an update to defederating from sh.itjust.works

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Beehaw Support@beehaw.org – 345 points –

hey folks, here's a quick update on our decision to defederate from sh.itjust.works! (and here's sh.itjust.works's side of this update)

we got in touch with the head admin over there, The Dude, and we had a pretty good chat about our concerns and reason for defederating. while immediate re-federation is just bluntly off the table with the rudimentary state of Lemmy's moderation tools, we now have a pretty good idea of the roadmap to refederating with them. we think we'll eventually be able to do this, although we don't have a timetable on when yet.

we're also now collaborating with him on how to move forward--and in the weeks and months to come we'll be pushing to expedite the process of developing some of the necessary tools. this decision has really helped us make connections that can hopefully realize those tools both on the desktop side and in apps being developed for Lemmy. we're also hoping to collaborate with other Lemmy administrators who have needs like our own, or just generally want more granular tools at their disposal.

we did also get in touch with the lemmy.world owner prior to defederating to share the concerns that prompted us to defederate[^1]--but we have not received any communication from him since it was levied, so there's no roadmap at all there as of now. we're always open to reconsidering and collaborating to end the defederation with him, but for now the earliest i can give you is "when mod tools are in a better state".

that's all for now folks. if any new significant developments take place we'll announce them as needed.

[^1]: we're only bringing this up now because it was just not useful information in the context of our announcement. it almost certainly would have been interpreted as some sort of callousness and/or brought unnecessary sectarianism and grief to him. at the end of the day he has his reasons and desires for running lemmy.world how he does, and we have ours for running Beehaw as we do. because of social and technological circumstances those are just incompatible right now, and that's fine.

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Lol .. tried commenting from my lemmy.world account but duhh that's defederated..

This was my reply:

Hi there! Lemmy.world calling!

I read here that I’m unresponsive, but after a chat with one of your team, the last mesasge I got was:

"Sorry for the bad news especially after we’ve had such a good conversation but we have defederated. It was not an easy decision and I hope it doesn’t hurt our relations. It’s not personal, it’s just that our goals don’t work together, we wish it was possible to “limit” a la mastodon… I hope you understand "

I didn’t know that was a question… ;-)

I would very much like to get in touch with you, I have also been in touch with the sh.itjust.works admin. If there’s anything we could do to solve your concerns, let us know.

You can reach me on matrix @ruud:h-y-p-e-r.space or mail info@lemmy.world (But I’ll be asleep the next 8 hours hopefully, so I’ll be unresponsive)

That's my bad, I had kinda assumed you'd reply something so the silence was a bit unexpected. I apologize.

@Lionir@beehaw.org, @alyaza@beehaw.org I realize a three day old buried comment chain is not the best place for this, but seeing as how the fediverse is difficult to search, and as a moderator of a medium-sized community on lemmy.world where I have not personally seen any content needing moderation, I'm curious if there has been a public statement somewhere on Beehaw you can direct me to that explains the specific issues and reasoning behind defederating with with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works?

As of today, @ruudtest@feddit.nl has implemented a captcha on lemmy.world and sign ups are currently closed due to an influx of spam accounts being created, which he already banned as stated here: https://lemmy.world/post/293545.

Lastly, why have other large instances with similar growth and open registration like kbin.social and lemmy.ml been spared?

What I noticed and why your experience probably doesn't match with ours is that people signed up lemmy.world to harass in other instances that are closed like ours and usually centered on LGBTQ+ communities. That might be a significant factor.

Here is the public statement we made about the issue a few days ago : https://beehaw.org/post/567170

As for why kbin.social and lemmy.ml were spare : I've not personally seen many reports from lemmy.ml and kbin.social was not even federated when we made this decision so it wasn't on our mind.

Thank you for reaching out and being open to collaboration! I'm not an admin or mod, just a member of Beehaw, but I wish you continued success and luck with your endeavors running lemmy.world!

Excellent! Paging @alyaza@beehaw.org , response from the lemmy.world admin :D

Man, i insist that this shitstorm should have happened a year or two in the future when Lemmy was a bit more developed :P

Yep, haha, it sure would be convenient if the world only ever threw challenges at us when we were well and fully prepared to deal with them! 🙃

I genuinely think Reddit lowered my expections of moderators so much over the years without me even realising, it's great to come to a place like this where everyone on both sides sounds reasonable and competent at what they're doing. Really excited to see how Lemmy and the Fediverse more generally develops.

been thinking about this comment all day, you put into words what I was feeling too. I’m very grateful for the warm community experience and discussion. I agree with all the directions taken so far and overall feel hopeful to see what the future holds here.

This server’s leadership actively protecting their users are a big reason why I signed up. Thank you for caring about the health of the community! 🐝

The Dude abides

Why am I not surprised that the head mod for an instance called sh.itjust.works is called The Dude. lol

Hahaha!

On a separate note, it is very interesting that the creator of Lemmy.world is non-responsive. That is concerning, seeing as how his instance is one of the biggest.

That is concerning, seeing as how his instance is one of the biggest.

he's probably just busy, and we're not going anywhere so as far as i'm concerned it's not a big deal either way

That was my take. I imagine most of the admins/mods of the larger instances are very busy these last few days. It will shake itself out over time. The thing thats really interesting about the fediverse concept is that something like this can happen--for better or worse.

I personally appreciate the level of curation and moderation being done here. I looked at the blocked list and even some of the names just skeeve me out. I dont want to have to deal with that, and if the mods here can see lots of trolls or bad content coming from particular places, I like that they would take action to deal with it.

Shoutout to The Dude for being responsive and receptive, but I wouldn't write off the lemmy.world admin yet.

It's the end of a crazy week, his instance is just a few weeks old, and there are many things to do. I'm sure he's busy and not intentionally ignoring beehaw.

I reached out to him on matrix and pointed him to this thread.

I guess I just don't typically give people the benefit of the doubt, especially online. I need to work on that.

I blame reddit's culture rot for that. A decade ago or more, reddit was an overall better place to be. It's going to take time to shake that off.

But the admins here are doing an amazing job fostering an environment where having overwhelmingly good experiences is the norm!

Yeah, I agree. Reddit was great when it first started out. I love what the Beehaw folks are doing.

As one of the biggest, it could be as simple as that they're overwhelmed, and Beehaw refederation is not a top priority.

Why do you see it as concerning?

Well, it was pretty big news that Beehaw was defederating from them, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to reply real quick to someone reaching out to you from Beehaw. You could just say "thanks, let's talk about this when I'm not so busy" but to just ignore it seems weird to me.

I don’t think I’m the only person who won’t reply to an email until there is something actually productive to say.

I guess I'm just the weird guy who appreciates acknowledgment because without it I feel like I'm being ignored.

It's rude to not to acknowledged, you are right and valid to feel that way.

Really love the transparency and communication. It’s a breath of fresh air, honestly.

very well said. It’s been a really eye opening experience to how good a community can be. From the admins to the users, it’s been smooth.

I find the content and discussion to be much more intimate and worthwhile than what was on reddit.

Hear, hear! I've actually experienced a general decrease in anxiety (personally) and everything! It's fantastic!

It's nice to be with nice people.

The replies to the post by the sh.itjust.works admin are fascinating. Admin's post is calming, reasonable, minimises outrage and indicates ways forward which will improve the platform. Win win win, with some temporary inconvenience. So of course others are forgetting all of that and inventing things to get upset about. How do we (collectively) unlearn this habit? I learned by observing it in action and reading others' writing about it. Maybe someone will learn something from reading this. Tiny drop in the vast ocean but I don't know how to scale it. We need to figure it out though.

People need to learn that the point of the fediverse isn't clustering, but distributed governance. Everyone can have the fediverse experience they want by picking a server that self-governs and federates with other servers the way they want. The idea isn't to distribute load (though it is a nice benefit), the idea is that Beehaw can be very friendly, sh.itjust.works can be very permissive, lemmygrad can be very tanky, and exploding-heads can be very supportive of American-style conservatives. What people are upset about is that the system works haha

The comment section of sh.itjust.works is much more understanding of the issue at hand than those from lemmy.world. Crazy how opposite they are. They do showcase a prominent disagreement with the beehaw mods actions, but nonetheless remain respectful in their opinions. At least compared to lemmy.world which stance was basically "lol they shot themselves in the foot".

Just above you the lemmy.world admin answered, so things are advancing :D

It seems like the admin of lemmy.world is eager to work with our admins, but yeah, I also noticed the community response on sh.itjust.works was mostly "I get it. It's not what I would want, but I get it" while the community response on lemmy.world was mostly "Fediverse ruined, day ruined, beehaw a bunch of fascist dictators." Which is a little bit wild to me since sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world both have very similar moderation styles. I guess it just goes to show the difference a sidebar can make in setting a tone. sh.itjust.works has a very basic sidebar with some rules of the road, while lemmy.world has a sidebar that says the sidebar is TBD. I wonder, and this is purely speculation, how many people signed up for lemmy.world explicitly because they wanted to be a problem. sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world both have the same signup process, but then they picked lemmy.world because "Oh hey, there's no rule against being a bigot (yet)." Me, I would have assumed that was just... Implied, but it's truly fascinating that they have such different communities already, and I wonder anthropologically why that happened.

this is honestly not a bad theory. when there's a lack of gatekeeping and a lack of specified rules, online spaces seem to overwhelmingly tend toward being more reactionary and more permissive of bad social behavior because there's no deterrent for it (and by the time there is one, often the culture is set and really hard to undo).

I think it's a lot less nefarious. About every post or article about Lemmy that links to Lemmy instances has links to (in this order in almost every article I remember) lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and beehaw.org. Of these 3 only lemmy.world accepts new users without vetting. Lemmy.ml doesn't accept new users at all and beehaw doesn't really look that welcoming to someone who knows they might stir some shit up in the future and also getting into beehaw requires more effort. So with lemmy.world usually being the first on the list and additionally requires the least effort to join, this is where all the world and their uncle end up on. They just get the biggest unfiltered influx and with that the biggest amount of toxic people. (I want to make sure that I'm not calling lemmy.world users lazy or toxic or anything like or that this is their target audience. It's just a fact fact that someone who can't be bothered to do research and/or "write an essay" as someone called it, will most likely end up on lemmy.world)

A lot of that can also be said about sh.itjust.works, which is the fascination I have in this. There's communal divergence between sh.irjust.works and lemmy.world that I would not have immediately anticipated

The main difference between these two instances as I see it is that lemmy.world gets a whole lot more media coverage, attention and direct links than sh.itjust.works. You have to do research or visit join-lemmy.org to find a link to sh.itjust.works and then their tagline starting with "A bilingual (EN/FR) general-purpose instance located in eastern Canada! Powered by 99% renewal energy!" might just keep some uniformed (as in how this federation-thingy works) non-canadians from joining (yes, I left out the second part of the tagline, assuming most people who'd be put off by the beginning wouldn't read any further).

That's interesting! I wasn't aware of any media coverage. Where should I be looking for that?

I used "meadia coverage" in a very broad sense here (as in online articles by magazines, blogposts and such)...

I honestly didn't keep track I just noticed this during the last few days that if there were instanced that were mentioned or linked it was usually these three, but it might also be confimation bias.

I find the decisions made so far entirely understandable and I really appreciate the transparency and updates.

Have to say the same thing. I really appreciate the hard work the admins and mods are doing and support the decisions they have made.

Reading this and the other admins replies has given me a proper little boost this morning. Thank you for the transparency, it won't always be good news like this but I value it anyway

I also read the comments. Glad we've defederated. Seems like there are plenty of people over there with really bad ideas and they're scouring the internet for people to poke them with.

And with this kind of cooperation and outreach, the Fediverse will be that much better! Thank you to all parties involved for communicating and working together!

I'm really glad everyone seems to be on the same team here and there's no bad blood between the mods.

Thanks for the update!

While exploring kbin I've been checking out lemmy world a bit and there's a surprising level of toxicity towards beehaw going on. From a vocal minority of course but some have seem to have taken the degeneration as personal slight and some are just aggressive towards beehaw on a general term.

A lot of people seem to understand the reasons and even if they don't agree with it they're at least understanding.

The toxic minority is hard to grasp though.

Then again, I suppose the ones that caused the issues in the first place are among that group.

I understand the decisions made but I would be pretty annoyed if I had a lemmy.world or a sh.itjust.works account and I'll explain why below.

Looking on https://browse.feddit.de/ Beehaw has the largest communities for Gaming, Technology, Chat, News, Programming, Politics and Music (and probably more). These are staple communities that the majority of users will be subscribed to one or more.

Those users now need to make a decision, they either make a new account on Beehaw (or another instance that isn't defederated by Beehaw) so they can continue to browse those communities, or they instead keep their accounts on lemmy.world / sh.itjust.works and join smaller and less active communities to replace the Beehaw ones.

Unfortunately trolls can create a load of accounts in instance ABC and spam Beehaw until Beehaw defederate instance ABC until there are no large instances left.

It's good that Beehaw are looking to refederate with both instances, but I imagine that the majority of people expressing their opinions thought defederation was a final decision.

I think there may also be a bit of a defensive reaction in that without the full context, there's sort of an implication that Beehaw admin thinks everyone on these other two instances are just terrible people. Couple that with Beehaw's...erm...opinionated language, and it's a recipe for hurt feelings.

I've seen some comments mentioning that it feels like guilt by association, and it seems somewhat reasonable to take that personally -- especially as people are still wrapping their heads around how federation works and how blunt the mod tools are at this stage.

I also think there's maybe some harsh feelings over the idea that Beehaw's ideal state is Beehaw users being able to comment on other instances but not the other way around. There's some sentiment I've seen that this amounts to Beehaw taking the big communities for itself and hanging everyone else out to dry. I don't really think that's Beehaw's intention, but when the big conversations appear to be happning behind closed doors, it makes sense that some feathers would be ruffled.

And last, I've seen some users commenting that the only reason the two defederated instances got users is because the signups are open and anyone who was put off by Beehaw's registration either can't use words effectively or was born to antagonize Beehaw's users. I really don't think that antagonistic view other other instances' users is helpful, and it's definitely making the situation on the ground worse. For example, the reason I didn't register with Beehaw is that I just couldn't think of any actual reason I wanted in there versus anywhere else -- I just wanted to be where the people were, so I could use a social platform to talk to strangers, and the way Beehaw's reg page is worded, it sounds like this would likely not be a good enough reason to be allowed to participate there. So I just went somewhere else that seemed more interested in having me around.

So i guess for anyone who bothers to read this, please don't lump all users from the defederated instances under a banner of "degenerates" or whatever. They seem to really be taking it to heart, and I think it's more hurt feelings than actual antagonism for anyone who didn't personally harrass anyone.

Plenty of them make it clear that they very much wants the decision to be final and for beehaw to die off.

But yeah, there are always going to be trolls online I suppose.

Amazing how fast tribalism takes form

Sad isn't it? :(

It is, but why not embrace the good aspects of it while at the same time working to overcome the bad?

The way I see it, beehaw is doing a solid for their "tribe" by holding to account those that are being nasty. This is one of the best things a tribe can do; work towards justice. Plus, this whole event is leading to collaboration with The Dude to make the fediverse better, right?

Very true. It's too easy to get dragged along with negativity.. I need to focus on the positive!

In my application here I cited the decision to de-fed from them as why I chose to sign up for beehaw. I was looking through shitjustworks and was absolutely not liking how it seemed to be absorbing some of the worst "libertarianism and rationalism are my excuse to insult people" chuds. I'll be interested to see whether their admins succeed in wrangling their 'hives'.

This is in the nature of the domain name. If you name your site "shit just works" you can't be surprised if you build a bubble for idiots in the first wave of registrations.

I'm not bashing on the site or their Admins.i say that out of own experience over the last 25+ years on the internet and some exp in hosting forums and all that myself.

Fun fact. Your take just made me sign up there too.

I actually seek different perspectives and don't quite agree with any particular place that is very "ideologically packeted" like most tend to. Where "they insult" and "we don't, because if they feel insulted is because of Reality and how right we are".

I'm new to all this fediverse and I'm curious to see how different niche interests develop and if we can actually form the usefulness that Reddit threads could have or if it's a unique and different usefulness...

Sometimes I wanna see what everyone else sees. That's why I also have an account on another instance. But sometimes I don't want the risk of seeing people question my right to exist (how often on reddit do I come across someone who's "just asking questions"). That's why I'm here. So glad reddit is dead now bc we're all here instead.

I'd word it as, you don't want the risk of other people writing a specific opinion on a specific topic that you don't agree with.

Because the whole "right to exist" thing is very relative and dependent on framing.

It's very common that criticism of X is taken as "you are -ism" or if you're not voting exactly how I tell you to then you are denying my rights to exist. There's lot of nuance In conversations of "where does my rights end and yours start" but the typical thing I see is "I want there to be no discussion about this, only axiom A".

Reddit is not dead, only time will tell what happens with but I'd say Reddit is pretty much like what you talk about, with some slight variations on niche places.

There's a difference between having an opinion I don't agree with and comparing being trans to "wanting to be peppa pig". And then when I rightfully get offended and angry they lose their fucking minds bc I dared insult them. It's happened many times, and yes, this is based on a real example from reddit. (tw: transphobia obviously)

I don't know why you would share that link thinking it reflects what you initially said.

I will avoid continuing this conversation because I don't think it will get anywhere but to me, it's clear who is bullying whom and who misrepresents opinions as "denying your right to exist" and allows no debate.

It's easy to think being righteous does not make you a bully but that's exactly how mobs operate, by thinking their righteous ends justify the means.

I'm ok if Beehaw bans transphobia from their instance.

Only if that rule is accurately defined. It's definitely not occuring in the link provided unless you consider "getting bullied and disagreeing with other user" transphobia.

I'm not going to engage with the other user anymore. They want freedom to insult and censor because "they're righteous". It's not an attitude that's specific to one group, mind you, but it's definitely an enlightening interaction in the context of this thread.

Authortiarianism doesn't sit well with me and I consider it an absolute no but I'm playing by the instance rules. I don't think they are but it is what it is.

We'll see how this space develops. Individual users are not relevant, anyway, but the aggregate.

I think it's curation, not censorship. This server isn't a bastion of free speech, because it's made for a specific community. I have accounts on other servers, but I use this one more often **because ** it's curated and has less spam.

The server is not a bastion for bullying/insulting pretending to be righteous either. From everything I've read from the admin what the other user did isn't it.

If you haven't looked at the user that initially replied to me, their comments here and on the Reddit link speak for themselves.

The server is not a bastion for bullying/insulting pretending to be righteous either.

Nor should it be, ever. I respect the admins and have donated because I think they're making good decisions.

Only if that rule is accurately defined.

Just a heads up, we have a whole philosophy post about why we aren't going to "accurately define" rules. If you're not nice to other people, you're not welcome here. There are many mods and admins, myself included, who view transphobia as definitively not nice behavior and it represents the safe space we have here, especially for minority individuals like transgender ones.

I don't particular want to engage too much on this but I guess if you think the user was being nice then you have a very inconsistent view.

My take, looking at the reactions, is that it's less so a safe space and more a place to bully dissent if you have a specific righteous attitude.

And we can look at the user's specific interactions in the Reddit link they provided or with me. Calling generic "transphobia" doesn't cut it.

If after looking at that you're 100% in agreement of their actions then revising your rules to be more honest will avoid similar conversations or encounters.

I literally do not have time to be reviewing what another user said on another platform. I'm an admin and I'm far too busy for that level of interaction right now.

Transphobia is not nice and thus not tolerated, full stop.

Debating human rights is not nice and thus not tolerated, full stop.

If you have issue with either of these statements or the fact that we have explicitly designed a system which is interpretable to prevent jerks from skirting the rules and ruining a place, then this probably isn't the place for you.

This isn't the place for me if I disagree with you in allowing bullying based on righteous attitudes.

Gotcha. All the way.

You also have no time to address the specific but enough time to come at me and "soft threaten me".

The level of circlejerk is way higher than I expected when I first started. Thanks for clearing it all up.

It's our way (of bullying) or the highway, and we will hide beyond the pretense of minority status (without even knowing who are we talking with, which is extra levels of hilarious).

I just hope you would be more honest about it. Not so disingenuous about it.

Reminder before the ban or whatever , that It was all unprompted. Toodles. Good luck with your whole enclosure.

Edit: throwback to our first interaction: https://beehaw.org/comment/208750

Guess the red flags were clear and came out pretty quickly. Again, it will serve you better to be honest about the narrow level of tolerance for even the slightest hint of disagreement. You can also eliminate all about being nice and just put your classification of who can be an asshole to whom based on their claimed status.

just fucking defend the reactionaries why don't you. Bet you're the type who sees nazis committing genocide, and minorities fighting back, and says "man why can't both sides stop fighting????" Enough with the fucking respectability politics already. In an uncivil age, y'all motherfucker's calls for "civility" are just a device to squash all protest so you can get your way, not actually an argument made in good faith.

Hey, well, I'm blocking you so I don't have to see this bullshit again.

There have been open calls to "eradicate transgenderism", along with a nearly endless amount of anti-trans legislation in many parts of the world. Their rhetoric frequently borders on genocidal. It is 100% about our right to exist.

We're not some hypothetical to have a pleasant debate over tea about, we are real people with real lives being directly harmed by real policy. Some of us are tired of being nice about it.

Related to the topic of defederation, I saw a post on kbin about an issue with an instance called exploding-heads.com being full of right wing troll types. Has the mod team investigated this instance? Would rather we be out ahead of it before they start coming over here to create issues.

Would rather we be out ahead of it before they start coming over here to create issues.

we defederated with them already, so no worries on this front

It's quite unfortunate that Rexxit happened before the platform was ready for it. Looking forward to refederating when the time comes.

I think rexxit is the catalyst to get the platform ready. I don't think rexxit is a one and done thing. It's gonna be more of a constant trickle, and lemmy is in a very good place to absorb more users. I browsed /r/all today, and saw many comments of people saying the frontpage sucks because there's no content. Spez might like to pretend there's no impact to reddit, but there's certainly going to be a big impact at least in the near term.

Indeed, I think that ironically the pattern we're seeing from Reddit is pretty much ideal for getting this platform up and running. They sent a moderate surge of users over here to shake things down and start contributing, and then on June 30 a much bigger surge may come this way to see what's been built.

I dont see it that way. Software improvements can be pretty stagnant if there is a slow influx of new users. A good dose of new redditors will expose the main issues with the platform, and thats a good thing imo. Defederation is now on the spotlight for many users who were clueless about it, and that helps development since awareness can bring volunteer work onto said issues more quickly.

At the same time, Rexxit is getting more folks involved with Lemmy (both as users and developers). Lemmy's already a 4-year-old project. I expect we'll see it advance and mature a lot in the coming months from all the new attention.

No one is ever ready for the Reddit Inqui-- er, Invasion.

How can you be ready for something you don't expect?

Expect the unexpected. Unexpect the... expected?

Im ready for a hot summer fling with an enchanting lover. However my expectation is that it will not happen.

Choose your own snarky reply:

  • not with that attitude
  • perhaps it's still your density (with apologies to the writers of Back the the Future)

If anything it's probably ultimately better (from this, specific perspective) that the Reddit blackout was only two days and only really drove 10k~100k over to try out Fediverse instances and not 100k~1m. In general I don't think things are clear and digestible enough to start porting entire communities (even small ones), but I think with some stress testing and getting some QOL updates, apps, etc., we could be in that position in as little as a few weeks or months.

only really drove 10k~100k over to try out Fediverse instances

Even with open-signup instances available, I wonder what the backlog looks like elsewhere. I don't think we can gauge the level of interest in alternatives four days after the larger Reddit community was faced with the blackout. Trends do not move in days in general.

We can't forget that the third-party apps are still functional for a couple weeks still too.

A big thank you for beehaw mods protecting our community. I feel warm and loved. :)

Thanks for sharing. This is encouraging and hopeful news for the growing community.

we’ll be pushing to expedite the process of developing some of the necessary tools.

Yes, please. The mod-tools are pretty basic, if existent.

btw guys, there's no intent of defederating from kbin, right? We're good, right? I don't want to lose you, lol. You're really cool, it seems to me.

Kbin (platform, important distinction) will likely have some problematic instances which are defederated, but it will also have many many instances which are fine. And the good kbin instances will likely defederate the problematic ones as well. This is the nature of platforms using open source software and federation.

Also, the reddit fiasco has dumped a lot of pressure on both lemmy and kbin before the software is sufficiently developed to cope with it. These two instances which Beehaw has (temporarily) defed'ed from aren't problematic in and of themselves, but they've both been hit with large numbers of problematic accounts in the influx.

TL:DR Support your instance owner(s) regarding moderation :)

Thank you for the transparency! I definitely understand the original decision to defederate (especially looking at the troll's post, which was linked to in The Dude's side of things), but I also look forward to better, more granular moderation and administration controls to come out so that refederation can happen.

I would also like to give kudos to the admin team and users over at sh.itjust.works - there's some good discussion going on over there in the thread linked here. I love that, despite the fundamental difference in views on how an instance should be run, it seems to be respectful on the whole. Even the people that firmly disagree with Beehaw's vision essentially leave it at "I think it can be done better, and want to demonstrate how." I think that's perfect, and encapsulates the benefit that Lemmy has over centralized platforms. There is also no support for the troll that triggered this situation to begin with.

Definitely agree, the people overall over there seemed like fine folks who understood once they saw both mod teams communications on the defederation. There were a few people who took the worst possible interpretation and were trying to run with it, but a lot of the users there were shutting them down and explaining where they might be drawing conclusions. Overall really happy with the interactions on lemmy, lots of nuanced discussion and really just feels more laid back and good faith for a majority of the userbase

This is pretty cool, I love how you got in touch. The instances get woven together so much and I love it. A neat kind of collaboration.

I hope Lemmy and other Reddit alternatives thrive and go well together!

Lemmy.world is free to ignore us, and we’re free to defederate from them. No corporate overlords are making the call. This is what the fediverse is all about. It’s not ideal, but few things are.

Thanks for the transparency. Is there no way to see a list of defederated instances? The one in the instances page includes mastodon instances which makes it hard to read, and also doesn't list the reason for defederation.

The defederated list does not include reasons and we can't add it from Lemmy's tools. The Lemmy instances we've defederated from memory are : Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml because they deny certain genocides, exploding-heads.com and lemmygrad.com because they are queerphobic, burggit.moe because they host child pornography.

Finally, lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works because of the reasons mentioned in the post.

New fear unlocked: unknowingly signing up to an instance that federates with servers hosting CP 🤢

Ew Child porn, wtf! Thanks for defederation. I see the news headlines: "All Reddit alternatives host child pornographie !!!111!!"

I like your clear communication. On the other hand, would it be better to not give the exact reason and instead refer to "content that violates out guidelines" or similar?

Just a thought and really just to keep the image clean. I can't tell if I'd rather have honest communication or a better view of us in public.

A downside of open source platform software is that it can be mis-used for purposes the developers and most users abhor. There isn't much they can do to stop that. Defederation, however, can be very effective in keeping those instances separate - far better than on proprietary platforms like Twitter, where the only defenses are moderation and individual blocking. Neo-nazi instances using Mastodon software are just using Mastodon software, they're not part of the broader Mastodon community. Clickbait news headlines thrive on misrepresentation. But when it comes up, we can use that as an opportunity to teach others about how these sorts of platforms work.

Yeah Admins are doing their best and that's super important. I do wonder what will happen if Lemmy grows enough to be monitored by officials.

Here in Germany we have NetzDG, where platforms need to act on illegal content as they reach a certain size.

My understanding is that there was illegal content and that it's been dealt with. There were other things too, thus the temporary defeds. Mastodon.social and its main dev are in Germany. That would be an example to look at. I think for Lemmy it's both the instance hosting the account and the instance hosting the community it's posted to which bear responsibility for removing illegal content.

Is there a non tankie leftist instance? I'm honestly looking for one

It's great how you're keeping us in the loop. I was really disappointed when I heard about the de-federation of specifically sh.itjust.works because it has some really good communities that I was missing from Reddit. I'm also really excited about the idea of different communities having different homes, but defederating too quickly can break that concept, and instead lead to only really having reliable access to communities on your local instance.

That's all to say this update has put my concerns to rest. I trust the admins on this site are doing their best to foster community with everyone possible, while also trying to keep the community here safe. I really appreciate the work you all are doing.

Hopefully you can link the Github issues created for the specific moderation tools you need, I'm excited to dig into the Lemmy codebase and hoping to contribute to the Beehaw community!

Honestly it'd be neat to have a local beehaw community for this dev related work, if one doesn't exist already

Yeah the transparency of the mod team is the number one reason I love this instance so. Completely understood all of their decisions and how they came to them and I don't think anyone can get mad about it, its a passion project for the fine folk that admin this instance its understandable you would take precautions. I mean if a certain instance is not moderating at all or only has a handful of people moderating that workload gets pushed off onto these guys when those instances interact here. And with them being open and transparent and willing to make changes as development unfolds, it makes me more confident in the whole project.

I appreciate the update and link. While it seems like most of the people on the thread there understand that it's early days and this is more a reflection of kinks in Lemmy that need to be worked out than Beehaw being unreasonable, the exceptions to that underscore to a larger extent than the original defederation action why it needed to be taken.

There's a lot of entitlement out there of the how-dare-people-who-put-in-time-and-money-into-a-passion-project-feel-they-have-the-right-to-any-level-of-control-over-said-project variety.

I'm curious what exactly you mean with "better modding tools". I am working on a iOS/Android app and I'm wondering if those are tools I could integrate into it.

What exactly are your needs?

My guess is that this is referring to "auto moderator" and similar type of tools, so functionality that needs to first be created in the Lemmy core, before you could support them on your client.

I appreciate the transparency especially the link to sh.itjust.works's update. As a newcomer, one thing that confuses me about the fediverse is how communities with different moderation policies can be federated together. My impression now is that a comment has to be moderated separately by each instance in which it appears, so either a larger number of moderators or more advanced moderation tools would be required compared to a similarly sized community in a centralized network. Hopefully you continue to have productive conversations with the other instances and these issues are eventually able to be resolved.

So new here does this mean that we cannot subscribe to communities in their instances or just the other way around?

Unfortunately, it means both.

So follow up question, is there any limitations to the communities that I do subscribe to beyond if they are federated or not?

On your account here you can only subscribe to communities that are within beehaw and other communities from instances that beehaw is federated with.

However if you really want to participate in those defedetated instances you can go over there and sign up for an account on those. Nothing is stopping you from having another account in that space. I certainly do, but i definitely prefer things here for the philosophical approach and community.

This makes a lot of sense and the transparency is refreshing to see :)

I remember reading a detailed post with a list of concrete mod tool improvement asks - things like the ability to filter the modlog to local only, or auto-report posts or comments containing certain keywords. Can anyone else find that? My searching is coming up empty. Maybe I dreamed it.

Am I on beehaw? This is so confusing. Can someone explain to my dumb ass?

Am I on beehaw? This is so confusing. Can someone explain to my dumb ass?

No, you're on kbin. Kbin and beehaw continue to be federated. But beehaw and sh.itjust.works have ceased to be federated.
So it's like having a group of friends that all talk to each other: Mary, Joe and Mark.
Mary talks to Joe and Mark.
Mark talks to Joe and Mary.
Joe talks to Mary and Mark.

Then one day Mary and Joe decide to stop talking to each other. Mark however continues to talk to both Mary and Joe.

So basically us (kbin) have no current beef with any of them, we continue seeing posts from beehaw, sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world, regardless if some of the ones that we federate with decide or not to stop talking to one another.
We're pretty much that friend who is liked by everyone (so far, lmao)

I hope I didn't say anything wrong. If so, anyone is free to correct me. Ty.

Yeah that's pretty much it. It's users of the three instances that are the most affected.

That's a really great analogy, I'm going to use that in the future.

Hi, we're commenting on a thread that's posted/hosted on beehaw.org. You yourself are using kbin.social (the website) but are interacting with beehaw in this particular thread.

I think you're getting a federated post from beehaw (just like me, I'm writing this comment from kbin)

Beehaw is a lemmy instance, which is the equivalent of a reddit.

There are different communities on this instance which is the equivalent of a subreddit.

You are on a different lemmy instance, kbin.social. Which has its own communities and users there.

The cool thing about this setup is that you can mostly interact with any community on any occasion.

You're currently interacting with !support@beehaw.org from kbin.social

Hopefully that makes sense.

A correction, kbin.social isn't a Lemmy instance, it's a a kbin instance. Kbin is a different, but similar, platform from Lemmy (that's able to federate with it, just like other platforms using ActivityPub do).

You're on kbin.social (just like me)! Most of the federated sites "shares" their posts, that's why you're also seeing content from other instances (like lemmy.world/sh.itjust.works/beehive etc).

Thank you.

Like I said previously, sometimes you have to shut the doors on bad actors. But doors can be reopened if things become better.

Thanks for the update. If any Github issues are brought up that would assist with getting the necessary moderation tools implemented be sure to broadcast them!

Being here from kbin.social, none of this directly impacts me, but I am more than interested in seeing how this all plays out. This is a whole new dynamic, and getting to see how it develops is fascinating.

It seems to me that the whole point of a fediverse-based system is that different instances should defederate, if that serves the purposes and desires of the admins of a particular instance. I know that user accounts and their various configurations are currently locked to a single instance. (If you're from the Microsoft world, think of old NT4 domains where the PDC controlled everything, in comparison to Active Directory with multimastering.) At some point, tools will emerge to import/export your user configuration, making it easier to switch from one instance to another to suit your own personal needs better. And maybe a multimastering kind of thing can happen eventually, too, so you could take your ActivityPub-based account and log in with it to any instance.

at the end of the day he has his reasons and desires for running lemmy.world how he does, and we have ours for running Beehaw as we do. because of social and technological circumstances those are just incompatible right now, and that's fine.

Exactly. One is not better or worse than the other, they're just different, in some incompatible ways.

Appreciate your input, some of the comments on the shitjustworks thread were kinda wild, people absolutely have been assuming the worst when the mods here have been wholly open and transparent which is absolutely what I look for in a lemmy instance. Make sure your values are in line with the moderators running the instance. Because in the end that's what will affect your user experience the most and if you don't like that there's always the option to run your own instance so you can see all the federated networks you want and none that you don't. Ideally everyone would be running their own personalized instance where they can see everything and then go to a couple different silo instances where people go to post their content.

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.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding your “responsibility for the betterment of the Fediverse” conclusion.

So Beehaw has been chugging along for a couple years, carefully curating their communities and their membership. What they did works really well, and the flood of new people from other instances were drawn to it.

I don’t think it’s Beehaw’s responsibility to change because so many new people like to use Beehaw’s communities. Beehaw is not the Fediverse, nor is it Beehaw’s responsibility to foster the growth of the Fediverse. Beehaw is responsible for Beehaw, and only for Beehaw.

If people like what Beehaw has built over the last couple years, they should model their baby instances on Beehaw’s experienced one.

The overwhelming amount of content is distributed among lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and beehaw.org - whether these instances like it or not.

Is the expectation that every popular instance has its communities for general-purpose stuff?

Do we need a technology@beehaw.org, technology@lemmy.world, technology@lemmy.tf, etc? That fragmentation seems like a nightmare for the average user and for adoption in general.

Yes. That’s decentralization. We are a village of cottages, hanging out on each others’ front porches to chat. My neighbor has a really nice rocking chair on their porch that people like to sit in, does that mean I can’t have a rocking chair on my porch? Maybe the folks in the other cottages don’t hang out in my rocking chair much, but if my family living in my cottage want to use my rocking chair on my porch, why should I have to throw it away just because someone else has a more popular one?

I definitely see your point, but I'm going to speak as one of the ones that would argue that it goes against the concept of decentralized communication 😉

I can appreciate that you think that there is a responsibility to the fediverse as a whole, but I feel like that responsibility comes second to the goals and intentions of the instance in question. As you suggested, Beehaw didn't request to become the go-to instance for gaming/tech/news. My idea of the fediverse response would be that, since Beehaw's technology community is defederated, then those instances should either spin up their own or go to another instance's. That may turn into a different instance's technology community becoming the de facto one, but that's a consequence that Beehaw has to accept with the decision to defederate.

I will say that this bumps into the issue of community collision - that is, communities with the same name and/or subject across multiple instances, and I admittedly don't have a good solution in mind for that right now. As it stands, I'm actually interested to see how all of this pans out - this is the sort of issue that only comes to light when a specific set of circumstances is met, and I think some precedents are going to be set throughout this process. It is also likely going to be a significant push for the improvement of moderation and administrative tools since that's the major limiting factor here, so I think this whole situation is an overall positive for the development of the fediverse as a whole.

I disagree I think it hurts overall adoption and the classic XKCD comic comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/927/

I respect your opinion, though.

Yeah, I respect yours as well - I think this is just a difference in opinion about what the core focus of the fediverse should be. For me, it's that there are more granular instances that aren't beholden to others and can determine for themselves what they want their corner of the system to be while still having a connection to others.

If I understand you properly, you seem to be more of the mind that the fediverse is meant to be focused more on robustness and taking control out of one central authority, and the welfare of the system as a whole is tied to the aggregate strength of its instances.

Please correct me if I'm wrong and you would like to though, and thank you for the discussion either way! I mostly wanted to be an example of someone that doesn't think that's what the purpose is since you had mentioned there will be folks that disagree. In the end there is no right or wrong stance, just opinions on what's more important.

For the record, that XKCD is exactly what I was thinking about when I mentioned the community collision issue!

I'll throw in here, too.

If beehaw has become the defacto source for a certain topic, in the current state, lemmy.world and sh.it can both see that content. Their users can't participate in it, but they can consume it. If one of those users feels it's important enough that they want to participate, they can create an account at an instance that hasn't been defederated - it doesn't even have to be beehaw.

On the other hand, if the topic community at beehaw feels strongly enough, they can move to a different instance as well, one that maintains federation with desired instances. Reddit subs have split in pieces, or migrated to new subs, when some moderation drama happened; that concept can play in the fediverse, too.

I believe that it is a reasonable and good thing for instances to be able to curate the level of discourse available through them as necessary. I haven't been here long, so I don't know much of the history or details around the reasons for defederating, but my understanding is that it has to do with a difference of vision on account verification and moderation/administration. Part of the problem with Reddit (and Facebook, and MySpace, and Digg, and and and) is that it's a monolithic silo. Yes, users have capabilities to filter content at Reddit, and other places, but the general concept is more "one size fits all."

The fediverse has an opportunity to demonstrate how dynamic it can be, and this kind of defed situation is part of it.

They can't see it though? Nothing new is federated to those instances. They only see the old ghosted threads that was federated before the disconnection. So they can neither see nor particularly in the current state of things.

Maybe I'm unclear on how defed works. I was under the impression that when beehaw defeds from l.w, l.w content is not brought into the view of users entering via beehaw, but beehaw content is still brought into the view of users entering via l.w - and that for the latter to occur, l.w would need to defed from beehaw.

I could be wrong, but i think all they get is what we had before the degeneration.

Really too new at all this! I'm sure someone knows for sure.

I feel like this is a healthy thing to do. We all want to enjoy the fediverse and being able to work with other admins where they may have been some problem users and create lasting working relationships towards a goal that would benefit everyone is a great next step for strengthening lemmy as a whole. Thanks for the update!

Some days it feels like there's a shortage of nice people. Today is not one of those days. Thank you.