I can completely understand why they did but it really sucks that it had to happen. Hopefully, as the Fediverse grows, better tools are made available so instances don’t need to defederate from each other.
With that said, I think it’s a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I also wasn’t aware that other instances vetted their users? This was the first one I picked. Is there a plan to address the issues beehaw brought up?
With that said, I think it’s a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.
I’ve been calling it a double-edged sword from the moment I knew that could happen in Mastodon and after I joined Lemmy, we see as normal to block lemmygrad from the beginning and that’s understandable, but if an owner goes block-happy they could leave a lot of people stranded and inside their echo-chamber.
They’d be losing everything then and would be forced to migrate to other instance or create their own which may be too much as time goes by and people post more and more.
I said this from the beginning but until we get migration tools to carry our content with us to other instance, think of your account as disposable.
The software right now is extremely lacking in many aspects that it’s hard to pin point which priority should be higher than other (specially since I ain’t helping to it), but yeah I assume there appeared so many bugs when the waves started that we can only be patient.
Yeah I think a migration tool would be very helpful. I basically just signed up for the first instance that looked good without doing much research.
Having to do so much research just to join an instance is one of the biggest problems of the fediverse.
Would be nice if there was a Link funciton. Not just on lemmy but on the fediverse as a whole. That way, you can create an account anywhere and “link” it to other instances so that everything is mirrored. That would mean that each time you post something it would have to travel toward all the instances
If we look at a similar but much more mature tech, email accounts either require something traceable to meatspace or another email account to set up.
Maybe it won’t go that far, I don’t know. We’ll have to see how much fuckery the Fediverse attracts.
This is surfacing a fundamental division between mindsets in federation: the people who say don’t worry about which instance you’re on are bought into the promise that federation can “just work” like email. But the reality is that if you care about moderation at all (like, even to the extent of being for or against having any of it) then sooner or later you’re going to have to make harder decisions about instances.
It’s pretty normal for long-term fediverse users to change instances several times over the course of however long this stuff has been around. It’s unclear to me whether any existing Lemmy instances would be a good fit for me in the long term TBH and I would expect that to be true for some time, as so many instances are still figuring things out internally.
Defederation decisions like beehaw made are extremely normal and rational. With their level of moderation staffing and for their user base, they determined it was unsustainable to remain federated with instances that were generating more moderation workload. If it wasn’t them today it would be another instance tomorrow; this will keep happening.
Also, I see a lot of folks saying this is lazy for beehaw, but it’s important to understand that from their perspective, this problem wouldn’t arise if moderators here were keeping a cleaner house and preventing bad actors from using the platform. (Not saying either take is entirely correct.)
In a sense, moderation best practices on the fediverse are inimically hostile to scaling the fediverse up to new users. (And if you ask folks with smaller but prosperous instances that have healthy internal vibes, they’ll probably tell you this is good.)
This is much more fraught on Lemmy than it is on Mastodon, because you’re building communities hosted on a particular instance and there’s not currently a way to move the community. So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Similarly, to avoid endless duplication of communities, folks have been encouraged to participate with existing communities instead of starting a new one on their own instance everytime. But anyone here who has gotten involved with communities on Beehaw will now no longer be able to do so unless they move to a different instance. (Which may be hard, as open instances that are easy to join are the ones that are harder for small instances to handle, which is what caused this in the first place.)
Some of those folks are going to create their own alternative communities on their servers, which to any third-party servers not in the loop on the defederation drama will be potentially confusing. This has the potential to create a cultural tend toward polarization of community norms between everything goes and what we see on Mastodon as content warning policing, but of which are, to me, undesirable.
The best case scenario is that the majority of large communities end up being hosted on instances that have sufficiently rigorous moderation standards and sufficiently robust moderation staff to not impose an unsustainable workload on smaller instances. Then as long as everyone who’s not a nazi federates with those instances, things should go smoothly…ish. But that’s hard both because “sufficiently rigorous” is different for everyone and because moderation labor doesn’t grow on trees.
Very cogent writeup, seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw’s decision in my eyes. People are getting really angry, and I wonder if those were the same people who bought into the whole “lemmys great because no one has 100% control” idea, only to be upset when the person in control of a slice they like decides they want to do something disagreeable with it. In the first place, one community shouldn’t have carried the burden of the entire content and community of the “Gaming” or “Technology” sphere, it just kind of turned out that way because once they gained momentum, everybody else just flocked to it. And you can’t blame them, that’s where the content is, and the content is why they’re here.
On the whole, though the software doesn’t really restrict you to one or the other, instances are very quickly separating into two camps - viewer and host. Viewer instances are instances like mine, where the majority of users are consumers and not creators. Yeah, I like to run my mouth around these parts but most of the content on my instance doesn’t originate from it. The host instances host communities, and so they carry the burden of having to moderate those communities and the servers/sysadmins carry the burden of having to relay all that communication to all the other instances. I think it’s this part that needs work as we grow, because the best analogy for a Lemmy community is an email group. Can you imagine an email group with tens of thousands of subscribers all just emailing each other over and over again? Lemmy is pretty much just that, but displayed differently.
The part where things get tricky is that beehaw currently has ~15 of the top 50 communities across the entire fediverse and has become the defacto discussion grounds for gaming/tech/news/etc.
One could argue this goes against the whole concept of decentralized communication in the first place, and this may be a position beehaw doesn’t want to be in.
Beehaw has every right to foster a tight-knit community that adheres to its desires.
But there also is a level of responsibility and custodianship over these large communities they foster for the betterment and adoption of the fediverse.
So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Maybe moving a community to another instance will be possible at some point in the future. Who knows?
This is a very good write up. I think there is a big difference in responsiblilty between community hosting instances and viewing instances, and I believe that we will see issues like this more often as community size is ballooning due to the reddit issues. I do believe, or maybe it’s more of a hope, that over time larger communities will bounce around instances until they land on an instance that can better handle the responsibility of moderation, and eventually we’ll end up with a few large instances that host popular communities, and smaller instance that host more niche communities.
I feel that this is the growing pains stage of Lemmy, and if a few QoL features like community migration get worked in, this platform will stabilize into something great.
I think this is pretty unreasonable. They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with the existing moderation team. That was never going to work. Placing the blame on the open registration instances and mod tools seems silly. That said I hope this does lead to an improvement in mod tooling.
They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with only FOUR moderators. That was never going to work.
might be a dumb question, but how could’ve they prevented this?
I think they should have made a deliberate attempt to remain outside of the top three biggest instances like lemmy.ml. Considering the conscious decision to only have the admins be the only mods (that is there are four mods site-wide that moderate ALL communities) these issues were easily foreseen and they should have accepted that they could not realistically compete for the largest instance while maintaining their moderation goals.
They’ve existed as a small community for a year and a half. In all that time, surely they have met/interacted with some people they trust enough to delegate mod duties to.
Not a good look. I get its the admins choice and all but it just wiped out a lot of my subscriptions. Its not a good look from the perspective of new users and increases the number of duplicate communities across instances.
I had hopes for it but I guess I’m one of the lucky ones who signed up for lemmy.world.
I think they should just ban problematic users not the whole instance.
I think they should just ban problematic users not the whole instance.
When the vast majority of the problematic users come from 2 instances with open registration, trying to do that is like stopping a flood with a bucket. I think theirs is a perfectly reasonable response to the troll attack they were just subjected to.
Yeah, I can get their desire to vet users before they can join their instance, but for me (and I suspect a lot of other people who are just starting with Lemmy, or just shy people) the effort of making a social interaction with a stranger was enough of a turn off that I went elsewhere. Beehaw still seems nice, I may still make an account there at some point. But, to figure out if a place suits me, first I lurk, then I engage by voting, then I engage by commenting, and eventually I may eventually post. I get applications, but they feel intrusive to how I use the internet.
I also get why they defederated, frankly there’s a tonne of low effort from the big new instances. However, everyone should expect low effort right now because users are antsy from having left reddit, and the low effort posts are the anxious laughter of people new to the party who don’t know anyone yet. So the defederation isn’t a good look, and will cause bad feeling with and within beehaw, so their mods have my sympathy. Better to have enabled downvoting and let the community handle the low effort posts.
They could also just use a whitelist of users who are allowed to comment/post on there. I have suggested as much but we will see how they respond. I might try and contact a mod over there if that’s possible.
Edit: I’ve been told by another user that this isn’t currently supported. I think it would be a good feature to add to lemmy.
But why would it disrupt your subscriptions if lemmy.world and SJW are still federating beehaw? Can’t one instance federate another without it being mutual? Is that the difference between a non-federated instance and a blocked instances, where blocked instances cannot even read your content?
Edit: Actually I think I understand. I checked the blocked instances and they are not blocked just delinked. So in that case, you must be a beehaw user who lost your subscriptions to communities on lemmy.world and SJW.
Who else here is chilling on their own instance watching this shit unfold with some popcorn 😂
I am a lurker over there so this decision literally changes nothing about how I use beehaw and my community is still awesome so I’m all good👍
Exactly the reason why Lemmy at scale will never work, since most people won’t run their own instance.
I don’t think running your own instance is required, just that the user base needs to be distributed across more instances. The happy median lies somewhere between “uber” instances and self-hosted.
