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.

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.

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.

This may be the most well thought out response I've seen yet.

Extremely well put. Community migration should be something that would definitely be needed.

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.

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 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.

Their post explains why your suggestions are not actionable.

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.

I just unsubbed from anything that was with them. Fuck em.

Is there a SubRedditDrama community equivalent here?

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👍

Yet another reason why it's great to be Canadian.

Exactly the reason why Lemmy at scale will never work, since most people won't run their own instance.

raises hand

Agreed. They do deserve their own points if they want to be that type of community. I’d say for instance if places like AskHistorians arise within lemmy or kbin, federating with just those would be interesting.

There are always going to be more exclusive communities. Humans just work like that. I say we ride with it for now.

Federation should be a gradient. If they want to close themselves off why is it using ActivityPub to begin with?

I posted this there, but since you can't see it

"I wonder if the type of community you're trying to build wouldn't be easier with a more traditional forum software like discourse. The infrastructure and moderation tools there have had much longer to mature."

I think they've picked the wrong tool for what they're trying to do.

Yeah. In the explanation they say that four people are taking the load of moderation, that can't scale. If the rest of the communities keep growing they may end up isolating themselves for not being able to adapt.

It was inevitable, though. Hopefully we see instances segregate nicely into tiers of lawlessness rather than just chaos.

My problem with Beehaw in general is it reeks of overzealous and manipulative mods. The internet is full of awful people but to pretend you can make an island of purity where you get to decide what is pure is going to be a worse idea in the long run.

Yeah, somewhat agree (they only had 4 main mods, that's rediculous) but they do raise a good point in the difficulty of maintaining a friendly and safe community with limited moderation possible.

What we need isn't large instances splitting off and defederating, it's better moderation tools and more volunteers.

I'm on a smaller instance and am still fully federated with all three instances involved, so it doesn't affect me, but that also means if I chose to be a dick and spam/troll on beehaw communities they would have to moderate me manually, or defederate from my instance too.

I suspect this will be reversed when better moderation is possible, or perhaps they will eventually be able to block posts and comments from other instances without defederating entirely if they want to remain as clean and high quality as they are attempting to be.

Totally unfiltered internet trash is just about as useful as being alone, though.

There should be a way to export and import your subscriptions and saved posts so that you can easily transfer accounts to different instances.

Reading through the comments in their post I'm losing the little sympathy I was feeling. It looks like the moderation tool they are hoping for is one that allows their users to access other communities while preventing the other communities from accessing beehaw. That feels shortsighted and selfish, and I would think most communities on that end on the block would block them reciprocally.

They are actively trying to be as clean and friendly as possible, and that's admirable but the tools don't exist for them to maintain that if they are fully federated. they are woefully undermoderated for how much traffic they are having to filter.

Once better mod tools arrive they may be able to re-open to other large instances.

Perhaps an option in the future would be for them to remain federated but somehow implement post/comment restrictions on outside instances to keep it under control.

many of those are imported from the tier0 Fediblock list, which includes all the instances any decent human being would want to block as well. I don't see myself wanting any content from pedo dot school or teenagegirls dot biz.

When an instance has a specific rule, no NSFW for instance, it can't be receiving that content from other instances and serving it to its users because it breaks its own rules. You might want NSFW content but your instance's users agreed to that rule, probably because that's what they wanted out of the instance.

Kbin (I'm on kbin.social) allows users to block entire instances, rather than leaving that entirely up to admins.

The problem is that read access for a user means the content is cached on the instance of that user, making the instance owner potentially liable if we are talking about content illegal in their jurisdiction.

That's a bit of a silly equivalence to make, beehaw admins even said it wasn't a permanent or moral decision, they just need to figure out how to manage that from a moderation perspective, which is probably fair.

we're on what list now?

They do want to refederate when they get more granular options, but the federation options for lemmy right now is basically federate or not, which is kind of sucky, also I don't think reports bubble up to the origin server like they do on mastodon, I'm sure it will get there in time, but for now there isn't that many.

It's a recurring fediverse issue - Mastodon has it too. Basically, there are levels of blocking at various points in the hierarchy and you block or get blocked to your tolerance zone. This means that certain norms get squashed(and there are some reasonable concerns about who this helps), but it also tends to self-moderate to the conversations people want to engage with. The "invasive free-speech" instances of Mastodon tend to end up isolated, but it can also be hard to get situated and find an instance and follows you're happy with.

Something I'm looking forward to with the forum model being added to the mix is a greater ability to browse for organized discussions.

Lemmy does not seem to include any kind of authentication on the user level (such as a user keypair and signatures using that on their posts and comments client-side) so allowing one user from a remote instance would at least trust the owner of that instance to not impersonate the user who is allowed to post.

In fact, how does ActivityPub in the threadiverse even ensure that the instance is who they say they are? The W3C document on it seems to indicate that there is no standardized way to authenticate servers to other servers yet.

I find it really frustrating to build up a feed of content, only to lose it when moderator fights begin. What servers are next? Which one do I join to get the most content?

I want this to succeed but I don't know how I can recommend it to people today, since they're going to ask the same questions.

yeah, was starting to like it here, but honestly if any instance will just defederate the second something inconvenient happens... we won't have a site with good content that will keep people around

But isn't that good? It means you have much more freedom now, you can make communities, post more stuff, don't have to follow a non existant set of rules.

Yeah, me as well. Seems kbin has a way more open minded view on things. They don't defederate from anyone, which suits me just fine. I wouldn't like to defederated from anyone, including lemmygrad. There are some interesting reads over there (at least for me).

Basically they stop receiving or responding to updates from your instance. That means their instance won't receive new posts or comments from yours, and any communities hosted on your instance won't be searchable on theirs.

In a nutshell, beehaw's server and the servers of the other listed instances are not talking to each other anymore. If new posts are made from either one, beehaw won't see them and vice versa. You can still pull up older, non-updated versions of beehaw communities/posts from before they defederated, but you won't be seeing any more beehaw-related activity on them. You might even be able to comment there(?), but no one on their side will see it.

Until they decide to refederate, any further communication is cut off.

See https://lemmy.world/post/149743 for the dirty details about how asymmetric defederation impacts us. It's stupid complicated.

If you're not signed up to any of these you may actually be in the best position because as long as your instance isn't defederated by any of them you can view it all.

Wow... I'm new here so I'm still learning how all this works but I tried to apply to beehaw at first and they were having severe issues with their approval system so I either got denied or, most likely, got stuck in application purgatory.

Honestly, with how Lemmy is set up, it seems like it makes more sense to cater your instance to a more niche crowd than "all nice people" like beehaw was attempting to do.

This is c/support@beehaw.org federated onto Kbin. Beehaw is defedding from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.

Edit: So that is how you make a working link across the fediverse.

I've been kicking around an idea in my head of making a Lemmy fork that has Tildes' ideas about modding baked in. (I would fork Kbin but I don't know PHP.)

In my experience, it's always been the best approach to select new moderators from the people known as active, high-quality members of the community. My goal with the trust system on Tildes is to turn this process of discovering the best members and granting them more influence into a natural, automatic one.

...

Trusting someone is a gradual process that comes from seeing how they behave over time. This can be reflected in the site's mechanics—for example, if a user consistently reports posts correctly for breaking the rules, eventually it should be safe to just trust that user's reports without preemptive review. Other users that aren't as consistent can be given less weight—perhaps it takes three reports from lower-trust users to trigger an action, but only one report from a very high-trust user.

This approach can be applied to other, individual mechanics as well. For example, a user could gain (or lose) access to particular abilities depending on whether they use them responsibly. If done carefully, this could even apply to voting—just as you'd value the recommendation of a trusted friend more than one from a random stranger, we should be able to give more weight to the votes of users that consistently vote for high-quality posts.

...

Another important factor will be having trust decay if the user stops participating in a community for a long period of time. Communities are always evolving, and if a user has been absent for months or years, it's very likely that they no longer have a solid understanding of the community's current norms. Perhaps users that previously had a high level of trust should be able to build it back up more quickly, but they shouldn't indefinitely retain it when they stop being involved.

Between these two factors, we should be able to ensure that communities end up being managed by members that actively contribute to them, not just people that want to be a moderator for its own sake.

Combine that with things like AutoModerator (the person behind Tildes is the one who built AutoMod on Reddit) and it seems like a reasonable way for a platform to promote good stuff and cut down on bad.

You'll have to deal with per-community "power users" with a lot of power, but the alternative is unelected mods who can be just as bad.

I don't know if I'm ever going to get around to making that fork. But I think taking Tildes' approach to mods is novel and fresh, and I quite like it.

I don’t think we should reevaluate our policy just to get 1 specific instance to refederate us…. Anyway, Beehaw’s mindset has always been exclusive and restrictive, despite being a larger instance. Even if we switch to closed registration, they may disagree with our vetting process. It’s just part of their community ideals of creating a “safe space” aligned with their “community values”. I completely disagree with their course, but it’s their instance, so whatever, their call.

Beehaws just weird honestly, at that point they would be running this instance and how we accept and moderate users. I agree it's a very poor time and I bet reddit admins and redditors are laughing at us struggling to form a community.

From a user perspective (who've been active on Masto for a while)

• Closed registration because it's what the instance can handle : Fine and part of the fediverse.

• Moderated registration : How do you define who can join ? It's fine and even intended to have small instances for the admin and their friends, but if you go bigger, how do you deal with a real newcomer, not someone who's been on slashdot/reddit/mastodon for decades and just have to send a couple of DM to get an invite ?

I do find it a bit odd that they didn't defederate from all open ones, if the problem is ban evasion then people can just change. I don't think their ban evasion preventative plan is going to work at all. Some of the "restricted" registrations are really just delayed and some are more gatekeepy so it's not really a solution for them

I agree. While they might have the larger communities (for now), they seem to have also absorbed the worst kind of judgmental pricks from Reddit. I was just thinking to myself earlier that Lemmy needs a way to block instances at the user level.

🤣

lol

this is why y'all got defederated lol

I was able to sign up. I am still not able to log in. None of the lemmy style sites work for me. Account created, go there to login and when I do it just sits there with the green button spinning forever. Same with sh.itjust.works which is ironic.

beehaw has a really insular culture that's strictly moderated. they have invite-only signups, are quick to remove things that are "off-brand", etc. their complaint here is basically: the amount of ex-redditors flooding lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works basically makes it difficult for them to moderate the way they want (cracking down on content that doesn't match their community), so they defederated, which removes those posts from their site.

Indeed the point of the "fediverse" is to have content between sites shared. but beehaw is a bit... special. and I have a feeling they'll defederate more and more instances as the fediverse grows, because their ethos is pretty much the opposite of it.

mod tools arent adequate (for now) to handle the influx of users basically, i believe. this comment about it is great: https://kbin.social/...

only to people on the instances they are defederating from, so smaller instances and selfhosters will be unaffected.

Gotta wait for better modding tools and scripts to become available, wont take long.

You will be able to see and post to anything pre-defederation, but it won't leave your server.

They did use future tense in the post. That's nice, it gives things a chance to move.

100%. The best instance to be on is actually your own. Failing that, a small one where the admins are easy to get a hold of.

Big ones that offer extra goodies might become a thing ala Gmail, but I expect they will vet and monitor their users so nobody has to block them.

Edit: Annoyingly, I can't respond to Kbin users,

big instances are more likely to stay up. smaller instances may just be some random user who might not be as interested in maintaining the site and may end up closing it. this happened to me when I used mastodon, I joined a smaller instance and they ended up shutting down.

There's a possible future where major fediverse sites switch to whitelisted federation to deal with spam etc. At that point, your small instance would have to petition all the major players to be let in. That would probably kill off most small instances.

1. it's extremely useful to newbies and less tech-savvy people who don't know how to find communities on other instances

2. at the current moment when federation is still a bit wonky due to the influx of new members, it's good to have the bulk of content you want to see be on your own instance. I can't login to lemmy.world, but I can log into kbin. But until recently I was only able to see posts 5 hours old on other instances from kbin.

The issue they stated wasn't with other federated communities, but with the users from those federated instances spamming their communities. Beehaw has a strict account policy and only want users they've personally vetted commenting and posting in their communities. So in effect they are blocking instances they've determined to be problematic by defederating them. At least that's my understanding of it.

They wana make a forum like community. Just look at the icons of all of their communities, they're tailor made and themed.

My understanding is that the subscriber count shown for a community is always exclusive to your own instance. Like if I go to !technology@beehaw.org I only see subscribers from midwest.social. But I still see posts and comments from lemmy.world users because my instance federates with both lemmy.world and beehaw.org.

Good question

https://fedia.io does.

But bear in mind that this is just the knee-jerk reaction of the admins at Beehaw; they will likely defederate with any community that has open sign-ups.

Beehaw wants to promote a certain culture within their instance. That's well within their prerogative - but I think they're beginning to understand why the fediverse may not be the place to do such things.

The fediverse is designed to link instances with niche communities together. If I had an instance about model-making, there'd be communities for model trains and model rockets and dioramas and Warhammer blah blah blah. These would be a bunch of separate - but related - topics, held under one instance.

That's how the fediverse is designed to work. You have a bunch of people who share a specific interest on a "home" instance, and if they wish to talk about other things then they connect to other instances and grab communities to assemble their custom homepage. Great examples of this are lemmy.blahaj.zone (LGBTQ-focused instance), rblind.com (accessibility-focused instance), and even the much-maligned Lemmygrad (tankie instance).

You focus on the communities you want and block the ones you are opposed to. Each instance has a discrete subject matter and specialty. You could have an instance which only allows verified scientists and historians to replicate AskScience and AskHistorians, and people who are "verified" will have it as their home instance.

What has actually happened is people want to make Reddit 2. And this isn't the fault of the users; indeed, I'd say the fact that lemmy.ml exists as a dev-run general-purpose instance violates this very philosophy the fediverse has.

Beehaw wants to operate under the way the fediverse "should" work; i.e. Beehaw.org is a small community dedicated to a certain mission, with subjects that relate to that mission. The issue is that their mission is very close (but not quite) to being "be Reddit 2".

They want to have a tight-knit community where everyone knows each other and everyone can look at all sorts of content, with strict moderation to prevent the worst of social media showing up on a platform. They want to be a "hub" where people make a home, and their users would be able to dip in to more specific instances if they needed something.

The issue is that the fediverse is a two-way street. I think Beehaw is just now realizing that. They set themselves up as a "general instance" and found wild success. But the "tight-knit community" part is hard when any rando can make an account on another instance and talk to them.

I think Beehaw mostly wants it to be a one-way interaction - their users can participate in other instances, but outside users can't directly talk to their instance. That's the only reasonable way for them to accomplish their goals, but that's not how Lemmy really works, at least not right now.

Add to this that people are flooding in constantly. They want to be in "Reddit 2". The fediverse supports such things - lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, fedia.io, kbin.social, etc. are all great examples - but that's not how it was designed to be used. Beehaw is an older community, one founded with thoughts of the "ideal" fediverse... but it's becoming obvious that (like Mastodon) users are going to gravitate towards the familiar and make everything general-purpose.

Well I’ll take this opportunity to invite everyone over to The Garden : a bed for gardeners and everyone else to grow their roots and thrive. We have open registration and community creation.

Lemmy.fmhy.ml is pretty open and no silly essay to sign up

Potentially. The did say they don't intend it to be permenant. Til then though you may want to register at a smaller instance that is federated with both us and them.

Or maybe make a kbin instance account.

Here's the announcement link viewable on kbin

Essentially the influx of users able to register without an application process is too much to moderate for them rght now.

Read the post at c/support@beehaw.org.

Edit: Oh shit, I forgot. Go the instance itself over normal internet if they've pulled the trigger by when you read this.

Let's not create an instance war already...

Looking at the blocked instance list of beehaw, they blocked mostly just tankie, rightwing and porn related instances. Far from being extremely sensitive IMO.

Nothing of value was lost.

Is that your position based on the actual content over there, or is that just a reaction to an instance (any instance) defederating? Because that would feel like a pessimistic carryover attitude from reddit.

Lemmy isn't reddit. Everyone, including mods who have been doing this for more than the past week, is adjusting to the reddit migration & inpouring of users who expect it to function the same as reddit, and may be frustrated that it doesn't. /edit

I don't quite vibe with the comments in the thread that seem to say Beehaw's four mods should have had server structure and manpower "long before now" just because the instance has been around for 18mos. That's a stupidly brief period to try and evaluate through the lens of a flood of new users.

I'm not sure I blame anybody who wants to hit the panic button this week. None of us know what the traffic in any instance will look like in another seven days.

//

And the announcement is hardly a novel.

Growing pains

Beehaw seems like they're trying to be something different than a reddit replacement

Meanwhile, the protest is not even done and Reddit is already booting out mods that have shutdown their subreddit. So Reddit is crumbling too.

Sounds like the issue is too many users for beehaw specifically to handle — doesn't seem to be an issue for other servers, comparatively. All things considered, this is going really well!

How's it collapsing? Beehaw's the only verse that's falling apart.

I'm on antemeridiem, a smaller instance in comparison. Because neither beehaw nor sh.itjust.works have de-federated with my instance, I can access both to my liking.

That attitude on a three day old account surely isn't engaging with a sense of longevity.

🤣