Beehaw “moderators” don’t have an issue with their user base checking out other communities. As is clearly obvious from the fact that they aren’t defederated from all other instances.
They do have an issue with droves of unvetted users from other instances trolling and harassing their community though. And the most effective way to deal with that currently is to defederate from the instances that the majority of those bad-faith users are coming from. The unfortunate (and unintentional) side effect is that Beehaw users won’t be able to interact with any of the users from those instances.
This is a situation born out of a combination of
- lack of manpower and moderation tools
- gaps in the configuration of inter-instance interactions
- the way the internet works
You can disagree with this decision and users are free to switch, but this meme is a poor caricature of the actual effects of Beehaw’s actions and (at least in my estimation) of their intentions.
The decision to defederate is less of an attack or an indictment against the other instances and more of a practical necessity for them to protect their community.
If the user base of the lemmy verse keeps growing I wouldn’t be surprised if either
- more granular control over the way instances interact with each other is implemented and the restrictions are softened or
- the amount of spammers and trolls reaches a level that forces more instances to vet their users and the defederation is lifted entirely or
- more powerful moderation tools show up and in combination with a greater number of people moderating makes the pre-screening of users unnecessary
I saw a wave of the harassing spam they were getting right before they defederated. One was a meme about lynching drag performers. Another was a picture of an erection that was posted in what looked like every feminist and trans friendly space, asking if it was bigger than the ones owned by the denizens of the communities. I’m sure it was just a small fraction of what they were dealing with as more shitty little hatemongers find their way to Lemmy, but I happened to catch it by sorting by new at exactly the wrong time. I can’t blame the Beehaw mods for not wanting to deal with the psychological toll that comes with manually moderating that kind of content.
I saw dick-pic spam.
There’s a lot of words we can use, but its a lot faster to just say they got harassed by the whole slew of NSFW-spam, porn-spam, harassers and such.
Yeah. I’m surprised by how hostile ordinary users have been at this point. Beehaw defedrated after the mods were swamped and most of the content they had to deal with was from these two instances.
I have accounts on both and I was just reading a discussion on beehaw where both the owners of lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had chimed in and everyone was talking about how to get federated back in the future after beehaw have had a chance to get more moderators and the influx of users stabilizes at the end of the month.
My only gripe is that all of my negative interactions at this point have been with people from lemmy.ml so why do they remain while the other two were defederated? But that might be just my experience.
I think shit and world got defederated because they don’t have that “why do you want to join” question on the sign up page, and so is easy to make spam accounts on.
Yeah I agree. They’ve been quite open about everything so far and their main issue was the modding implications of open sign up. The tools just don’t exist yet to manage it effectively and keep the kind of community they want, so it’s just easier to defederate for now until they do. They have a dialogue open with shit just works and said that the admin of lemmy.world hasn’t replied to their message, but that it’s fine if they don’t want to talk too.
I am a bit disappointed that inter-instance sniping has started so early though. I personally am on both instances and am going to try and treat both in good faith for now
Fortunately, @ruud made a comment https://beehaw.org/comment/298646. They should be working together soon.
I agree with Beehaw’s decision, until moderation tools are strong like on Mastodon to quell targeted hate spam and other such 4chan level trash…They have every right to defederate Lemmy and any instance that compromises the wellbeing of their community. I do hope these issues which have caused this situation are resolved overtime. I’d donate to help the effort. Decentralized social media feels like the future of how we interact with others with internet-based communication. It needs support to get off the ground and run faster than sites like Facebook or Twitter.
No, the meme is accurate. The owners of beehaw are so obsessed with protecting their users from possible harassment that they are willing to put them in a prison with no communication with most of the outside world (lemmy.world has the most active users and sh.itjust.works is in top 5).
And the users on beehaw are free to create accounts on other instances if they want. Your prison metaphor is a bad one.
I’ll be honest: that’s a shitty way of handling this. Making 20 accounts to view content from 20 different instances that don’t want to cooperate with one another defeats the purpose of all of this. If that’s the plan, the Lemmyverse or whatever it’s called is dead on arrival.
They are restricting their users freedom. But yes the users are free to leave.
Users are people capable of making their own choices. It they don’t like the moderation approach they can just make a new account elsewhere. You don’t get to tell them what they like.
Yes, how dare I criticize someone’s actions and the impact they have on our community.
I have a BeeHaw account and a lemmy.world account. I’m not imprisoned lol, it’s the Internet, not some.private island. Nothing’s stopping anyone from browsing or joining any of these communities
People’s freedoms were limited for no good reason. But you are right that they can leave. Users can leave Reddit too.
fucking lmao
as if they can’f make an account on another instance
y’all are just hurt because you think you’re being rejected and insulted by this, when they made it clear that it wasn’t personal or permanent
as if they can’f make an account on another instance
So that makes it right to cut people off from the outside world without asking them first? Do you want things like this to keep happening? Or should we maybe try other solutions first? Somehow other instances didn’t have to defederate, so maybe it’s not necessary?
Nothing wrong with that imo. If you don’t like it, just use another instance.
This system means people can foster their instances to be however they want, and that’s great!
Also, fyi, if you’re on lemmy.world, leave any beehaw comms you’ve joined and join alternate comms in other instances. The beehaw comms are going to be very empty on your end soon.
I also predict that their comms will die out in a few weeks, unless they federate again.
Still, interesting challenge to the whole federation concept, if it’s even possible for you to shape/customize a community of people, if you have to let anyone in from anywhere.
When I was registering to lemmy, BH was already big, I read their rules/concept and was thinking how would that even work (e.g. no downvotes) with federation.
Let’s see where it goes, but I would be happier if we all stay federated and build a big userbase, rather than fragmenting into small silos, and having 5 different versions of a topic-based community with a few K users each.
Is there an easy way to shift an account between instances? Or do you need to start from scratch with a new account on each instance?
Not any that I know of. Doesn’t matter much though; there’s no karma system here to worry about, and you only really need one account on an instance that isn’t controversial (like lemmy.world and lemm.ee, and really, most instances)
You can check if an instance is blocking any others by clicking ‘instances’ at the bottom of the page.
This beehaw thing is very rare. Just stay away from the instance and its comms for now until lemmy’s improved further to support this massive wave of users.
Is kbin a good place to set up shop? I don’t really understand the advantages/disadvantages of different instances. I made an account on lemmy.world first, but I remade my account on kbin a few hours later because I like the kbin interface a little more.
Also, if there’s no karma, what are the “reputation points” in my profile?
beehaw initially seemed like a nice good natured well rounded place but they got controlling and weird very quickly. never even let me in, i typed pretty good faith answers and haven’t heard shit ofc
check out their modlog. they have way too many unnecesary bans or post removals. wasting energy instead of focusing on the real trolls.
How do I filter modlog to only show logs from given instance? I’ve entered modlog that is available at bottom of page on beehaw and also different instance and the modlog is quite similar with some beehaw entries not showing up on other and vice versa.
I assume the modlog is combined from all federated instances, so I can’t really tell what actions are made by beehaw unless it references community belonging to beehaw.
Beehaw was almost responsible for me not joining this service at all, got frustrated when I couldn’t log into my account a week after I made it and nearly gave up entirely.
I’m on the SDF instance. It’s a small instance that seems to Federate with all the big ones including Beehaw. It has manual approval but only asks one question and approval is within a day.
Also the host platform has been around since 1987.
Let them do what they want. The communities you wanna check out will be available elsewhere with time.
What bothers me about this is that the administrators at sh.itjust.works, beehaw.org, and lemmy.world are all being adults about this.
While this Reddit-like stampede is already trying to create an us-vs-them environment.
It’s fine. The adults are adulting. Maybe a bit of Reddit deprogramming is all that is needed for people to become more reasonable.
Exactly! I’m new here (from Reddit) it’s very clear that some of us new ppl are getting confused as to why instances are having to defed and are getting upset at the admins.
We are the reason!
The admins are working hard with the extra traffic and increased exposure to content that may not have previously been welcome in their communities.
My fellow Reddit refugees, post and comment on the content you want to see, not the drama and the uncertainty right now. Find your ppl in the new communities and start sharing and conversing like the good old days on Reddit.
The Reddit deprogramming goes deep, for sure. I still find myself deleting comments here after typing them out because there is a 50/50 chance of getting abuse or arguments from someone for basically anything you post on that site.
I’m hoping that the overall lack of certain systemic encouragements from commercial socials that everyone has become horrifically used to interacting with will squash a lot of this kind of behavior over time. That is, the bullshit no longer serves the algo that doesn’t exist herre, and the lack of positive feedback will either cause them to change their ways or just leave.
I wonder if Lemmy’s upvote system overweights the first few upvotes the way Reddit did. That drove people to make high engagement posts since a sudden flurry of comments on a rage-bait post tended to slingshot stuff to the top reliably. If Lemmy doesn’t do that, it will help. The lack of eyeballs in Lemmyverse should discourage bots to some degree.
I’m hoping the same for Mastodon. A LOT of the behaviors that people have internalized come down to trying to game the algorithm with hot takes and such, but the limited virality of the Mastodon platform will hopefully discourage all their usual bullshit, or they’ll go.
I think the people who just want Reddit will return to it, at least for a while, since Lemmy was just their methadone and the heroin store is back open now. Me, I’ve been peeling away from both Reddit and Twitter for a long time so I’m ready to move on. There was a distinct culture on the Fediverse before all these sudden surges in users, hopefully once things settle that culture will get a chance to assert itself again.
The us vs them mentality is such a default human reaction, one that you have to actively battle in yourself.
I like the whole idea of federation and I think the more we use the platform the better and more tailored our experiences will be.
It’s a ground up, organic process, and we’re still figuring it out. I think things will naturally develop, because that is how this system is set up.
fr, I just failed that battle not that long ago lol.
I think between removing Reddit from my habits and the positive engagement here I’ll be ripe yet!
Beehaw.org, a large powerful Lemmy server, has defederated from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works in response to a severe harassment campaign involving porn-spam and death threats.
This means beehaw.org users and communities are now cut off from Lemmy.world and vice versa.
The full details are a bit hard to follow, but the TL;DR: Beehaw.org wants a curated community and Lemmy.world doesn’t. Beehaw.org has a tougher sign up process while it’s basically free at Lemmy.world.
But that’s not a big deal or the real drama. People are all looking into the future. /R/piracy has moved into the Fediverse, as have pornographic servers. So now there are discussions on all sorts of topics and what should be or shouldn’t be federated.
That’s fine. The federization model works, but differently than what Redditors are used to. So I think people are confused about how things play out on the Lemmy-community.
To add more context, currently Lemmy doesn’t offer great moderation tools. So if a relatively open instance like lemmy.world interacts with beehaw, beehaw ability to shut down the ‘few bad apples’ coming from lemmy.world is rudimentary at best.
At a certain point, admins just can’t keep up and have to make a judgment call. Either accept that trolls and bad actors are going to get through or cut off the source of the infection, regardless of whether or not that impacts regular users.
Beehaw has already stated that they’re open to reconnecting once they have a better way of moderating and dealing with bad actors.
It’s pretty easy to sum up. The admins on beehaw decided to break federation with a couple of other instances including lemmy.world. Their reasoning being that the open registration policies and relative lack of oversight in those instances were incompatible with the space they wanted to create on beehaw. What this means is that users from lemmy.world cannot interact with users on beehaw and vice versa.
The technical details of how all this works are a bit more complicated, but that’s the basic gist.
the short of it is beehaw is a selective community that is fairly liberal and expect people to be respectful to each other. That is the alien concept of a lot of reddit refugees and hence beehaw has to leave the larger federation of lemmy/fediverse and that means you won’t be able to see their topics here (say lemmy.world). A lot of people seem to be mad that they’re doing it and saying angry things about it. There is a possibility when they get better mod tools they can return, but for now there is simply not enough mods to control the refugee trolls.
And this a prime example of why the multi-instance system is great. Don’t like one instance? Go to another one.
EDIT: I also wish to say that I feel both sides of the situation have merit. Yes, it sucks that we’ve been defederated, but in all fairness, there legitimately was an issue with abusive users causing havoc over on Beehaw.
Yeah I think Beehaw have a clear ethos and want to protect that. I think the misunderstanding is from the new people influxing into Lemmy/Kbin (me included) - they don’t have to be a part of the wider Fediverse. They’re big by the standards of Lemmy/Kbin when people arrived so people are suprised that they don’t seem to “want” a big influx - they were expecting them to embrace redditors and want to be the new reddit. They understandably want to be able to moderate their communities and that’s difficult with the current tools. They may also want to screen their users which may not be ultimately sustainable in a federate model.
Beehaw will continue and succeed in it’s aims but it’s probably not going to be a big player long term, but I don’t think it wants to be the mass choice. Lemmy.world and Fedia.io / kbin.social at the moment seem like more likely bets long term as they’re embracing the growth, and analogous communities to big familiar Reddit communities are being created which will be clear places to go for future influxes.
