Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is
Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.
I've been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to "lemmy" as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.
For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw's communities are "owned" by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances' content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw "owns" the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.
This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.
Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren't going to read technical documentation?
People don't dislike defederation because they misunderstand it. They dislike it because it's a bad user experience. It sucks to effectively get banned from a bunch of major communities through no fault of your own. It's a flawed system. I don't know what a good solution would be, but it's definitely an issue.
I guess one solution is to encourage users to join servers that are as small as possible, to reduce the chance of getting blocked. But that approach comes with its own set of downsides too.
I'm torn on defederation. In theory I like it; a user can join an instance that moderates to the level that they agree with. Beehaw is a pretty good example of this because a lot of users like having a slightly more restrictive community in order to maintain a certain vibe.
But there is a more pragmatic side of me that thinks that the average user isn't super informed about this stuff, and are naturally going to gravitate to the larger instances. No doubt there were more trolls coming from lemmy.world, but there are far more regular users that have no idea what's going on.
I think Beehaw's decision is understandable though, especially given the lack of moderation tools. They've already mentioned that they are willing to (re?)federate in the future when trolls/bots are easier to deal with.
I think that this can easily be mitigated by the addition of transferable user profiles. Because the easier it is to hop off of a server and move to another, the better. You lose those communities in the event of a split, but then you desire new ones on your new instance and go join them. It would heal the UX much faster.
Like other users, I expect this will largely become a rarer and rarer occurrence as moderation levels out. We're very early in the game still.
One thing I haven't seen talked about is the benefit of this defederation. When beehaw defederated, what happened immediately? A lot of noise was made. The mods got in contact and opened dialog. Communities desired federation. While that's interpreted as entitlement, I think it's possible beneficial to keep the number of defederation events low and only done when necessary.
Brand new to lemmy, but this is my take as well. The first account I created was on lemmy.world and then I had to create another to come here. Imagine if Verizon 'defederated' from T-Mobile because of a few bad actors.
The problems are real, but the solutions Lemmy currently seems to offer are going to stifle it's growth before it can truly go big. I can deal with it, but as it currently stands I could never get my friends to join and even if they did, a defederation event happening would kill the concept dead for my more casual friends.
People have been conditioned to never answer their phones when an unknown number calls because of a few bad actors that severely abuse the system and none of the network operators want to take responsibility for the actions of their users (and they are profiting from this lack of moderation).
Imagine if ISPs and services like Cloudflare didn't counter DDoS attacks.
happens with email servers all the time
It's just like when email blew up. Email is a federated system as well. These are basically the same arguments I was hearing in the late 80s, early 90s about email. It's too confusing, nobody will ever use it.
Most servers did zero authentication for incoming emails. When spammers suddenly struck huge ip blocks were banned including innocent bystanders. Any "home" machine was often port blocked from running a mail server.
They developed tools and techniques to mitigate problems and now nobody cares where your email is.
The tools for this area known and the devs are working on it. Early adopters experience some friction.
That's basically how federated software has to work. Without defederation, running federated software becomes unusable. Either you get overrun by spammers or you become legally liable for illegal content from other servers if you don't do anything about it (the beehaw admins mentioned someone posting child porn as being one reason for defederation). Lemmy is clearly in its early days but this kind of thing will become way more common, as it is on more mature fediverse platforms.
Email providers are a good example of federated software. They have to make sure nobody is sending spam or malware or they will get federated, and they can be very aggressive about that.
Ultimately if you don't want defederation to ever happen, you want a centralized system run by a single organization. Those are your options.
Or you can have the government step in and have a very highly regulated system like for telephony, where almost nobody gets to run an instance, which seems unlikely in this case.
Yep. I have accounts on three instances, but I had been using my Lemmy.World one the most, and then suddenly my beehaw communities are gone. It’s not a huge deal given that these accounts are so young, but it was still annoying. These sorts of things will prevent Lemmy from growing as an overall community.
Yeah, and the user experience matters a lot right now. The reddit blackout is the best chance for rapid Lemmy/fediverse growth, so giving the best user experience right now is critical. Users who are new to the fediverse are already confused by the multiple instances, adding in extra conditions like "don't join these communities because you can't interact with this community" adds an extra level of complexity and makes the fediverse seem fractured and flawed as a first impression.
Beehaw's decision to defiderate may have been the best short-term decision for them, but I feel like it's a terrible decision for the rest of the fediverse and will hurt growth.
I think it is fair to also consider the excessive centralized moderation like the kind we criticize on reddit to be a part of the user experience. Those similar problems that only affect specific instances, but not all, is a part of the user experience here with lemmy.
To be fair, email works the same way and there are a number of domains that different email server admins block to avoid spam or for any reason they choose. I know some smaller ones block gmail and others because the gigantic amount of spam they send. I also recall the relatively quaint days of Ukraine drama in 2014 had motivated a local university to block my email because my web/email host was located in Ukraine.
Sure, there are times when individual server admins will muck things up, but rarely does my email not make it to where I want it to go. My point is that I think that this is being made into a bigger issue than it is.
Hard agree. It's the instability of the user experience that really sucks here.
I do think this kind of thing may solve itself given more time. Instances will establish reputations and their behavior will become more predictable and dependable over time. Right now, users basically have to gamble when joining an instance, or be willing to juggle multiple accounts.
I'd assume it's better to stay away from small instances though, unless you know the owner. Small instances are very vulnerable. Who knows if that owner will keep maintaining the instance? If it disappears, so does your account.
The truth that is hard to swallow...
We are techy people who enjoy the concept of the fediverse, but the general public will never use it if it doesn't become simple and straightforward.
Defederating lemmy.world is a temporary measure as better mod tools are made. It isn’t worth handwringing over. Defederation should not be the norm for dealing with a few trolls, or objectionable communities.
This isn't handwringing, though I can understand why it might come off that way. This is simply mulling over how things "actually work" in the fediverse as opposed to how people believe it works. I believe that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is and how it works. This is an educational issue that we have an opportunity to begin sorting out
Federation/Fediverse should mean a user of any instance should be able to use any community. Gated communities shouldn’t be the expected norm. So, I would agree with the lemmy.world people who are upset at being broadly blocked from a Fediverse community. But it doesn’t matter because beehaw says it is temporary.
This is true, except for one element:
Fediverse should mean a user of any instance should be able to use any community the instance elects to federate with. Lemmy is open by design, but instances can just as easily switch that feature off and go to a allowlist method.
A commonly missed element with federation is that you federate with who you trust since you essentially mirror their content. It's less apparent with the lemmy migration, but mastodon used to caution its users to "join an instance that aligns with your preferences" for this reason.
Federation is really a philosophy about mutual trust, just like how email providers can block messages by user, instance, or domain.
Trust me, there's likely more gating present than you're aware of. Maybe not at lemmy.world (which as of this post is only blocking one site for reasons I won't mention), but this can get dark pretty quick if you leave things completely open.
A major instance (in terms of comunities) like Beehaw changing from denylist to Allowlist would be devastating for users on small and single-user instances, so I hope it never comes to that. Unless there's some process to get hundreds of tiny unknow instances in the Allowlist
I think some people see Lemmy as a way to host their own self-supported community on their own server, with users identifying strongly with the values of the instance, and with cohesion among the users of the instance.
While other people (me included) see instances more as something to just host the account, so we can participate in Commities across "the network", where "the network" is basically all the Lemmy instances except the de-federated extremists, or other walled gardens. User-cohesion is more on the Community-level and less on the Instance-level.
Do we want a small network of instances that have proven themselves trustworthy? Or do we want a large network of instances that have yet to prove themselves untrustworthy? Different people will have different answers
You do bring up a good point about needing to trust your federated instances because you're essentially mirroring their content
This is the kind of respectful, well informed, nuanced debate that I used to have on reddit and missed terribly until I joined the fediverse. I'm worried it's going to take some fairly firm moderation to keep it from nastifying in the future.
There's a bit of a culture clash going on in these defederation debates between the "yay it's the wild west, reddit admins can't tell us what to do, we can go anywhere and do anything" folks on the one hand and the "yay it's collaborative, reddit admins can't tell us what to do, we can build community and do our own thing and have our own rules" folks on the other.
I think that just as much as we as individuals can go where we like and interact with what we want, mods can set up whatever instances they want with whatever rules and federation boundaries they want.
Sooner or later two people's freedoms bump into each other and someone's desired freedom to say something hits someone else's desired freedom from hearing something.
I think that painting defederation as a destabilising nuclear option that will kill the fediverse is as extreme as saying the same of moderation. The mods at beehaw decided that defederation was the best solution in the short term to some problems including some highly nasty content that pretty much everyone condemns, without themselves becoming overwhelmed. I respect that. Beehaw is, as far as I can tell, a great place, and I'm sure it takes a lot of work to keep it that way. The beautiful and intricate garden you're walking through might not be able to exist without the wall separating it from the pigs next to it. I know you're not a pig, but also you know that the wall isn't a huge deal, given that there's a gate.
Thank you for phrasing my point so eloquently.
I don't think that assertion is based in reality. A server has to be hosted somewhere, and admins will generally choose to uphold those local regulations for the sake of their instance's own longevity. Federation has never meant that you communicate with literally every other instance. This isn't Tor where nodes pass along communications that don't directly involve themselves.
Two separate issues are prompting “defederation”. Blocking users from posting to your local community and blocking remote communities from being mirrored on your server. Those should be handled differently. Beehaw didn’t want trolls posting mean things and blocked every user on a server. Your concern about illegal content would be more a complaint about specific communities that feature that content.
Either way you shouldn’t blame an entire server for a few users or communities you don’t want. Expecting everyone on a instance to be like minded isn’t going to work.
The only way to not address things on a per-server basis is for moderation tools to be expanded in scope. Maybe that will be how things work one day, but it is not how things can work right now.
Completely understandable. I am not opposed to moderation or keeping people safe from harassment.
It's a stopgap measure until better moderating tools are developed. I can't blame them for it.
If that's the only way to stop harassment, yes, you do... anyone on that instance that isn't like-minded with the behavior that instance permits is well-advised to leave it for one better suited to their own beliefs.
Are you then opposed to open registration on instances?
I'm not opposed to any process on any instance that enforces civil behavior on its registered users. Moderation is mandatory to eliminate defederation as the only way to handle the problem.
If you refuse to moderate your instance, you forfeit any right to complain about your instance getting defederated.
But these things are still too young and primitive for good moderation tools to really exist yet... yet. If your users are getting your instance defederated, maybe that's a problem you should work on.
By that line of reasoning all alt-right, homophobe, harassing, doxxing, trolling etc. instances should be allowed to access every other instance to spread their hate. Is that really what you want? I don't.
Why do you think entire instances will be devoted to that? You will have to block every instance that has open registration, since any open instance cannot guarantee one of the people you mentioned will not come in. I guess the issue I have is that I see moderation as something between users and communities. Not that the overall instance should be doing the moderation.
Because entire instances have already devolved to that and thus been blocked by the wider fediverse.
yeah this is like everything on our defederation list besides lemmygrad, shitjustworks, and lemmyworld--we're literally using a block list which is dedicated to those kinds of instances
Is there a central place to track these instances?. Or do you all have a text list or the reasons you defederated some that you may be open to sharing (even privately). I was looking for something specifically to avoid things like illegal content and the like.
https://beehaw.org/comment/300942
Nice thanks. Added those to my list at least. Beehaw has a ton, and frankly I dont even want to click through some on grounds of well...CSAM stuff ala burggit.moe etc
You might be interested to know that, as luck would have it, this was the first issue I picked up when scrolling through looking for a good introductory task to get used to the project: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3168
So this might change in the not-too-distant future (I haven't started doing any frontend work to support it yet though).
I think a blind trust of such list is kinda dangerous. But a common place where admins and user can tag and rate instances and hosted communities can be a good start.
Agree. Kinda what I was asking/looking for.
I’m a bit new to running an instance. There seem to be tools created for finding instances and communities. But not something that does the above.
beehaw.org/instances
Yeah i see that, but that doesnt really list the reasons some were removed. So prior to @alyaza@beehaw.org's comment I was kinda wondering why some may or may not have been dropped from beehaw.
There’s no function in lemmy to track reasons in the admin interface, it’s a text box where you pass in a list of blocked instances. The Beehaw admins may maintain a list separately.
Im aware. Thats why I was asking the admin if they were open to sharing such a possible list, even privately. It would help me save time. Heck it could be a github list we could share (again even privately) if I ran across new instances. They are sprouting up all over the place, mines not really an exception there either.
So what happened with lemmyworld?
Some are run or overrun by those kind of people. Have a look at how many instances are already defederated: https://beehaw.org/instances
We sure, I can understand Defederation from “skinheads.social”. I’m more concerned with large instances like lemmy.world who just are rather wide-open. I wonder if large open instances are just bad.
The Admins here have been pretty open about the fact that they're keen on re-federating with large instances once better moderation tools are available!
That's exactly it. Open signups and the volume that comes with that just highlights the lack of comprehensive moderation tools at the moment, certainly within instances, but also cross-instance - lots of very active conversations happening on this front though!
Gods, the names on the list of blocked instances. JFC
My understanding is that people from Lenny.world can still “use” behaw by subscribing to communities and commenting on posts, but people on Behaw just can’t see them. Is that not how it works?
I have to say I chose behaw because I wanted a more heavily modded experience here. I really don’t mind them shadow banning whole communities if a disproportionate number of trolls are coming over from them. People have got the right to speak, not the right to be heard. The internet’s full of kids just wanting to be obnoxious, and I’ve got to say I’m more then happy that other humans are helping me to filter that junk out
When a Lemmy.World user posts to a Beehaw community right now, it updates the cached community that Lemmy.World stores. Beehaw has defederated with them, so the "source of truth" (hosted by Beehaw) never updates. The source of truth is what updates other federated instances. As a result, someone on startrek.website, for example, will not see posts made by lemmy.world users to beehaw communities. The only people who can see what lemmy.world users post to beehaw right now are other lemmy.world users.
Won't that cause a major problem if/when Beehaw would want to refederate, and all that pent up stuff just pours on Beehaw all at once?
When/if refederation happens, the comments lost to the abyss will stay lost to the abyss. The source of truth will not update based on the past updates of a formerly defederated instance to my understanding
As far as I understand it (though it may be incorrect) - they won't be synchronized. Content between instances is synced/cached only when the instances are federated, and it doesn't go backwards - only posts after federation will be visible.
Unfortunately, defederating means the cord has been cut. This means we still have what was previously been posted, but all future content is bidirectionally blocked.
This doesn't mean it cant be mended.
This is also correct, and we're hoping we can do so sooner rather than later. 😉
Just because this software can be used that way, doesn't mean you're required to use it that way.
If I want to start a lemmy server and not let lemmy.world in, there's nothing wrong with that.
Lemmy.world isn't owed anything, they're not owed to view content in my community, they're not owed that I show their content to my users. And if my users are unhappy with that, that's fine, it's their choice to stay in my enclosed community or not.
Just because we're running the same software and the same communication protocols doesn't change that.
Nah. I don’t think it’s an education issue. E.g. I do understand how it works, but see defederation as the nuclear option. As a user in a federated system I don’t care where the communities are hosted that I frequent. As long as it works. That’s the entire point of federation. Otherwise we could just remove federation all together and have everyone create a separate account per instance.
I get where the beehaw admins are coming from and it’s understandable. But it’s not good and chips away at what Lemmy is and could be.
This is one instance now where this happened and I’m not on either of these instances, so I’m unaffected. But if I see more of these defederations (no matter where), the Signal it sends me is that for my needs I likely still have to bet on Reddit and at max this will become an occasional visit.
We are still far away from this point. Just saying. And a normal user can’t be expected to understand it or relate to it. It’s bad UX if they have to. Arguing for them to be educated about it is nice in theory, but misses in reality of how things just are.
Beehaw admins have no responsibility to "Lemmy as a whole" and to believe so is fundamentally misunderstanding what Lemmy instances are. They have a responsibility to their users to curate the space that they promised.
That makes sense. I think this also shows a general misunderstanding. Lemmy isn’t and can’t be a replacement for something like Reddit at the end.
A replacement for reddit in that it's the same community, culture, and content, as reddit, just hosted in a different place? No. And I hope not.
A replacement for reddit in just being an alternative social media with a similar general vibe but instead is community driven and owned social media system that generally provides better, more informative, and less outrage driven content? I believe it is.
I mean everyone seeks something different out of those communities. I do wish for the second option in general as well. But at the same time get a lot of value out of large communities with a lot of participants and content.
Depend on what you want or need and that’s different for a lot of folks.
@Cipher I think of it more of an instructional issue specifically rather than learning issue. People explain "it's like email" but fail to deliver the fact that it should be more like "It's how the internet should work". Where people think Lemmy is THE SITE and can communicate with kbin THE SITE.
It should be mentioned that if anyone has built a website, that Lemmy is the software. You install Google Chrome on your computer, you install lemmy on your computer. You are now able to ACCESS all the other websites like you would in Chrome.
People think "oh it's like email, well I know Gmail is pretty good so I'll make an account there. Whatever decisions Google makes is by extension my decision." The average user doesn't know what email actually is. They don't know that you can make your own email service. They don't know you can even just buy a domain and have your own email address.
The only thing that bugs me about the fediverse as a whole is that these threadiverse concepts shouldn't have communities. If it was implemented as intended, you'd have to make a community by making a new instance. The community should be federated, and then duplicate communities would get individually federated or defederated.
I think the ambiguity of the fediverse is muddied by how each software is trying to implement it. And it's almost hard to incentivize making your own instance.
@trachemys
The problem with the idea that each community should be its own instance basically comes down to cost, both financial and time. If I want to make a community about something I'm passionate about I'd have to shell out money I don't have on hosting, buy a domain, learn how to actually host and administrate a Lemmy instance, and then spend like half of my time and energy maintaining it.
Not everyone is a programmer with programmer knowledge making programmer money.
This is why I think email analogy is very useful to get the basics of how Lemmy/kbin work on a technical level but falls flat on a practical and social level
You have what I would call federation idealists that feel that is should be just like email you should be able to contact anyone. This ignores the fact that email is private communication tool vs a public facing forum.
The argument that instances should be utilities with no "politics" or "culture" just ignores the reality.
Exactly, at the start of the growth phase for new sites, people want things to look stable. Seeing drama from Z site because Y site disconnected from them can look pretty unappealing
That remains to be seen, doesn't it?
It’s unfortunate that a handful of replies here are demonstrating exactly why the Beehaw community leaders felt they had to make this choice. 😞
If Lemmy instances are like web forums, federation basically gives us a “Sign in with your [home instance] account” option. (That’s not technically accurate at all, I’m only talking about the user experience.) It reduces user friction and helps people participate more widely. They just stopped allowing that from certain instances because they think adding a bit of friction back in will be healthier for the Beehaw communities. If you’re on one of the defederated instances, you aren’t banned. Yeah, it’s inconvenient for you, but you just need a different sign-in (at least for the time being).
From an end user perspective, I want a singular UI to browse all my various Lemmy identities in a cohesive manner. Not logged in on multiple tabs, trying to keep my subscription lists synced or otherwise organized. This is where a good app front end could smooth a lot of user friction out of the process.
This is the best solution - copying accounts across would just replicate the problems of being overwhelmed that the beehaw mods were trying to avoid by defederating. They absolutely would want to stop auto-copying of accounts from exactly the same instances that they've defederated from.
Having fediverse apps that can handle multiple accounts would solve the problem for folks that can be bothered to make a beehaw account because they like the vibe over here but stop the low effort folks from carelessly posting low effort, high hassle nastiness here because they think that federated means unmoderated freedom rather than cooperative interlinked communities, partly because they just don't see beehaw posts for them to interact with.
People also need to be mindful that the concept of the fediverse isn't a simple one, not to the majority of people who use Reddit / other sites. We want to try and streamline the process of searching for, signing up to and contributing to content, at least if we want these platforms to continue to grow.
We don't need the 400+ million that Reddit has but having more interested users will help generate more content / engagement
Are they, though? I’ve read a lot about it, and everyone over there seems to more or less understand it, kind of just shrug about it now, and have moved on. Lemmy world sees it’s bigger than beehaw now, has tons of its own content, still has access everywhere else and will be fine.
I have absolutely seen some highly upvoted pillars of salt over there.
This is a bad take because you used the most extreme example of why defederation is a practical necessity to justify a significantly less serious issue. I personally would want the bar to be much higher for this kind of thing.
I also don't "misunderstand" anything here. I just strongly disagree with the decision. What's next, beehaw gets upset that other instances allow downvoting?
Hi, Beehaw user here. You can downvote me all you want and they'll never appear on my instance so that won't be an issue. I could be sitting at -50 on your instance and it'll always appear as 1 on mine.
Honestly though, I'm a big fan of the defederation decision (at least for now). It's only a temporary measure until Lemmy gets more powerful mod tools and then they'll refederate when they can more easily moderate the trolls and bad actors. This is one of the features of the fediverse, got an instance that's producing a large amount of trolls? Not anymore! Insta-community clean. The only people I've ran across that don't like it are normally the people that end up getting banned tbh.
Edit: For reference to the vote scores, on Beehaw this is currently sitting at 25 upvotes for me. If anybody is viewing from an instance with downvotes, that's how it appears for Beehaw users.
Personally, I think there is way too much overreaction to the defederations. I agree with admins’ reasons, and it is clear that the minute there are sufficient moderation tools available, that the impacted servers will be re-federated.
The pressure is now on the developers to start pushing more iterative moderation tools - something that wasn’t a priority before Reddit decided to implode, and now looks like it needs to be reprioritized. This is a project/project management issue.
The problem isn’t the decision to defederate, it’s that the only solution to handle bad actors is binary. It’s like shaving your head because you have over-dried out hair, when you’d rather just cut the split ends.
I am willing to be patient because I see Lemmy as a long-term engagement. I’ve been off Reddit since the AMA and haven’t had any desire to go back. I’d rather invest the time here and show the devs that prioritizing more iterative mod tools is a good ROI for them.
I like this choice of words. The wounds suffered by reddit are aggressively self-inflicted.
Completely agree, I don't like that defederation is the only tool but glad that it's there at least. Looking forward to when those more powerful tools can be developed for the mods but this works as a bandaid for now.
The only interaction I've had with Reddit is going through my saved posts and bringing over to Lemmy what I think is worth it. Next up is deleting the account and editing all the comments.
I do not think that anyone "likes" de-federation. In the end though people coming in from other nodes are guests in our forums. We do not have to put up with bad behavior. Moreover instances that allow their users to engage in this bad behavior take some responsibility too. They are your users after all. So if your instance gets banned look to your instances users, and also the admins and their policies that allow those users on that node. Do not under estimate the troll problem. Moderation is required and if it cannot be done effectively then other actions have to be taken like de-federation.
Then again, your coming from lemmy.ml and are not de-federated so why do you care. It is also a bit rich when lemmy.ml has not accepting subscriptions from behaw since I joined. Maybe you should complain about that too.
This is a terrible argument, in any case.
Maybe a better one is that lemmy.ml has not been accepting subscriptions for some time. It also has it's own block list in terms of federation: https://lemmy.ml/instances too. Most instances will not federate with everyone and will block some to protect their communities. It is just a fact.
As I said, I do not think it is a desirable thing in general and it is disruptive when transitioning to blocked but it is from time to time necessary. The necessity has to be jugged from the point of view of the instance making the decision and their admins. So projecting some other set of concerns onto it is kind of questionable. It is even more questionable when your instance is doing similar things and worse when users from your instance were the ones causing the issue to start with.
"Community organizers keep promises about their community management goals. Outrage ensues."
You clearly misunderstand the decision to defederate if that's your counterexample. It wasn't about beehaw "disliking a thing other serves do" it was about unjustified moderation time, a lack of mod tools, and a worsening of the community values that were trying to be achieved.
I recommend if you're interested, reading the community philosophy on beehaw to better understand why trolls in the space warrant quick action.
Nice slippery slope fallacy. Try arguing in bad faith somewhere else.
This isn't a slippery slope or bad faith comment. Sit down and be quiet.
To me the whole situation is a "they bit off more than they could chew" kind of thing so you pull the nuclear option.. Honestly I'm avoiding subscribing to any beehaw communities because I won't be able to see any posts made from one of the most populous instances, hence diminishing their value. As a general user I would avoid signing up for beehaw as well for the same reasons.
By starting a Lemmy instance a year and a half before Rexxit? I never saw them claim to want to be the next Reddit. The Fediverse had an influx of users and Lemmy doesn’t currently have the mod or admin tools to deal with that situation gracefully. My understanding is that most of the bad actors were external to Beehaw.
They didn’t bite off anything, shit was being shoved into their mouth so they closed it.
Personally, I’m using my very own Lemmy instance so that I can choose who I federate with (including Beehaw). I totally understand why some folks might want to have their home instance elsewhere, and it’s cool that federation gives us that ability.
By not being prepared for it. It was setup with default communities, like technology for example (correct me if I'm wrong), but no plan to deal with those with moderation capabilities and levels that reach their own standard. To me it's only making the entire experience untrustworthy and stunted. Somehow lemmy.world and others can deal with it without defederating others so that's where I'll go.
i mean... yeah? it's not every day you suddenly have 5x the number of total users on your site visiting the site per minute because a major corporation just did something extremely unpopular with no forewarning. if we had that kind of clairvoyance, i'd be a millionaire and running this site would just be my full-time job. this strikes me as an irrational critique informed by the hindsight you have now, weeks after it began.
this is primarily because they have more permissive rules and no defined ethos they're trying to upkeep—or at least, they don't have the latter in a way that requires constant maintenance. (as a point of note last i checked, lemmy.world didn't even have listed rules, per se,[^1] so it'd be hard to parse what's even not allowed as a user besides "actively illegal content") we, by contrast, have a very clear idea of what we want—we spent a year thinking about it, and we're at a year and a half of making it reality—so defederation in the absence of better mod tools is an extremely obvious way to maintain that. actually it's the only tool we have in a lot of cases, which is a gripe we have with Lemmy that we're trying to solve
[^1]: although Ruud has told us he'll moderate hate speech, bigotry, etc. from the top, so implicitly those aren't supposed to be allowed. i question how viable doing this is with such an open-registration policy, more-or-less unvetted mods, and lots of communities to keep track of but i suppose all instances here can be thought of as large-scale experiments right now
Every time I start a new project my first thought is obviously "how would this scale to hundreds of thousands of people?" (I tried breadmaking over the pandemic help)
If communities belonged to "lemmy" you would have Reddit. If anything would be forcefully federated it would be a mess. IMHO it's the right balance. I get your concerns about being confusing but given the state of development of the platform most of it will be solved by a better UI and better instance data synchronization policies, etc...
I agree. These mechanisms are in place to stop the fediverse from becoming fedChan
I think it would be more like reddit if there was a single super Lemmy instance, the extra layer of self hosting confuses everyone
As we are seeing the same issues with Lemmy and Mastodon I'm starting to think there is something fundamentally wrong with ActivityPub.
Because instances pull content from others they have a responsibility in the content, so instances with different rules can't really work together.
If on the other hand we had a lighter integration between instances, like for example RSS to consume from multiple instances and only having federation for identity management (like OpenID or OAuth) I feel like we could avoid a lot of drama.
Its not as bad as you describe. The issue is only present when it comes to large instances interacting with other large instances. As an instance takes on more users, it is going to have a harder time serving everyone all at once. So some restrictions will ha e to be imposed so it can offer service at scale. This will include defederating with other large instances for community maintenance.
The solution is that if you need your own set of rules than it is up to you to host your own instance. I think that is fair.
Overall, instances should in general try to federate, because that is what makes this go round. And you Alcan understand the salt users would have since they are effectively banned from a large community over something that they didn't really do. But those are the breaks, and the whole point is that if you don't like it you should host your self and maintain a good relationship with the instances that you want to participate in.
RSS could really work. That way, as many others suggested, it's up to the user to block/censor whatever they don't want to see
Signing up for social networking so you can start yanking tech support and reading man pages right away? Is this some elaborate masochistic exploration that we don't know about? What the vuck are you all talking about...
People need to understand what lemmy is. This is not monolithic social media like facebook or reddit. People need to understand that, or the mismatch between how they think it works and how it actually works is going to cause a lot of mental anguish that could be avoided.
As they say in software development, 8 hours of debugging can save you from one hour of reading the manual.
I’m reading this on kbin(new transplant from an old Reddit account) and I have little idea what this is about lol
Sure, and I should've been more clear and said people need to understand what the Fediverse is.
This is, ultimately, about what federation means and how this platform operates. Its deficiencies, and the way things work currently to address those deficiencies. What I have posted is just as true for kbin as it is for lemmy.
Personally, with a background in software/programming, but little to no knowledge about how ActivityPub and the interactions between federated instances work, I really appreciate this post and the discussions. Learned a lot today!
Thanks, I really appreciate that. Education was the foremost goal of this post, and I'm glad some of that may have come through
Here’s an analogy, hope it helps:
Kbin.social and beehaw.org are like really advanced email servers (e.g. outlook.com, gmail.com)
The content you’re seeing on kbin is like viewing an email sent from another server, in the case of this thread you’re getting content from beehaw.org.
These aren’t just normal emails, they’re super advanced emails with comments, replies, categories, votes etc.
The content is downloaded to the kbin servers for your viewing pleasure, and you can send an ‘email’ back to beehaw by engaging in their posts/communities like you’re doing now. That will send what you’ve done back to beehaw so it’s all synced up for their users.
If beehaw ever goes down/gets unlinked from kbin you’ll still have the old ‘emails’ (content) but you won’t be able to engage with them anymore. Like if someone deleted their email account it doesn’t delete all the emails they sent to other people.
I'm new here and not up on the history, but I have a couple of questions:
When an instance defederates, does it disconnect from all other instances? Or can the administrators choose which other instances they no longer want to sync up with?
In the case of content remaining on my local instance that originated on another instance that has since defederated, would I be able to tell? Would it be possible for Lemmy to add a visual indicator that this content had become disconnected from its originating instance?
It will take more time to establish norms. Other instances will certainly defederate and folks will become more accustomed to what that defederation means.
Instances are very vulnerable right now. There's not much ability to trust or predict how the owners of your instance will behave, because there isn't a long history of past behavior to look back on, so understandably some users will be frustrated by the lack of stability.
I do see one huge issue with how people are being instructed to join lemmy, which is that most resources tell people it doesn't matter which instance they join. That becomes fundamentally untrue with defederation.
The problem is that even the official lemmy documentation heavily implies that it doesn't matter which instance you join because "you'll still be able to interact with communities on other instances."
I've been enjoying my time here, but there are some very valid concerns about how the current model of federation will impact Lemmy's ability to ever really be an alternative to other social media- the obvious one here being Reddit. The Beehaw defederation really shows part of the problem here, because multiple of the largest communities that I see on Lemmy are hosted there. Yes, users on lemmy.world COULD make their own versions of those, but three days ago they already existed, were already being interacted with by hundreds of people in lemmy.world, and those communities are just... gone. Thanos snapped away from people on lemmy.world, who will understandably feel kinda miffed.
The thing that I think didn't sit right with a lot of people is that Beehaw's admins apparently said (I haven't seen it first hand) that they see a future in refederating with Beehaw's communities being kept private, only accessible to Beehaw users, while Beehaw users would get access to the wider Fediverse.
To be honest, I feel that it's Beehaw's prerogative to grant or revoke access to anyone on other instances, but also I wouldn't be surprised that in turn other instances would not federate with an instance that would not give access to other instances' users for its communities.
I do, personally, think it's reasonable for an instance to have "private" communities exclusive to their own users. This is likely a subject that comes down to personal belief, but after dealing with so many trolls and bad actors on other platforms, I absolutely do see a need to have those kinds of permissions.
That’s sounds…not possible. At least at the current iteration of the software. It also seems like kinda the opposite of what the fediverse was meant to be.
I just looked at one of my communities and the only main setting is whether mods can post. You can’t set perms at the community level to exclude certain users or make them private
On the latter part of your reply. I agree. It is their prerogative but I do see obvious benefits of not going say…allowlist only federation. We are swiftly hitting a point where there will need to be instances just to manage user registrations and avoid bottlenecks and scaling issues.
Yep, not possible currently, hence defederation for now. The point is that there must be some change, better mod tools, less new users, or something to change the calculus for Beehaw to refederate. The point Beehaw is making that they can't create the community they want with the current software iteration, either with regards to perms or mod tools without defederating from other big instances.
BTW that's my point, it's not what the Fediverse is meant to be, that's why it's weird. Again, this is second hand info, so take it with a grain of salt.
IDK why is everyone making accounts on the 3-4 biggest instances.
How do you expect a newcomer who has no understanding of content federation to find these low-pop instances? Of course everyone's joining the main handful, they don't know anything else exists.
I'd imagine most people coming from typical social media don't even realize that instances are a thing when they sign up on one. They've heard about lemmy or kbin or whatever, so they go to lemmy or kbin or whatever and sign up. Once they learn how it works, they've already established a profile on that instance; they're not going to start over on a new one.
I don't think that's particularly true. Reddit had plenty of people making multiple alter accounts for various purposes, and some of the third-party apps made it easy to swap between accounts. Multiple profiles throughout the fediverse doesn't seem a particular stretch.
Multiple accounts is not the same thing as abandoning your profile and instance to start over somewhere else. I have more than one profile right here on kbin, for example.
Regardless, you’ve ignored the entire rest of my comment, and kinda the whole point; people don’t know. How could they know? Where are they going to learn if not here, and once they are here, why leave?
Makes sense. It was the main reason I just built an instance, for speed and performance reasons, but also to have control on my account. I have the know how so f-it.
And I’m mulling over just opening it if there’s a huge surge come 7/1/23. Though I may stick to application based onboarding to make sure it’s not totally overwhelmed.
This wasn’t the impression I got from the Beehaw admins. I believe they felt that blocking lemmy.world users from Beehaw but still being able to have Beehaw users interact with lemmy.world would have been better than full defederation, but I don’t think that was the ideal solution either. Something like an approval process for an external user to interact with Beehaw communities would be preferable.
Also, Beehaw could go fully private today if they wanted to, that definitely doesn’t seem to be their intention.
know very little about the programming but it feels like there would be some sort of SSO multi-instance user account syncing solution.
Make an account on one instance, say Lemmy.World, and from that account request access to the other instances that you would like to join. Your account would get cloned and synced to the other instances that you get accepted to and posts/comments in that instance would be stored on that instance account as a secondary instance.
Posts could be cloned to all federated clone accounts or you could designate a secondary backup acount in case the primary server goes down. Maybe there could be a limit of instances you join like 3-5 cloned accounts to reduce duplication of data and maybe only clone messages, not media or something unless specifically requested. It would also allow for folks to continue posting and browsing even if their primary instance is overloaded or down which would improve the end user experience.
Again I only have an approximate idea how this works so this may all be dumb...
In practice this would be difficult to implement because each instance has its own take on how to shape the code for their site. There's no obligation to create an instance so that it will be compatible with everyone else's instance, and in fact I would guess that would be effectively impossible.
Let's say Instance A allows porn, and a user on A wants to create an account on Instance B, but Instance B doesn't want any porn on their server. At minimum, a way to keep any porn on that user's account from syncing to B's server would have to be implemented.
This is only a single case. There will be plenty more small issues like that to have to work around, so it will take a lot of time to get all that logic designed, implemented and tested.
The cloning of an account might also involve a not-insignificant amount of data being transferred. What if the receiving server wants to limit the amount of data storage for a new account so that they're not burdened with storing tons of data for new, unknown users? How do you then determine what subset of that user's data to import?
Maybe these things will happen with enough time, but for now I think it's best for now at least if everyone thinks of each instance as its own separate website that can communicate with other similar sites rather than a set of cloned sites where which one you pick doesn't matter.
Please don't take this as argumentative, as we need people to share ideas like yours! I just keep seeing messages that give me the impression that people have expectations for the Threadiverse that aren't currently realistic given what the state of the software is now.
Yeah I figured there would be technical challenges. I imagine the data load would be fairly large, but since its a growing platform data growth is going to be an issue either way.
Maybe the better solution is an app that you can log into multiple accounts with anditt merges your feeds.
That probably is the best solution because it keeps the moderation burden off of the individual sites.
I am also not a programmer, but I have been thinking about the above idea as key to simplifying the adoption of lemmy to the broader public. I think that this idea is good, but the fact that the host instance must locally store all the data of another instance it's federated with seems resources intensive (but I bet storage is cheaper than processing calls). Wouldn't it make more sense to have a shared API-like protocol to allow instances and users to migrate freely using a SSO?
I think that the problem I had was "but which instance should I join?" and the answer that I understood when I saw someone commenting from mastadon in lemmy.ml or something was "it doesn't matter."
Then it became "but which one do I want to join and be associated with?" and after a day or two, I found feddit.uk, which appealed to me very much as a concept. I've been happy with my choice.
I occasionally worry that I'll need to create other accounts on other instances, but thankfully I'm not (yet!) blocked from the communities I subscribed to on beehaw, beehaw being the place that I most nearly made an account.
I'm not sure that an auto-copy of accounts is simple in practice or secure in principle, and I worry that it would make experiencing the fediverse even more complicated, eg I'm commenting on beehaw, but should I use my feddit.uk or my usenet.revisited.digg.lemmy account?
I worry that it would also fail to solve your moderation quandries - the beehaw mods would want to block exactly the auto-copied accounts from other instances that are the only duplicate accounts you would need because you can already access content from outside the blocked instances without creating other accounts.
Yes, I joined Feddit.uk too - there was a recent post saying that they were going to keep the number of defederated instances small, which is good to know. Major stuff shouldn't disappear suddenly.
Yes, so way to merge some accounts (like elsewhere you can sign up with your Google, Facebook, etc accounts under one login) and/or being able to easily switch accounts/instances as easily as you can in Reddit. I am using the Jerboa for Lemmy app, so this may all be possible in other apps or web interfaces.
This is so cool, these discussions remind me of events in the Bobiverse books where the spirit of these topics are similar. Also the start trek instance is totally getting this right from my perspective of things (startrek.website). Of course there are many ways to approach this as « right » is one’s opinion.
I completely understand the reason for the current workflow. However, IMO that makes Lemmy almost unusable. I already have a programming and a gaming community that I can't use Jerboa on. That's pretty bad.
Excuse me, I've been using Jerboa. Are you saying Jerboa, the app, is filtering out some servers, in addition to what my home server has blocked? If so where could I get more information on what Jerboa isn't allowing?
Jerboa, the GUI, is not filtering anything. The only restrictions might be with your "home instance".
No, jerboa isn't filtering anything. They mean they don't have access to some beehaw communities because beehaw isn't federating with Lemmy.world.
I don't know why they are saying this though considering they are in the programming.dev instance
I think if every instance was a one person instance then the mods would not have the hammer sollution to defederate thousends of people at once. Back in the days they would ban a IP range, it's simmilar.
But to not need to do that, there need to be better tools available for them, we're waiting for those now.
So for newcomers to the fediverse (also, hi!), mastodon has gone through debates and events too. People my differ on this, but I think the whole phenomenon is just a part of the fediverse and that it's fundamentally a good thing.
Where it causes drama or friction, I think it is essentially a different kind of friction compared to what happens on big-social platforms. And while it can have its problems or be mishandled, the problems, IMO, reflect real-life social dynamics more, and are therefore healthier than being subject to and at the whims of big-corporate overlords with many more interests other than true cultural and human engagement and interaction. Sometimes, people and whole groups of people just don't want to know each other. Free-speech and political discourse ideals aren't the catch all analysis here. This isn't the news papers or an academic journal, it's social media.
Bubbles are problematic but so are firehoses and incessantly unpleasant social interactions ... grouping and excluding is what we do ... it helps to match our finite minds and lives to the magnitudes of reality.
Beyond this, I think many are just not accustomed to real-life human dynamics playing a more structural role in their major social media life. There's an adjustment that needs to happen. And this goes both ways, for those against and those in defence of defederation actions, where attacks on defederation may miss the point and defenders may not see that there are sometimes better ways to manage problems.
Many of the attacks of defederation are along the lines of "this will stifle growth". I get it, and I've said the same myself elsewhere. But, one, not long ago no one thought any of this would "grow" and yet here we are, so maybe save the prognostications and try more substantial and constructive critiques. And, two, much of the above about transitioning to different modes of online socialising necessitates friction, where the fediverse is not simply your substitute for big-social waiting for the special moment you decide big corporations have crossed your line, rather, it's a different system, problems and all. Now, by all means, critique the fediverse (I sure do), but, I would recommend doing so with some of the above as part of your frame of reference.
For my money, the biggest problem right now is account mobility. Your account is stuck and limited to an instance. Mastodon has migrations but it's really just importing your settings and followers to a new account on a new instance rather than truly moving your account to a new host. This is baked into the current structure of the fediverse. Instances are first-class citizens, users are second-class. It is truly accurate, though somewhat pejorative, to use "feudal-verse" instead, because that is actually what it really is.
In terms of defederation, the problem this causes is that you can find yourself at odds with the federation policies of your instance and want to leave, which is obviously a PITA. More deeply, it's hard to know the federation policies of an instance before you join, or how they'll respond to some situations, so events like beehaw can be a little "shocking", and sometimes hurtful, because you find yourself labelled by your instance when you in reality have little alignment it, at least on the matter at hand.
Thing is, belonging to an instance or a community of some sort, finding a "home" of sorts with a group of other people, is probably a good thing, in line with my comments about healthier and more "in real life" dynamics. The issue is that instances and us being forced to join them is somewhat arbitrary, and once you end up having multiple accounts, just a PITA and ultimately bad UX.
What the fediverse really needs, IMO, is both grouping/community mechanisms and for our accounts and their hosting to be decoupled from these groups/communities.
Lemmy/kbin and the threadiverse as a whole do well in this regard by having sub-reddit/forum like structures. Mastodon and the microblogs struggle as they are quite bad at communities (as the BIPOC communities found out it seems). But, as it stands, the threadiverse still couples community hosting with account hosting, and so we have the beehaw defederation issue (which I should say is interesting to see as communities or reddit-like structures haven't been popular on the fediverse until now-ish).
Technologically, my suspicion is that this whole fediverse thing goes to another level once a coherent protocol provides for optional independence between account hosting and community hosting and, arguably, independence between the prior two and platform format. We have "self-hosting", but at the moment it's a bit of a hack, still binds you to platforms and hardly provided as a convenient service (check out Spacehost, an upcoming service for this: https://spacehost.one/).
I wonder about self-hosting scales and suspect it's awfully inefficient, and so, technologically, I suspect some hybridisation of the architecture is required, where the whole web2.0 idea of user->server->platform just melts away.
In reality, the only real innovation of the fediverse is to parallelise the "server" part
user->server->platformso that a single user on a single platform can be achieved with horizontal scale and a distributed work load.This has the effect of FOSS social media being a thing (here we are and it's awesome TBH), but isn't really revolutionary from a user perspective. Once multiple platforms communicate over the same protocol, it starts to get revolutionary, but that's only started as anyone who's tried to mix mastodon and lemmy can attest to.
Wow thanks for such a verbose post.
That's given me a lot to chew on
Instances hold copies of other instances' communities? I thought it was simply an API call to the other server. Not an expert, tho.
That is correct, and this is why a new instance only shows the most recent 20 posts for a community until someone from the viewing instance subscribes to it. From that moment forward (barring de-federation), the host instance sends updates to the viewing instance. The viewing instance provides content to its users from the local copy that it stores.
Yep, on regular intervals your instance asks for the latest data from the remote community and that's what it serves to its users. So it doesn't matter if 1 person or 100 are subbed on asingle remote, it's the same number of calls.
Is there a reason for working like this and not simply be a portal to the other instance's community?
I'm not a lemmy dev but my understanding is that doing it that way would end up exponentially increasing latency once you start getting nested links to communities - accessing a post on lemmy.world that was linked to lemmy.nz and then finally read through a beehaw account, for example, might have to jump through at three servers on opposite sides of the world before getting to me rather than just being served directly across the pacific from beehaw's server to me!
Probably for reliability and stability — otherwise, every view from every federated instance would create a new request to the hosting instance. The protocol itself would basically DDoS smaller instances. Also you can still read the cached version on your home instance if the remote instance is temporarily down.
WOW, 25+ score!?!?! Das a lot of score-arinos!!!!! Congratulations fedizen! :)