ou might have seen that we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. I think there’s some necessary context to understand what this means to the users on this instance.
How federation works
The way federation works is that the community on beehaw.org is an organization of posts, and you’re subscribed to it despite your account being on lemmy.world. Now someone posts on that community (created on beehaw.org), on which server is that post hosted?
It’s hosted on both! It’s hosted on any instance that has a subscriber. It’s also hosted on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, etc. Every instance that has a subscriber is going to have a copy of this post. That’s why if you host your own instance, you’ll often get a ton of text data just in your own server.
And the copies all stay in sync with each other using ActivityPub. So you’re reading the post that’s host on lemmy.world, and someone with an account on beehaw.org is reading the same post on beehaw.org, and the posts are kept in sync via ActivityPub. Whenever someone posts to that community or comments on a post, that data is shared to all the versions across the fediverse, and these versions are kept in sync. So up until 5 hours ago, they were the same post!
“True”-ness
A key concept that will matter in the next section is the idea of a “true” version. Effectively, one version of these posts is the “true” version, that every other community reflects. The “true” version is the one hosted on the instance that hosts the community. So the “true” version of a beehaw.org community post is the one actually hosted on beehaw.org. We have a copy, but ours is only a copy. If you post to our copy, it updates the “true” version on beehaw.org, and then all the other instances look to the “true” version on beehaw to update themselves.
The same goes for communities hosted on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Defederation affects how information is shared between instances. If you keep track of where the “true” version is hosted, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on.
How defederation works
Now take that example post from earlier, the one on beehaw.org. The “true” version of the post is on beehaw.org but the post is still hosted on both instances (again, it has a copy hosted on all instances). Let’s say someone with an account on beehaw.org comments on that post. That comment is going to be sent to every version of that post via ActivityPub, as the “true” version has been updated. That is, every version EXCEPT lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. So users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won’t get that comment, because we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. If we write a comment, it will only be visible from accounts on lemmy.world, because we posted to a copy, but our copy is now out of sync with the “true” version. So we can appear to interact with the post, but those interactions are ONLY visible by other lemmy.world accounts, since our comments aren’t send to other versions. As the “true” version is hosted on beehaw, and we no longer get beehaw updates due to defederation, we will not see comments from ANY other community on those posts (including from other defederated instances like sh.itjust.works).
The same goes for posting to beehaw communities. We can still do that. However, the “true” version of those communities are the ones on beehaw, so our posts will not be shared to other instances via ActivityPub. And all of this is true for Beehaw users with our communities. Beehaw users can continue to see and interact with Lemmy.world communities, but those interactions are only visible to other Beehaw users, since the “true” versions of the Lemmy.world communities (the ones sent to/synced with every other instance) is the Lemmy.world one.
Communities on other instances, for example lemmy.ml, are unaffected by this. Lemmy.world and beehaw.org users will still be able to interact with those communities, but posts/comments from lemmy.world users won’t be visible to beehaw.org users, as defederation prevents our posts/comments from being sent to the version of these posts hosted on beehaw.org. However, as the “true” version is the one on the third instance, we can still see everything from beehaw.org users. So we see a more filled in version than the beehaw users.
Why can I still see posts/comments from beehaw users?
Until they defederated us, posts/comments were being sent to lemmy.world, so we can see everything from before defederation. After defederation, we are no longer receiving or sending updates. So there are now multiple versions of those posts.
Why can I still interact with beehaw communities?
This won’t ever stop. You’ll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won’t see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities.
Those communities will quickly suck for us, as we’re only talking to other lemmy.world users. Your posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. I highly recommend just unsubscribing from those communities, since they’re pretty pointless for us to be in right now.
Why do I still see comments from beehaw users on lemmy.world communities?
Again, comments from before defederation were still sent to us. After defederation, it will no longer be possible for beehaw users to interact with the “true” version of lemmy.world communities. Their posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. They also aren’t getting updates from any other lemmy, as the “true” version of those communities is on our instance.
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.
This seems like it’s worse for beehaw users than for us?
Yes. In my opinion, this is an extraordinarily dumb act by the beehaw instance owners. It’s worse for beehaw users than for us, and will likely result in many beehaw users leaving that instance. They said in their post that this is a nuke, but I don’t think they fully assessed the blast area. Based on their post, I don’t think they fully understand what defederation does.
I can understand wanting to have a well-moderated community.
What I don’t understand is how they expect to do that with a moderation team of just 4 people.
I guess now people will just leave Beehaw, its communities that were popular here will be replaced by others in the Fediverse and life will go on. The Fediverse is built to be resilient to such changes.
The crazy part is that they want to be able to view and comment on other instances’ posts but not vice versa.
Like why should other instances agree to that?
Hopefully beehaw dies off quickly.
Hopefully beehaw dies off quickly.
I don’t get why you hope for this? Isn’t the point of fediverse to have lot of different instances for different people?
Beehaw will continue existing as it chooses to exist, with or without lemmy.world. Isn’t that a good thing? That’s decentralization. That’s what we want more of.
It’s a really shitty thing to do a growing platform. For the 3rd largest server to defederate a week into the platform growing is going to go a long way to convincing folks this platform isn’t viable. Honestly this may be it for me.
The Beehaw admins are really in love with their ideals but I can’t help but feel like they have effectively kneecapped a new platform.
I disagree. It’s like a poorly implemented private subreddit. People didn’t complain that that was possible before and I don’t see why they should now.
It’s quite literally free-loading off other instances though.
Not just in the content sense, but also the actual monetary cost of the image hosting, etc.
The crazy part is that they want to be able to view and comment on other instances’ posts but not vice versa
Where did you get this idea from? They won’t be able to interact with other instances from Beehaw. They clearly don’t want to based on this action.
Read their comments - https://beehaw.org/comment/262284
Site (instance)-wide limiting is exactly that.
I don’t think you’re technically wrong, but I think with the reddit migration it’s overall damaging to the concept of a fediverse to have a large instance defederate with two huge instances.
There are people who are just getting settled only to find out they now have to use two accounts to access the content they needed one for yesterday.
Yeah, the solution is just to leave beehaw though. It takes a few minutes to make a new account on another instance. If they really want to access the beehaw stuff they could join an instance that is still federated with them, that way they could see the beehaw posts and the lemmy.world posts.
It’s probably best just to abandon beehaw entirely though and use alternative communities in the Fediverse.
People really shouldn’t see that as a bug, it’s a feature. Reddit does something you don’t like? Too bad. One instance in the fediverse does something you don’t like? It’s incredibly easy to leave. Maybe some day you’ll be able to transfer accounts to other instances, that’d be neat.
They are fine with being a small community. They aren’t interested in growth for growth’s sake. They existed for 18 months with around 200 members and were content with that continuing indefinitely. They aren’t against growth, they simply don’t value it highly.
And yet they still have the largest communities by an order of magnitude.
The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users. And beehaw didn’t have confidence in the moderation of shit just works and lemmy.world and couldn’t keep up with banning them on their side. Thats why they defederated.
The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users.
It’s correct what you say, but the idea bugs me the more I understand it.
It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance. These other users can have nothing in common with the causing users, or might have even opposed them in their wrongdoings.
There is also a level between users and instances; communities. Maybe the problem was with one specific community, yet all other communities who happen to live on the same instance feel the same consequences.
Defederating individual communities would feel better for me, but ultimately I think a problem caused by individuals should be solved with these individuals, not with groups which are more or less meaningfully associated with those individuals.
The problem is that we don’t just have individuals but anonymous individuals. Even if you block, ban and defederate users if they can just turn around and put a +1 on the end of their Gmail account and go on spamming, and posting unwanted content. You have to act against the people enabling this.
There is a reason why some moderation tools aren’t available yet but a application system is. The fediverse is not supposed to be a group of unaccountable anonymous individuals. It’s supposed supposed to be an actual market place of ideas with bars where if your customers shit on the tables all the time the local health department will shut you down.
undefined> It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance.
That’s why I always thought that the ideal scenario for federated web is to have instances that are either single-user or are down to friends-of-friends level of members (say, under 100 users per instance), so that there can be social accountability and if you have a bad actor on your instance, then it’s easy to kick them out and preserve your reputation. Bad actors will concentrate on their own instances and they can be defederated without collateral damage.
So, if Beehaw’s registration model is invite-only (that’s what I gather from this thread), then I think they probably have the right approach to federation; they are vouching for their users and they are responsible for making sure that they won’t be damaging communities across the federation.
It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance.
As I understand the problem from their side is that to get an account on Beehaw, you have to go through an approval process. If a user there starts violating their policies, they can be banned and it’s harder and slower to make a new account to get around the van because of the approval process. But getting an account on the other two instances is automatic and instantaneous. If a person from this instance starts violating Beehaw policies in a post there, and Beehaw mods ban them, they can make a new account here and be back there causing trouble in seconds, which is apparently what some people did.
The moderation tools are apparently pretty coarse right now, so they could essentially ignore it or defederate from us, and they chose the latter.
Sure, there’s no issue with that. I think most people agree that Beehaw can run their instance as they see fit and even understand their intention of trying to keep out trolls. We’re just also saying that it’s not the most efficient way to deal with the problem, and mainly it punishes Beehaw users as far as I can see.
Yeah having 4 mods for something this large isn’t realistic, though I also understand they have problems with the moderation tools. Hopefully they can find more mods and lemmy can get better tools. I think once that happens they are considering refederation.
As much as it seems like a bone headed decision I can understand why they made it and that they probably didn’t have much choice given the resources theu have. I suggested to them that they should consider a whitelist/invite only system of users from certain instances instead. I haven’t heard back from the mods on that but another user has already tried to shoot me down.
Edit: I have been told a whitelist isn’t currently supported by Lemmy.
It won’t. There will be likely lots of cases of mod abuse that ends up pushing users away. Moderation requires a healthy balance, not an extreme of either side. Lots of Reddit subs had similar issues, but they at least benefited from the overall growth of the platform itself to fill the previous slots with new users.
I guess that’s an improvement. I mean their users seem to like the set-up. I just don’t like not being able to create communities and having such a small group of users in control.
It just seems ripe for abuse like we saw in Reddit.
But that’s the wonder of the Fediverse, each user can pick their instance.
A lot of people are missing the point of their defederation, which is a lack of proper moderation team and tools for the sudden scale they are exposed to as one of the most popular place of discussion with the rexxit with them harboring some of the most active communities around.
Their issue is mainly bad actors, trolls and harassers coming from those big instances and overwhelming them.
Defederation is the big-nuke symptom of a wider fediverse problem, a lack of moderation tools and readiness for scale, that I also saw happen a lot on Mastodon. I followed the infosec instance and they basically ended up having to defederate the biggest mastodon instances for a few days at a time when stuff like spam and cryptobro DMs ran rampant. I’ve received many of those so I can tell you that it’s pretty real.
Construing their decision as a desire to fracture the community is missing the actual reason they’ve tried to articulate. It’s a temporary stopgap for the 4 admins who just weren’t expecting the sort of volume and associated misbehaving problems they are suddenly getting.
Overall, Lemmy is getting through a pretty intense “shit just got real” moment. Please bear with it, people are working really hard at solving this from what I can see.
It seems like Beehaw want to create a closed community they can moderate. That kind of makes sense for their aims but they will need to defederate from more and more services to maintain that over time.
It seems a bit of a kneejerk in reaction to the influx of new users but essentially it means they’ll not be part of the fediverse, and they risk creating an echochamber. It’s rather the opposite of their stated aim of creating a diverse community, and will probably stymie their growth going forward.
On the bright side, at least I have drama content to read. Maybe this thing can replace reddit… lol
Hey I am just going to throw this out into the ether, I have been on the lemmy instances longer than beehaw, and I have yet to find an instance whos admin team I would trust less with their stated reasoning. I would not trust their stated reasoning and if I had to guess they are trying to get Lemmy.world to change something to come into line with them. if you ask me you have dodged a bullet. I hope lemmy.world stands strong
