I get that we need more users. But allowing the communities who were here first to get torn apart is not how you do that. The beehaw users have already shown the ability to grow communities from scratch. That's exactly the kind of people we want here.

But they also need to be given space to build those communities. This is essentially the core concept of Lemmy, that federation allows you to have large high activity communities coexisting in peace with small niche communities. You get to have both things on the same platform, because instances that come into conflict can defederate without having any impact on the network as a whole.

There are many bigger reasons that the platform is confusing, the beehaw situation doesn't even move the needle. If anything, I think the defederation has helped many people start to understand how cool the federated structure can be.

I understand you're frustrated they couldn't just moderate the problem away, but seriously man, don't be so dramatic. Beehaw is cutting the legs off the fediverse? Bro if the fediverse fails it won't be due to the actions of beehaw, I can tell you that much.

To gain users, users need to find a space that matches what they want. If you want a 4chan style environment, beehaw.org is not for you. If you want a beehaw.org style environment, then maybe it's a GREAT place to be. It's getting angry at users for wanting different things from the experience that will reduce the number of users, not that some spaces are different from others

There was already a community blocked from this very node and lemmy.world as well because they are VERY enthusiastic of tanks and were flooding other communities.

I don't see that much tragedy and drama coming out for that so .. eh, hard to take these kind of comments seriously, especially when they show to not have even understood how the federation works.

Because they don't let us download from them right now.

@anthoniix pooky trolled some fiminatzis, beehaw had a midlifechrisis and then unfederated. that's it really. why that took a 5 page magnus opus i don't know.

@TheDude @magic

And if you really want to interact with beehaw, just go make another free account over there.

IF they’ll let you in.

Yeah I've been reading into it and it seems like it's more of an issue of the maturity of the software. Their post about their tools not scaling well make a lot of sense.

If the moderation team has the tools to handle a community of 10,000 people but suddenly the next week there is a new instance with 100,000 users trying to post in your communities then they simply cannot keep up. That results in bad posts being up for longer, spam being up for longer and it degrades the communities.

I'm sure they will re-federate as tools develop so that they can get a handle on the issue. I think there needs to be actions on both ends. Instances should bear some responsibility for the users who use their instance as well. If this instance is causing trouble for another instance then there should be tools available so that the local moderation team can deal with the problem.

All in all it seems like a software maturity thing. They simply had no other options available but to de-federate until the tools/manpower are available to hand the influx of users.

It's just growing pains.

That being said, if you're registering here just to harass people in other communities: Go fuck yourself.

Why? What would you even check?

It's not like you can interview the person and check their ID, etc. - it's just meaningless bureaucracy that stifles growth.

That does not seem sustainable.

What?

It's almost as if they're getting the result they were looking for. People saying they disagree with their choice are exactly the people they're trying to avoid lol.

I've been on the Fediverse since around 2015-2016 (don't remember if it was just before or just after I went back to school). It seems like a lot of the newbies here don't understand what the Fediverse is for and about.

These people might lack technical knowledge of how federation works, but they get the ramifications of federation just fine. The fediverse didn't invent federated protocols in 2015, there are some truly large and successful federated networks we can learn lessons from.

Email is often used as a cultural touchstone to introduce people to the fediverse. You know what a major email provider almost never does? Blackhole customers from another major email provider en masse. They understand that the value of their service is in its interconnectness, and an email address that can communicate with everyone you know is much much more valuable than an email address that can communicate with a confusing subset of people you know. They don't eschew blocklists, which are an essential tool for combatting abuse. But when deploying a block, they consider their own costs and also the costs to the network as a whole. This wasn't always a given, there were many walled gardens before and some tried to operate email that way, they were not successful.

The internet itself is the most successful federated network in the world. Do you know what a tier 1 isp almost never does? Depeer other tier-1 ISPs in a way that disrupts the global routing table. Again, they don't eschew selective peering, every few years somebody plays chicken with tier 1 peering agreements that could isolate Comcast customers from Netflix or Verizon customers or whatever. But in the end they do consider the costs to the network, and understand that the value of their service is it's ubiquitous interconnectedness. Again, this wasn't always a given. In the early days there were vigorous debates about who got to join the internet.

... every instance represents a house with a garden.

Beehaw has about 13 thousand registered users. At this scale the garden party metaphor looks pretty silly. A much better metaphor is that each fediverse app is a world, and each instance is a nation. Beehaw has a problem with the immigration policies of other nations (registration), and it's enacted drastic trade and travel sanctions as a negotiating lever. As an independent nation, it's entirely within their purview to do this, but as in real life the costs of doing so are high both within Beehaw and beyond.

The idea of federation/peering as a negotiating lever is always popular when a federated network is young, has poor abuse management tools, and the cost of severely damaging the network is low. But as soon as the network becomes useful enough to matter, the value of interconnectedness dominates all other concerns and people suddenly find other ways to resolve their disagreements.

So I disagree that people aren't getting federation. They get intuitively that interconnectedness dominates the value equation in networks that matter, and are treating the Lemmyverse like it matters to them. The Beehaw admins are treating it like a toy they can break if it doesn't work the way they want, and in doing so they will ensure that it remains a toy until the network routes around them and makes them irrelevant.

Yeah, that seemed fairly obvious to me and I've only been here for fiveish days. Even in reddit we had subreddits go private to keep their community from getting trolled which seems pretty similar but new refugees for some reason don't understand that.

It's almost like their arguments are entirely in bad faith.

That is understandable. But there is also the other side: When people joined Beehaw, it was under the assumption that they would be joining the lemmy community, the fediverse. Now, they unilaterally decided to silo themselves, without polling their users, without giving any heads up and without requesting more moderators... Lets not kid ourselves, we need users, the more the better. Sure, we do not need the alt-righters and the nazis and all, but we need users. We need more content in the communities. Beehaw had a significant user base, the third biggest in the Lemmy-verse I think. They just decided to block the biggest (lemmy.world). That essentially broke the userbase in 2. That is a disservice to the whole "unreddit" movement. Absolutely pathetic in my view.

I honestly hope Beehaw users leave Beehaw and join us in Lemmy (as in community, not software). I would also agree with removing Beehaw from join-lemmy. They are using Lemmy software, but they are not really using the Lemmy community. At the very least, there should be a notice regarding that in join-lemmy.

I hear ya. I don't know the first thing about what goes into running a big instance like that, so I'm willing to keep an open mind. But I really like this instance for its open approach. It fits with my understanding of how the fediverse would work, especially when some of the bigger instances were (at least initially) encouraging people to not all sign up on the same instance to balance the load of new users. By defederating, it kind of negates that aspect. People are going to need to sign up on multiple instances or just go straight to the big ones to ensure access to those communities.

But with everything being so new, I get it. It'll be interesting to see how things evolve as the fediverse grows/ages. I do hope the block list gets reconsidered soon enough though.

Oh certainly. I wish that we had less nuclear options like more granular mod controls both on the instance and community level.

https://github.com/dessalines/jerboa

Link for the lazy

This. We don't all need to be one big happy family... Federated does not mean a single site decentralized. It also doesn't mean isolated.

There's a million flavors of in between they the fediverse let's us explore, and hopefully instances will rise and fall as we find what builds the best communities. Some will over-moderate, some will be totally unrestricted, some will be safe spaces and echo chambers who carefully manage what users are exposed to, some will vet their users carefully, and most will probably be open to whatever their users ask for

The goal is that instances become all sorts of different places, and users can freely move if they like somewhere else better

That makes sense! Is there a place we can see instances that we defederated, if any? I was trying to find Container Gardening which is in instance "I use arch linux FYI" but haven't had any luck.

In fact, no one outside of your instance will be able to see it, because everyone else's version is in sync with beehaw, which doesn't get your comments.

It's an organic and messy beginning, but the good should 'bubble up' leaving the detritus to rot in the bowels of the community listings.

The alternative is to become a platform where people go to register in order to be assholes. If the user population of your instance is too big for the moderation team then close registrations until the workload is small enough.

Ohhhhh, that was an interesting nugget of information that I didn't previously understand. Thank you for sharing that.

So, the only way to keep a bad actor registered in your instance from flaming in another one would be to revoke their account completely, then?

Other servers probably need to be able to block individual users from posting anywhere on their instance if we don't want to end up as mostly disfederated, isolated servers.

Huh. Not how I'd have put it, but sure.

Probably more a list of dealbreakers than a list of kinks, but effectively that.

Ferinstance where personal relationships are concerned, I imagine there's a big matrix of people who (require | don't care about | despise) (weed | guns | porn), with each combo having a distinctly different character.

Pick some number of more-ideological items, and you'd have a basis for this.

Obviously as the number of dimensions increases you get increasingly more fragmentation of the demographic, and correspondingly smaller pools of matches, so it would behoove people to prioritise and limit their filters carefully to find a good compromise between quality and quantity.

I think it's very likely there'd end up being maybe half a dozen core filtersets that most instances would pick between in order to strike that balance.

People could of course go make their own filterset (with | without) (blackjack | hookers), and if they can draw enough like-minded people to be worth grouping up with, more power to their elbow.

Then you will need to follow users around other places that they interact. You just get more work creep at the end of it all.

Although this user is kinda huffing their own farts, I think they are speaking to something that needs to get solved in the long term.

If you make an account on an instance, create a bunch of posts and comments, then your instance makes a choice you totally disagree with... It's easy for everyone to say just leave and find another instance, but leaving that history and effort behind kinda sucks. Even if you're not at the mercy of an instance's admins, your account is.

Lemmy/Kbin really need a mechanism to migrate an account so users are totally free to find their own home, and client apps need a way to transparently mix content from different accounts so you can join two instances that have de-federated from each other. Again, it's easy to say you just need to make an account on each, but the UX of doing so is terrible.

Just switch from 'Hot' to 'Top' and it sorts how you would expect. I think Hot is basically 'which post had an upvote/comment most recently'

e: oops, double post

thats bc the default sort is by "active" which means that anything that has many comments and votes (more interactoins) will get pushed to the top. the way to solve it is by sorting by top. but the default one is active, which is similarish to sort by controversial on reddit.