand why you would keep anyone in the mod team that has been banned from the community?
If you get site-banned from Beehaw while you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from that instance and kbin can see your posts
Yes that is a problem with Lemmy in general. But why this only seen as a problem for people from Lemmy World and sh.itjust.works?
The modlog is not chronological
We fix this by having enough admins to go through these reports as soon as possible.
The modlog breaks if you ban someone for more than 4 digit days.
Why ban for 9999 days if you can leave it empty and perma-ban?
Anyway, I agreed that there are a lot of issues that haven’t improved, but at least I heard that users will be able to block instances themselves soon so fingers crossed. But Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works very early on and in the meantime they are federated with instances that are as big as Lemmy.World was back then.
Why not remove them as mod? I don’t understand why you would keep anyone in the mod team that has been banned from the community?
Oversight - that simple.
Yes that is a problem with Lemmy in general. But why this only seen as a problem for people from Lemmy World and sh.itjust.works?
That is not actually a problem with Lemmy in general - community bans do block posting unlike site bans. As for why, well, it was done at that point in time because Lemmy.World and Sh.it just.works took a lot of moderation time - for one reason or another, bad actors liked to go there. I have no reason to believe this has changed now that .World is now many times bigger than it was.
Why ban for 9999 days if you can leave it empty and perma-ban?
Oversight or malice. You can break the modlog of everyone you’re federated with because of this - that is dangerous.
But Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works very early on and in the meantime they are federated with instances that are as big as Lemmy.World was back then.
Size doesn’t necessarily mean problems though. I think it’s probably a culture problem as the root cause but I don’t think .World wants to tackle that problem so all I can do is wait for better tools.
I really don’t get the “oversight” part of keeping someone who is banned from a community on the moderator team there. Can you give me an example how this would make sense?
The modlog breaking XXXX amount of days bug was reported to the devs by me btw. And it was fixed on 12/08: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2058
It just feels like you are looking for excuses to keep defederated while there is no actual problem that can not be handled by working together as admins. We’ve always said we are open to discuss actions but you’ve always said when the “when modtools are available”. Now it’s a culture problem - how are Lemmy World users different from lemm.ee, midwest.social, programming.dev or other instances? And what do you propose should be done to tackle these issues?
Is it a problem of contributions (nobody made a PR adding those missing features so they don’t make it), technical challenge (those features would be hard to implement due to how Lemmy and federations work) or policy (whoever is maintaining of Lemmy does not want these features to happen)?
Some of these are likely not hard to fix but some of these are a bit more complicated like fixing the report system.
So it’d say it’s largely the former two though I’d like to mention that these issues appear to not be treated as critical problems by the main Lemmy developers so I believe this is also a policy problem.
I trust the admins. I was attracted to beehaw specifically because of the tight moderation. If they think they can keep to the same high standards and refederate, great. If not, oh well. I’d rather miss out on some content than expose myself to rude assholes, bigots, fascists etc
They’re pretty different for me. Beehaw is more community oriented - it reminds me of the smaller subs where you had regulars who talked about or gave advice on the content like vaporents. Kbin however is just as good for me, it just reminds me more of scrolling my hobby feed, whereas Beehaw honestly is a lot of news and politics on mine.
I have subbed to pretty much the first 30 pages of Magazines that I’m interested in on Kbin and it’s small but throughout the week it’s pretty varied. I actually haven’t gone through my subscriptions on Beehaw since not long after I made it, so it’s still pretty default. Like I said, it’s much more community chat based with news.
But I can probably change that just by adjusting my subscriptions on Beehaw, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet :) I like both for what they are, though I wish kbin had a little more activity. I’m also lucky, I haven’t personally seen any negativity whatsoever over there, but some people have reported issues which is disheartening.
Lemmy.world feels the most Reddit-like in my experience. Beehaw felt… different even when I was browsing it from Lemmy.ca in April and the entire Lemmyverse as a whole had maybe a couple dozen posts a day. There were real neat and in-depth discussions by people who were capable of feeling and caring, and no propaganda spam that many instances had. We had a few bumps along the way but overall I’m still very happy about how things are.
We handle our reports daily and urge our users to keep reporting anything that goes against our rules.
I replied somewhere else in this thread but we - the admins of lemmy world - have always been supportive of the beehaw decision to wait until better tools come along for moderation. We went through a few growing pains with LW but I’m happy to see how far we have come already and we keep working to make things better. Our legal page with the rulesets is actively being maintained and defines what we stand for: https://lemmy.world/legal.
lemmy.world is just hot garbage imo
I’m on Lemmy.world every day and I’ve never seen any of that. I don’t doubt it exists, but it’s definitely not a problem on any of the communities I’m subscribed to.
I’m not jumping on you - I’m just pointing out lemmy.world isn’t a total write off. There are about 20k monthly active users on that instance and about 20k of those people are polite, reasonable people who post interesting content.
With any large community like that there’s always going to be some people who’re problematic, but either the moderators on lemmy.world are deleting them before I see them, or else it’s happening on communities I don’t subscribe to (probably a mix of both).
I think Beehaw should re-federate lemmy.world as soon as the moderation tools are better. In particular the cross-instance moderation issues should be sorted out. The key to a functioning fediverse is to ensure that everyone across instances can work together to tackle bad content. Many hands make light work.
I don’t really care about “growth”. Lemmy is a community not a corporation. What I care about is when someone starts an interesting discussion, are there “enough” people who take part in that discussion? I see threads on Beehaw (and even on Lemmy.World) that get zero replies. That sucks.
I’m from kbin, here’s my perspective.
Stay defederated from lemmy.world. The admins are at the very least sympathetic towards fascists being on their instance as long as they’re “polite.”
Shit just works is mostly fine, but world is a shithole and honestly I wish everyone would defederate them to force them to be broken up or isolated.
Honestly I would suggest defederatibf from lemm.ee as well. I have noticed a ton of fascists originating from there.
Not sure what you mean by ton of fascists originating from lemm.ee, but please be sure to report users if you notice something weird, rather than trying to create random defederation in the fediverse.
https://kbin.social/m/politics@lemmy.world/t/366019/-/comment/1806367
FYI that link doesn’t work for us beehaw folks - the link you used is specifically for kbin users to view lemmy.world.
Defederation should only ever be used as a last resort. Every instance will have some amount of problematic users, or even users you simply don’t agree with.
If we’d all defederate from one another because some users on each instance are out of line, the Fediverse would die out quickly.
I’ve recently made a blog post about this subject if you’d like to read it : https://lionir.ca/posts/open-limitless-federation/
That said, defederation is a tool like any to build site culture and moderate spaces. If the only thing we can have are awful spaces because we should not curate our own community, we’d be better off not federating at all. Thankfully, most admins understand this and do take actions when necessary.
The main problem I personally have with defederation is that it can make it very difficult to discover and participate in already niche communities.
Sure, being open to everyone comes with its problems. But a large user base that’s able to connect with each other is essential to these niche communities. Let’s say I had an interest in Virtual Boy homebrew development. Say someone created a community for this on lemmy.world, I would obviously want to join this one instead of creating my own, because we’d likely already only be a handful of people. Now a lot of instances start defederating from lemmy.world for whatever reason(s) (and sure, there are likely good reasons to do so). This would likely completely kill such a niche community. Sure, you could try and coordinate moving the community to a different instance, but finding an instance that isn’t defederated from any of each users’ home instances will be hard if defederation becomes so commonplace. Users could also all create an account on that new instance, but most users probably don’t want to create dozens of accounts because each of their communities happens to be on a different instance.
I already created accounts on multiple instances because the instance I was using either defededated from communities I wanted to interact with, or other instances with communities I wanted to interact with defederated with my home instance. I don’t even care about my accounts as such (content history, upvote count or whatever), and transferring subscribed communities (and saved posts/comments) is done with a simple script within minutes or even seconds, but having to find a new instance every few weeks because instances start defederating from one another can be cumbersome (and again, it will eventually lead to shrunk niche communities).
If I see a user or community that I don’t want to interact with, I simply block it and move on.
Defederation should only ever be used as a last resort.
That depends on the, particular, situation. Using words like ‘should’, in your estimation here, shows that you’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. You haven’t carefully thought through all of the possible scenarios.
I agree, this is kinda hurting the fediverse.
I came here because I happened to see a post on lemmynsfw (coming from lemmy.world through federation) about Threads, and I was looking to reply from beehaw (because replying with a lemmynsfw account gives a certain “flair” of course) so I was looking for that post here. But I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then I started looking into the reason here. Then I found this post which explained it.
But I think it’s important to realise that this way the fediverse will stay very niche and fragmented. It would be better to let the users have a choice who they want to see. And defederate only in very heavy situations (for example, nobody would expect beehaw to federate with gab.com because they support actual total nazis). But blocking lemmy.world as one of the biggest instances is… strange.
The thing is, I came here as a new user because spez makes reddit so inhospitable with his dick moves. So I went to https://join-lemmy.org/ and found beehaw. (well in fact I went to lemmy.ml first but didn’t like the attitude there). But join-lemmy doesn’t describe this whole complex fabric of defederation, it appears as if I could see the whole fediverse from beehaw. Because lemmy.world is a really major instance this is a little bit disingenous. For a new user like me (and a very technical one) this is really hard to grasp. And will lead to users being put off.
I think this whole fragmentation thing is a much bigger threat to the fediverse than Threads is to be honest.
I saw the same on Mastodon, with a lot of German sites instantly blocking federation as soon as another instance doesn’t copy exactly the same set of rules word for word (so no incidents are even necessary). In my opinion this hurts the fediverse a lot. As a user I don’t want to maintain accounts everywhere, the whole point of ActivityPub was not having to do that.
And don’t forget that not all communities on lemmy.world might necessarily bad. Reddit itself is full of toxic communities like the old the_donald (now banned of course). But also really good ones. The same is true for lemmy.world. By by defederating we’re blocking the chance of even seeing them.
thank you for your take! being here on beehaw (and being relatively new to lemmy in general), i have not had a ton of interactions with either of these instances. This came up for me because there are well-populated communities in those spaces that i want to subscribe to. That said, if World is that rife with fascists, then it is obviously not worth the gain in communities.
I have an account on world, and I’ve not come across any fascist stuff. Then again, I’ve blocked several communities like politics, where such people may tend to congregate.
Personally, I treat Beehaw as a standalone community. I do not really see the point of Beehaw federating with others, when the rules, and feel of the community, is so different.
I prefer using a Beehaw account for Beehaw, even gave it a yellow colored theme so it’s clear that I’m browsing Beehaw, and know that it’s “safe” browsing Local/New.
Honestly I would suggest defederatibf from lemm.ee as well. I have noticed a ton of fascists originating from there.
Does Kbin show you what instances users are on? Recently lemm.ee has had a high quantity of users from another instance interact with their posts discussing defederation.
Personally I have not once seen a lemm.ee user fitting the description of “fascist”
