YSK: If you're on Lemmy.World or Sh.itjust.works you should not subscribe to any Beehaw communities
Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
It's important to note that the admins of beehaw are not happy about this solution, either. And they hope to refederate once they have better tools and enough mods / admins to deal with it.
They point wasn't to shadowban, that was a side effect. The point was to protect their member--who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance--from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that. Nobody's happy with the situation, but it's the best they could do under the circumstances with the resources they have.
I also don't think it's wrong for instances to have their own strong rules and preferences. This is one of the GOOD things about the Fediverse. The software features and how people use lemmy will catch up eventually.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on...that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it's not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like "true-" whatever.
That's true for just the duplication problem, but the defederation / shadow banning issue is not one that reddit has and is pretty confusing and poor user experience for new users coming in.
This isn't reddit 2.0. It's a different platform with different mechanics that hasn't had over a decade to mature.
Change is hard. People need to learn to adapt.
Right, but even non-reddit users would be confused by it. When everyone advertises lemmy as seamlessly integrating with all the different instances, it doesn't matter what instance your account is on, this definitely is not that.
It's a young platform experiencing unprecedented growth. There's going to be growing pains where misunderstandings and misinformation are bound to happen. We need to correct the misinformation and set proper expectations.
The ability for a server admin to choose what servers they federate with is a core concept of the fediverse and needs to be properly communicated.
Except you're not making a case for why they should rather than go to some other alternative once it pops up soon.
I foresee a lot of issues with defederation and the proposed mod tools in the future, as well. They can refederate but it's not a good look for the platform when the federation can be fractured so easily. We have not seen the last of this issue.
I also question what it's going to look like when these moderation tools are implemented. Lemmy has more avenues for moderation/admin abuse than Reddit, and less recourse for users. There are a lot of concerns here that just seem to be swept under the rug under the pretence that "you can always go to another instance".
Ultimately it's not an issue with the function of the fediverse, but with the moderation philosophy of the people running these instances. Particularly when it comes to the viability of voting. That's a huge opportunity for suppression that I don't trust certain admins not to abuse.
How does Lemmy have more avenues for admin abuse than Reddit? On either platform, the admins can technically do whatever they want. (Including editing users posts, spez). Lemmy makes it easier to just go somewhere else. At the end of the day that is all you can do.
Wow so much misinformed hostility against Beehaw here. The mod tools for Lemmy are currently limited and they just want to protect their community from trolls and spam. There's no conspiracy here to break federation.
Beehaw is some pseudo moral purity echo chamber. They consider anyone with a contrary opinion a troll. People create these "safe spaces" under the guise of protecting minority groups, but fuck.. I'm a minority, and I knew immediately I wasn't going to be welcome there.
People are free to judge it as they please.
--edit--
Why aren't other instances having this problem? Like if trolls and spam are such an issue, why do I only see relevant on topic comments in other instances?
T he issue isn't trolls, it's political dissent. And if you care about the truth, if you care about having the ability to talk about and express your ideas freely to other people, to have uncomfortable discussions with people you disagree with, to be exposed to new ideas, and fuck.. to possibly even change your mind, you shouldn't support beehaw.
If you genuinely want that type of environment, go for it, but that place should be called out for what it is.
This type of political authoritianism is why I left Reddit. It kills discussion, and I'm here for critical discussion.
Why would you not be welcome? Is it for your political opinions? Even if it were, I don't think they would personally shun you unless it entails attacking minorities.
That aside, and having said that of course it is everyone's perrogative to judge this behavior, I personally feel it is an exaggeration. Not every instance is about free speech nor should they be, at the end of the day the fediverse is about creating communities, one is able and should shape them into what their vision of that is. This is not authoritarianism, in this case they said it is due to their inability to moderate.
Even if it weren't for that, it is good that communities don't federate with every instance, aa I said, not everyone is about free speech and changing opinions some are here to have a good time and for that adequate protection is necessary.
I myself prefer deciding myself when to block other instances, so I joined one that let's users decide. But if other instances decided to block us I would understand and either move on or join another instance to interact with them without thinking much about it (having multiple accounts is kind of easy on the apps,)
I think I'm kind of used from servers blocking one another from my time on mastodon and I've seen the necessity of the practice, for example an anime focused group blocking bot instances, brigading, alt right groups, etc.
Rationally I think this is straight bullshit. Their inability to moderate is because of the desire to control the political direction of topics. If people want an echo chamber, fine, but I'm calling it out.
Yes, that was always allowed. Beehaw is extremely up front about the kinds of voices and perspectives welcome on it. It never claimed to be a bastion of free speech. Complaining about that is like saying you don't like a burger restaurant because they don't serve sushi.
Fine, I just don't get the echo chamber feeling but admittedly I only use beehive for gaming/anime/escapism hobby related communities so I haven't seen it being all about conteolling politics, at least not directly.
At the end of the day I barely get what you mean by controlling politics, since it is not apparent on the communities I visit. Also keep in mind, I'm not american so if this is about the culture war over there or a republicans vs democrats thing I probably won't notice it since it hasn't affected any discussion I've had.
But I would need concrete examples for me to see it as authoritarian because in a vacuum as I explained I can see communities pulling this kind of conduct without it being about controlling the discourse per se but more about helping communities.
Edit: forgot to say, but if it was over politics I don't think that would necessitate a ban lemmy.world (or alternative ly that would mean complete defederation) since it has no clear political affiliation, I see it just it being massive and difficult to moderate otherwise they would have targeted many other toxic instances way before touching .world.
Beehaw lost me when admins allowed a female user to repeatedly insult men, say 95% of them are awful, that men shouldn’t even exist etc they claim they’re a “safe, welcoming space” but it’s actually hypocritical.
They defederated from this and other instances and yet I’ve never seen any comments reaching that level of hostility here. The only way to interpret that is that they actually are okay with insults and bigotry as long as it suits their whims. If a man had made the same remarks it’d be written off as the rantings of an incel and they’d likely be banned.
I should be their target audience as someone who has voted left my entire life and it’s too much and too controlled for me. Either they’re for all equality and inclusiveness or they’re not. Pick one.
Eh, there were a few posts about this on lemmy.world when it happened. People went through beehaw's modlog and could only find a handful of actions taken against both communities.
Seems they just want to have their own little bubble.
Safe spaces are pretty much that. I would actually like to join beehaw if I ever need to switch to an instance for my own sanity. I left reddit but it's followed us here so I think a more curated experience would be nice.
That is unless they're nazis, fascists, authoritarian or any other kind of violent extremist faction. I'm sick of having no faith in humanity because of all these backwards ideologies being "expressed". To quote Costanza, these pretzels are making me thirsty.
I also don't like how beehaw has downvotes disabled. I get not wanting there to be brigading, or negativity, but being able to downvote a troll, or a post that is blatantly providing misinformation (purposefully or not), is invaluable.
I think there's value in it. The underlying idea is that if someone is wrong, even if blatantly so, you have to take the effort to explain why. On reddit, the downvote button was just as often used as a community cudgel against dissenting opinion, even when the opinion was 1) genuinely harmless but unpopular, 2) well reasoned and supported by evidence but something that went against the mob mentality, or 3) just something that people didn't understand and their gut reaction to it was negative.
Yep, I applied to join when I was fresh and it asks about how active applicants are. I was honest and said I wasn't the most active person but that I did participate in the subs that I used the most. Was trying to be honest and didn't see any red flags with that. They still denied me, so fuck beehaw
True, but unsubbed from them when it happened because I don't want to see communities I can't interact with.
Why add to the problem and have frustration with wanting to discuss something you are blocked from?
They have every right to protect themselves against spam. But that said, ever since they defederated, their activity and user numbers are down.
Agree that they have every right to handle their instance however they want. I also have the right to not interact with them while they are blocking the instance I call home.
It's getting pretty tiring to see people feeling entitled to have access to any and all communities of the Fediverse, if the people paying for the running cost of the Beehaw instance wants to defederate (for whatever reason, "good" or "bad"), that's their prerogative.
If you really want access to their content, apply to join, otherwise sign up to any of the dozens of lemmy instances federated to the rest of the fediverse.
One of the great things about the Fediverse in general is choice, user and instance admin can choose how they want to interact, and are not beholden to a company or group which can take any arbitrary decisions they want.
TLDR : Instance admin are entitled to how they want to run it, you're not.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we've come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
I'm entitled to leave to another instance. One of the main things to look at when choosing an instance is who they are federated/defederated with. I would never join BeeHaw Lemmy.world, or Sh.itjust.works because of their feud. I'd rather join a third party instance and have access to all the content on all three.
It's not a feud, lol. Admins from all of them say they talked it out and they plan to re-federate in the future. Beehaw wants to be a heavily moderated instance, and lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works were growing faster than Beehaw's moderation ability.
I think it was pretty clear, yeah
I signed up through sh.itjust.works - was this a bad idea? Only opened my account 2 days ago so learning the ropes.
Nothing is stopping you to register on multiple and see how each one feels, then stick to the one you like most. Instances with application process tend to have a bit more curated user bases and that's reflected in conversations where they participate. You could try lemmy.world, Beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, or any other instance.
Don't worry about it, sh.itjust.works is a popular instance and Beehaw just want to do their own thing. Unless there's a specific community hosted on Beehaw that you really want to be a part of you probably won't notice, as most popular subjects have communities on other servers.
Shitjustworks was defederated from Beehaw, if you absolutely want to be able to post on Beehaw, you'll have to create an account there, otherwise you should have access to every other instances federated to shitjustworks
Also - fwiw - they are likely to refederate in the future. I subscribe to beehaw communities, cuz we can still see them, just can't talk to them.
For instances that are mostly for discussion, its pretty pointless to stay subscribed.
Unless you're ok lurking and just reading. I used to rarely contribute to ask reddit, but I would read a ton of those threads
You can still communicate with other people from your own instance.
I guess we will just have to take their word on that refederation thing
As a member of Beehaw I haven't seen any reason not to trust them so far. They've been transparent about why it was done and they've spoken with other instance admins.
Think we have to be conscious that this is all still at an early stage and generally it's wise to give people the benefit of the doubt at first. I get the cynicism but this isn't a privatised space- people across lemmy have been constructive and open so far, so maybe give them a chance?
Both teams of admins have been openly posting about the discissions they've had with each other too. There isnt any hostility or underlying motives behind the situation at all. They are genuinely open and honest about things and definitely looking to refederate once it makes sense again to do so.
It might seem like there is some drama here but there really isn't any at all.
They've already been talking to the admins of those instances, they did it because there weren't better options like in Mastodon, remember that Lemmy is still Alpha software
Yeah I don't see any issue with having conversations with each other even if the beehaw folks never see it
is there a list of beehaw community? how do I know which community is from beehaw?
this is a bit confusing but I will prevail
The community name will be !something@beehaw
I disagree with this. A more nuanced take is that you should consider any beehaw communities read only unless refederation happens. The defederation was not out of ill will, it was about self preservation in a growing ecosystem and the reasons were clearly communicated and a path to refederation was left open. Read only posts are still valuable, and even though there is a more complex mechanism at play than true "read only" understanding that you can view is better than just blocking them in reverse. We are all friends here, and I think in the long run refederation will happen as this platform matures.
I’m basically a read only user anyway so hah!
I'm starting to realize that maybe I should learn to lurk. If I lurked in reddit I would have had a better experience.
Lurking with occasional comments in areas that interest you is best, I find. Oh and ignoring anyone who comes off as a troll or clown
Yeah I would agree with this. It's good to know for anyone new coming in but should be taken in good faith unless and until a reason crops up to change that. Not seen anything like that so far.
It would be nice if Lemmy let you know if you were browsing a thread from a defederated instance. Like a flair in the title or something, So you can read but you know your comment will only be seen by users on your instance.
Can we actually see the posts from people at Beehaw?
I was subbed to some communities from before defederation. I also have a accounts at a few instances for discovery.
@SteelBeard@lemmy.world , you should add a link to the announcement which explains why Beehaw defederated since this looks to be the top question many are asking.
Can you help me understand exactly how this will affect me? I actually have accounts on both lemmy.world and beehaw.org (I signed up for both when I initially found Lemmy and was trying to figure the whole thing out).
If I'm on my lemmy.world account, will I no longer be able to browse beehaw communities? On the flip side, if I'm on my beehaw.org account, will I no longer be able to browse lemmy.world communities?
Am I understanding things correctly? If that's the case, then is the only solution to flip back and forth between the two accounts depending on which server the community I'm wanting to browse is on?
If you get an account on an instant that isn't involved in this mess like FMHY you can browse both without any issue.
This was my thinking.
Is there an easy way to check if anyone has defederated from your instance?
I might have to go here. I'm already tired of defederation and its histrionic champions.
Basically. You can browse them with the opposite account but you can't interact.
So it's like getting banned from a subreddit, except you can't even browse with the same account after being banned?
Yes browse. No post.
I don’t understand: did something serious happened, or it’s them overreacting?
It's just down to Lemmy not having good enough mod tools yet. Beehaw is a carefully curated walled garden instance that hosts some high quality communities; they are availing themselves of the only real tool they have to curb an influx of bad actors from other instances.
Here's hoping its temporary. The admin team here at sh.itjust.works clearly operates in good faith.
They have stated as much, and are open to refederating once the mod tools can handle the influx of people joining instances with open sign-ups. Side effect of the reddit refugee crisis.
They defederated because they were both large Lemmy instances with zero review process for joining users, and they'd rapidly starting acquiring bots and bad actors. Because of federation, these accounts could interact on Beehaw's server like they were locals.
Beehaw on the other hand, has a human-powered review process for signup. It isn't strict, but it keeps out bots or low-effort users. Beehaw's community goal means that reducing the amount of bots, bad actors, and low-effort users on the platform is a priority for them. Their moderating is also human-powered, and very involved - not outright banning/blocking. They reach out to users to discuss their content's intent, and issue warnings/requests personally as needed.
That level of moderation is fantastic for fostering community and is compassionate for ignorance and error; but it isn't scalable when being hammered by bots and an influx of new accounts. Beehaw's only protection from instances that shelter bots and bad actors was to defederate from them until those instances were able to address them somehow.
The Beehaw admins have reached out to the admins of the other instances; their hope is to find a solution that reduces the amount of bots and spam accounts creating on .world and .works. They don't want defederation to be a permanent solution, it's just the only feasible one they had.
There sign up process was nearly successful in putting me off from ever trying Lemmy. I almost gave up finding instances which would let me join without filling in a completely stupid form where I have to state what communities I will join when I haven't even had a chance to get to know what communities are out there!!.
Is there a page where we can see which instances are ban-crazy and which ones actually federate and communicate?
It's not exactly what you're looking for, but still: https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ (might be slow to load).
That would be awesome
At this point it's too early to tell how well moderation can work in the long term. I'd rather they take it slow than burn out.
Same for any expectations regarding lemmy itself.
I reckon this will hurt Lemmy in the long run
Not if @whenigrowup356@lemmy.world is correct.
this is completely reasonable, they own the instance and should be able to do whatever they want with it.
OP didn't say it was wrong. Just a tip.
Newbie here. Is there an easy way to identify a beehaw community? I've been hitting the subscribe button left and right to build up my profile feed and I'm just winging it here. thanx!
The community name will end in “@beehaw”.
If you go to the community search bar and search for say, “gaming” you’ll get multiple results. The one that’s just “gaming” is your home instance, any with an “@instancename” behind them are from elsewhere.
okay, that makes it easy. Thanx for replying!
If you are using an app remember to turn on the option to see instance names right next to the poster's username.
Also their icons are pretty recognizable, I think they are all yellow honeycombs.
Anyone knows why this happened ? Hope admins dont ruin Lemmy for everyone.
When there was an influx of users during the Reddit blackout, they said that they were getting lots of trolls and they couldn't keep up with the moderation. Lemmy.world and Sh.itjust.works had the most traffic and were letting people sign up without vetting so the Beehaw admins decided to defederate those communities.
Making it harder for people to sign up and interact with each other, during the most important week of the platform's existence, I hope they didn't take that lightly
So I don't understand your mentality here. What do the people hosting servers as a hobby owe former R3dd!t users to make their migration easier??? Seems entitled to think people who are literally paying out of their own pockets right now for people like us to talk to each other owe us even more. Geez.
That's a hard action. Hopefully its temporary.
Beehaw has plans to refederate with sh.itjust.works, but no word in lemmy.world.
But since sh.itjust.works is federated with lemmy.world, if beehaw refederate with sh.itjust.works then lemmy world users will be able to interact with beehaw, (via sh.itjust.works) correct?
No, nothing would change in regard to lemmy.world until they refederate with it as well.
But since sh.itjust.works is federated with lemmy.world, if beehaw refederate with sh.itjust.works then lemmy world users will be able to interact with beehaw, (via sh.itjust.works) correct?
No, it's not transitive, it's like lemmy.world is blacklisted.
No, Beehaw it's already Federated with a lot of other instances that are Federated with lemmy.World.
Yep, they said they intend to federate again once they have access to better tools to help with the bots and stuff. Hopefully with the new influx of tons of people, that will also mean more people working on tools and apps to improve things.
Thanks
Just a heads up, we love our admins around here, they are great. Beehaw defederated from people because they were afraid of being able to mod everything with the influx of users with limited mod tools available. They will likely refederate eventually. For now I unsubbed from all beehaw communities and dont miss anything. The cool thing is if you do end up on an instance with admins you don't like, there are like 10,000 other instances you can go to.
But the admins here are usually pretty transparent with everything going on. They are just some dude with a server in their closet. Not some cooperation that are making decisions with profit in mind. They are doing it for the community.
Just a heads up, we love our admins around here, they are great. Beehaw defederated from people because they were afraid of being able to mod everything with the influx of users with limited mod tools available. They will likely refederate eventually. For now I unsubbed from all beehaw communities and dont miss anything. The cool thing is if you do end up on an instance with admins you don't like, there are like 10,000 other instances you can go to.
But the admins here are usually pretty transparent with everything going on. They are just some dude with a server in their closet. Not some cooperation that are making decisions with profit in mind. They are doing it for the community.
From what I understand, admins here are literally paying out of pocket AND volunteering their time to host us. Just as when I invite my friends over to my house for a BBQ, if one of them brings a friend that starts shitting in my pool, I tell them to GTFO and probably stop hosting BBQs for a while even though my friends who DIDN'T shit in my pool still end up suffering the consequences.
Thanks, current Fediverse admins!
beehaw's selective defederation announcement
Why?
At the time LW and SJW had few barriers to signing up, so they had a higher rate of spam coming in and the beehaw team said they couldn't keep up with moderating it. No idea if this is still the case, but they remain federated.
SJW is a wild abbreviation
Oh no, are we calling shitjustworks SJW now??
I thought about that while typing it but I thought it was kinda funny so decided to leave it haha
We need to replace dumb acronyms with better ones, anyway.
I wonder if that was intentional on the instance owner's part?
Nah definitely not. I don't know about the owner but there was definitely too much "debate" on whether to defederate from exploding heads for my liking, felt a little too "free speech-y" so I set up on lemmy.world instead
The first post I came across from another instance was on Beehaw. It was very confusing trying to figure out the federation concept with that community being my first visit.
Nice. Its been just 2 days for me using lemmy and im already banned for no reason in an entire server that i do not use just because im in another server. I whana say reddit moment but im getting mixed info into their reasoning. Some say its because they cant mod that much people and just defederated temporarilly while they fix stuff and others say their a radical echochamber that doesnt tolerate any slight deviants. So i dobt know what to believe. If any of ya m8s could enligthen me some more that'l be sweet. Thank you.
Most normal users won't care about any of this because it'll shake itself out quickly as has happened with Mastodon. But if you do care, join up with a smaller server that plays nice with everybody and enjoy the whole fediverse.
this, then :
Selfhosting
Also: multiple accounts.
Also: multiple accounts.
Last I checked, their reason for defederating is to avoid the high influx of new wildcard users from large instances without vetting processes.
As for the radical echo chamber part, I can't say for sure because I didn't actually interact with them but I recall the term they make you agree to apply for an account was somewhat vague, possibly allowing arbitrary bans to enforce an echo chamber.
Disclaimer: pretty new to Lemmy a federation (older than this account though).
From what I gather, defederation is supposed to be a function of this whole system, but intended to cut off whole instances that refuse to moderate or are active cesspools. In saying that, I don’t understand Beehaw cutting off two of the other biggest instances. I know they have a weird mentality over there of no downvotes and saw some odd conversations condemning someone’s political views while admitting to not know the person at all (dafuq?).
It seems to me it would make more sense to block a single community rather than the whole instance.
Maybe they want a walled garden, but as new people come in and want as much content as possible to show that this is a better venue than Reddit, to me they give off the wrong message.
Am I mistaken somehow? Anyone able to enlighten me?
I recommend reading Beehaw’s statement: https://beehaw.org/comment/263590
As it is just text on a screen, I think there are more and less generous ways to read the post. But I think a lack of scalable mod tools (to combat an internet-sized influx of “bad actors”) is a reasonable (and hopefully temporary) rationale for defederation.
Having read this, I get what they’re going for, but also question the venue a bit.
With Lemmy being about federation, it sounds like they want to have a de federated mini Lemmy to themselves where they can decide who is allowed in or not. Not that that is a bad thing, if there’s a demand for it, but I think it’s different than what every other instance is about and maybe would be better as something like a Discord server (or FOSS alternative).
Again just my 2c, I just know I’m looking for a better quality alternative to Reddit, and an isolated instance isn’t my cup of tea.
Eh, I have accounts on both instances. I've appreciated the active moderation on some Beehaw communities - I'd rather discuss LGBTQ issues on Beehaw than other instances, for example. But I also like to see more content elsewhere, so I've got my Lemmy.world account too. It's pretty easy to account hop when using an app. It's reminds me of being a member of multiple hobbyist forums, in a way.
I'm still looking for an app that lets me browse using multiple accounts at once. I'd like to have a feed from Beehaw and Lemmy.World, for example. Defederation won't be a problem if I opt in to moving in and out of their walled garden
You can do dat with liftoff for lemmy. They have and everything "All" Section where all of your logged in instance in the app is combined into one feed.
You can still subscribe to stuff on Beehaw from elsewhere it's just interaction with it is turned off for now. It would be nice if an app had a selector for what account to post/vote as on the fly though.
So the question is it turned off for the blocked instances or is it just not visible to Beehaw. If I make a post from Sh.itjustworks, can someone from Lemmyworld see it? Or can no one see it?
Doing that on Jerboa right now. It's great!
I disagree, they definitely don't want their own mini Lemmy. They want a safe space they are happy with, and defederation the only way they can do that with Lemmy's current mod tools.
Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works make up about 20% of the acitve users in the threadiverse (source). That is a lot, and it sucks, but it's far off from making beehaw an isolated instance.
Imo for now new users should be discouraged from joining Beehaw, lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works, since all the content can be seen from other instances anyways.
Fair point. But I will say as a pretty new comer to Lemmy, it is hard to find an instance that you know will be a good fit.
It's important to remember that federation is just a feature in the end. As an instance administrator, you're absolutely free to choose who to federate with.
I don't see anyone giving Hexbear any shit for not federating with anybody.
People are just salty because they have some of the largest communities.
But they're rightfully salty if Beehaw defederating themselves deprives this platform of a big chunk of content and users, especially during this month
That's the thing. If someone defederates with you, and you wand a community on that instance. Then you are free to make the lost community in your instance. And if re-federation happens, both community can co exist without problems.
Also you can make an account on the instance that defederated. So you still can view the community you want.
Choice is the point of federation.
I think a thing to note is that their community was here and well established well before rexxit. Rexxit put a lot of stress on many instances and their moderation ability, so it makes perfect sense that they might prioritize protecting their established community from abuse over being connected to every instance that intends to be a reddit alternative. There are plenty of instances they remain federated to that share their more careful moderation.
I expect that some time in the future they may reconnect with some more popular instances, as rexxit slows down and modding tools improve.
The nice thing about federation is you can choose to join more or less connected instances depending on what type of moderation you are looking for.
I think it's also important for the this context to understand what beehaw is. They are an instance specifically created to be a more friendly, empathetic community. That made them a bit of a target when the migration started happening, as you might imagine.
Ultimately, they can do whatever they want. I understand that decision might rub some people the wrong way, but in the end it's their community.
Frankly, after seeing the downfall of other reddit alternatives like voat, I think they're justified. Young internet communities seem to be prone to being overrun by trolls and neonazis.
That's not why voat is full of racists. Voats population surges came from racist Reddit communities getting banned. This is the first time there's been a reason for other people to migrate off the site.
That's not to say those racists don't also share the same reason for migrating this time, too.
Thank you for the source
Aren't you only "shadow banned" from users of that instance? Wouldn't folks federated with your instance still see your comments?
Pretty sure that's right.
My understanding is that Lemmy isn’t peer-to-peer, it’s more like hub-and-spoke, relative to the instance that the community is on.
So if users on B and C are interacting with a post on A, then it’s the responsibility of A to be the postman and handle the syncing between A<>B and A<>C; B and C don’t directly talk in this case.
Thus, nobody outside of Lemmyworld sees posts from Lemmyworld, because Beehaw doesn’t accept them, and therefore doesn’t pass them along to the other instances, either.
I recommend reading this post on lemmy.world for a very clear understanding of how the defederation affects these instances: https://lemmy.world/post/149743
This is a bit of a bummer since I'm interested in a lot of the beehaw communities. Should users just make separate accounts to interact with beehaw communities?
If you want to interact with both beehaw and Lemmy.world you need to find an instance that federates with both.
My instance (iusearchlinux.fyi) does, but so does a lot of other instances too.
a lot of the beehaw communities have alternatives in the rest of the lemmyverse. while I can participate in beehaw communities, i personally found it more useful to just block all beehaw communities (so I don't accidentally post there) and participate in the non-beehaw communities so I'm interacting with the majority of the fediverse.
most of the other instances are low-drama and don't have issues with defederating/shadowbanning like beehaw does!
I've tried a couple times to create an account there and been denied.
Yeah lemmy.world has a more open sign up which is a double edged sword. It's good in that it's easier to set up an account and start talking.
But the other side of it is that it's also easier for shitty people to sign up. The kind of people that will say shitty things to the LGBTQ+ communities on beehaw.
So yeah, you might want to consider signing up for an account on an instance that's a little more selective. You'll probably have to write up a few paragraphs introducing yourself, and it might take a little time for it to be reviewed.
I use a separate account for Beehaw but ever since they defederated I haven't seen as much activity on there.
Yes.
Go to beehaw.org/instances to see what instances are blocked and which allowed. I'm on lemmy.fmhy.ml, which I picked because it was a decent sized instance that was still federated by all the big instances. Fingers crossed it stays that way.
Just create an account with an instance that federates with both.
If you don't want to color with your opinion, use a different word than shadowban. They didn't do this with malice as the connotations of that word would imply.
Is there any reason for them defederating?
Beehaw.org is a highly maintained instance with careful moderation and rules for their instance and communities.
The explosion of new users this month has overwhelmed their moderation team with having to keep up with now moderating new huge user bases from large instances like sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world. These instances in particular it seems had lots of bad actors causing issues in their communities.
There are plans for them to re-federate at some point with the advent of new modding tools and updates to Lemmy
That honestly does not sound like the worst way to curb the increase in traffic. It’s understandable for communities to “get their house in order”.
But it does put a damper on the growth of every instance. The second people hear one of the biggest instances has cut off from the other biggest instances, they go "this fediverse thing is just too complicated!" and go to one of the centralized replacements.
"The growth" of the fediverse in general or of any platform in it is not responsibility of one server. The only thing Beehaw admins are responsible for is Beehaw.
If you want Lemmy to grow create your own communities and threads, participate in other people's communities and posts, etc.
there are more than 1000 Lemmy servers, many of whom are open to community creation (something that Beehaw never has been)
Go create content on Lemmy if you want it to grow.
BTW, "growth" is not necessarily a good thing on the fediverse. Growing too much can be the death of a server.
I don't mean to the growth of the fediverse is their responsibility, but I feel it is a problem that will affect them along with everyone else. Trolls are an existential threat to a safe space community, but lack of users is too.
The issue is the the growth could literally kill the underlying servers. Imagine running an instance on a raspberry pi and all the sudden see a hundred thousand users start hitting your server.
If that was Beehaw's issue, I'd be more sympathetic, but it isn't. They are using it as an incredibly crude moderation tool, not because of some technical limitation.
They have defederated as a moderation step, not as a technical step. Large instances with open registrations were the source of several trolls that would spew hate, get banned and then simply re-register.
There is no moderation tool to deal with that aside from limiting sign-ups, which the instances in question were unwilling to do (which I get, because manual approval creates a huge workload).
In order to keep their community as safe as possible, Beehaw defederated, because they prioritise community safety over community reach.
That's the point! That's the whole point! There are no other tools built yet It IS an incredibly crude moderation tool, because the alternatives are being worked on as we speak
The most trolls came from those two instances since they have no criteria to joining and they have so many users, and beehaw prides itself on being a nice, safe space. Lemmy currently doesn't have the moderating tools to empower them to take care of all the new, toxic redditors, but they said they're willing to federate with them when it does, which I'm sure it will eventually.
Read for yourself: https://beehaw.org/post/615042
The post also contains links to updates on the defederation.
I'm already starting to get pretty tired of people in the fediverse saying shit like this:
Having "multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse, if you want it" is the most nightmare user experience sentence I can possibly imagine.
A user does not want multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse with it being unclear when their comments will be shadow banned and not. They want to be able to see a post and go in and comment on it.
Federation is not a feature, it's an implementation detail.
Federation is a feature. If you want to spin up a network of Lemmy instances between universities and ONLY federate with other universities, you could!
Want to spin up a private instance for you and your friends and not federate with anyone? You can do that too!
To me one of the big selling points of federated services is you don't have to be part of the same giant bucket as every other shithead. If you want, you can pick and choose who you federate with.
Beehaw never tried to promote itself as a default instance. It was a toy hobby project started by four friends that through a fluke of where it was listed, had an enormous, unexpected growth spurt.
It's still those four people's server though, and it's totally their prerogative in how they run it. We aren't entitled to it's content, and users don't have to stick around if they don't like the way it's being run.
The fedeverse gives you choice. That means there's well be some servers whose choices you don't agree with.
User experience is not the primary motivator for the development of the Fediverse. The features you dislike are the core features of the Fediverse and are the main reasons it exists.
I disagree simply on the basis that they hope to refederate eventually, and it might be good to already be subbed. But yeah.
I'm sure it will be announced. It will be big lemmy news, hard to miss.
Okay, guess I just won't use it then if they defed from my primary instance. Glad they did this now and not later when they became bigger and more important.
If they're that into making a safe space then fine. Hopefully some other people will also make more free spaces and both of them can exist and everyone can be happy.
I realize that is a highly optimistic outlook to put it mildly. I must remain hopeful to avoid losing my mind, if I haven't already -.-
shrugs It sounds like they'd happily refederate once the right mod tools are available.
Seems like a pretty reasonable request. Hopefully they get the tools they're after and then everyone can be even more connected again!
And this is why the fediverse will never work out - if I gamble wrong and set up shop on an instance that gets in a pissing match with other ones, I either have to make an account elsewhere (and then have to do it again later the next time two instances defederate each other) or live with only seeing some of my subscribed content.
Don't do that. You probably should have multiple accounts on different instances. If you really need a continuous, single identity, post links to all your usernames in each.
This is why the move from Reddit was so difficult for Redditors: because we put all our eggs into Reddit Inc's basket. All our content is under Reddit's control. This analysis can be applied to any centralized social media service. If your instance shits the bed or bans itself from everyone else, you can move somewhere else. You can start your own in the worst case. It's annoying, but at least there is a real path to move on.
We shouldn't be putting our eggs in any one basket. We shouldn't have been doing it before the Fediverse, and we shouldn't be doing it here either. Your social media access should not be dependent on the goodwill of one person or entity. Eventually, that entity will corrupt.
Also, I'm on vlemmy.net. Right now, they haven't defederated from anyone, and I believe we're still not banned from Beehaw or anyone else. If you really want the whole Fediverse (and you probably don't), make an account on vlemmy or one of the top three instances on this page.
Lazy. Don't care if my shit gets fucked. But if you do care if your shit gets fucked, then you shouldn't rely on centralized social media.
this is why i plan to host my own federated instance - no pissing matches can be had, and i can federate with any larger ones that i like/pick up steam.
There are already conversations about Nomadic Identities and what that would look like. Until that is done, I agree with you that there are going to be some issues, such as this. The fact that this is on their radar is very promising.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1571
I'm genuinely curious of a real answer on this as I have the same concerns having registered on InfoSec.pub. Apparently signing up there means I am locked to that community? What happens to my account if they shutter? It's not like I can login using Lemmy.ca as my community.
As cool as this is, it's not fully thought through IMHO. There's a reason centralization tends to occur naturally. We are already seeing that with people in droves showing up on lemmy.world. for that matter who owns the instances? I'm lazy I'll get around to digging more eventually but right now this is a curiousity.
There is a feature request to allow accounts to be transferred to other instances. So that's in the works.
Someone that's not spez.
There's no such thing as a perfect system that shitty people can't fuck up in some way. All that can be done is to mitigate the damage on shitty person can do. So yeah, if the instance you're on gets taken over by assholes, it's going to be a problem. But it will be less of a problem if you're on a centralized system that gets taken over by an asshole.
Case in point: beehaw is an instance that hosts a lot of LGBTQ communities. The influx of new users comes with an influx of new assholes. The kind of assholes that say shitty things to people in the LGBTQ+ community. On a centralized system they'd either have to accept those slurs or move to some other centralized system. But on lemmy, they have the option of temporarily disconnecting from the instances that have had an influx of assholes.
It's a growing pains kind of thing really.Most of the new users aren't assholes, and some of the new users will step up and become mods and the assholes will be removed. But until then, some smaller instances are going to batten down the hatches until the storm passes.
Lemmy offers options like this that a centralized system doesn't have. Does having additional options make a system worse?
This argument is absurd. What happens, right now, if Reddit shuts down? Where can you take your account to access what’s on Reddit?
The fact is federations CAN be set up this way. Lemmy is new and the people providing the service are working to get things functional as fast as possible. Federating authentication is possible. Can you do it right this second? Nope.
Can you do it with Reddit right this second?
“I’m not gonna do this because it doesn’t work the way I think it should.” News flash, Reddit doesn’t work that way either, while you’re not doing it on Reddit…. Lemmy CAN work that way, Reddit… yah good luck.
I get it, mediocrity now is better than improvements later…
I think the logic is more that reddit is not going to close up shop anytime soon. Whereas Dave running a server from his basement genuinely might just shut down any moment. Just because both instances are possible, doesn't mean they're equally likely.
Right up until Twitter shut everything off unless you were logged in and throttled you if you are logged in I’d have agreed with you… YouTube is preventing you from watching YouTube if they decide they can’t advertise at you… The point is, big social media has come up with creative ways to make using their service miserable if not impossible. Even reddit is doing it right? I find your assessment of possible versus likely incomplete at best.
What in an account? It's not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
If it's your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I'm building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn't do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
But I love decentralization, I think it's the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring... But I'm pretty sure I've got it down, I just need sleep.
You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I've got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought "that sounds like a bad idea, let's try it out". You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it'll tell your server to start pulling it in
I've also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
Centralization makes everything way easier, so it's a constant temptation. But we'll get more and more decentralized as time goes on.. I'll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to... This is too important to just let it become just
Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we're asking what we can do to take it further
What in an account? It's not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
If it's your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I'm building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn't do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
But I love decentralization, I think it's the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring... But I'm pretty sure I've got it down, I just need sleep.
You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I've got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought "that sounds like a bad idea, let's try it out". You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it'll tell your server to start pulling it in
I've also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
Centralization makes everything way easier, so it's a constant temptation. But we'll get more and more decentralized as time goes on.. I'll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to... This is too important to just let it become just
Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we're asking what we can do to take it further q
And it's extra shitty because Beehaw has the largest technology community in the fediverse, so if you want to access it you better make sure you're a member of one of their 'blessed' federated friends.
I think it has positives. and the negatives can be adressed with new features like a federated identity . something that could allow you to keep accounts on multiple servers combining subscriptions deduping content and letting you control what user to use to interact.
This splintering of communities can be a drawback, but it can also be a blessing. Instead of having one account where I do all my social media things, I've been categorizing the types of social media I enjoy and creating an account for each category, on the instance that feels closest to that type of media. It's kind of nice because I know exactly what kind of content subscriptions I'm going to see when I switch to each account. It's also nice to be able to comment on things and know that people who look at my history will see comments on similar topics. Someone's opinion on my comments about politics, for example, won't be colored by my recent comments about extraterrestrials in a different community.
There is some risk of being part of a community that might disappear someday, or become something you don't like, but that's a risk present in all social media. As another commenter mentioned, the advantage here is that you can set up your own instance where you can control your own data. It's actually going to be beneficial that a lot of people do this, so that the fediverse as a whole can handle everyone's traffic without operation costs ballooning beyond control for any individual instance.
But a consequence of this is the creation of many small communities about the same topics, spread across many instances. I think we will need to create some method of federating many communities across many instances in a categorical way. For example, if I want to see all communities about cooking across all instances, there would need to be some decentralized method of tagging communities by topic. That way you don't have to decide which community is most representative of what you want to see. And there could be many tags for each community, so if I want to see only videos about only cooking, where only vegan food is shown, there may be a community that ranks high in all those tags.
Instead of subscribing to the community itself, you would just subscribe to the tag, creating a virtual subscription to all the contained communities. You'd be able to see all the communities for your selected topic(s) across the whole lemmyverse. And if you see a community that you think does not belong to something that it's been tagged with, you can unsubscribe it from the tag so it doesn't show in that list for you. If more people do the same, that community would fall in ranking on that tag list until eventually it is taken off. But if people upvote content from that community more than communities higher in the ranking, that community would rise in the tag list.
I'm not sure if others would be interested in a system like this, but in my mind, it is the kind of thing we need to have rich curated content at low cost. Okay, I'm done now.
I don't really like this approach because it's not personally customizable and wouldn't be very straightforward. I'd prefer something similar to multireddits where I can make a collection of similar communities.
I mean, I was on Beehaw when this happened so had to move my account. It took ten minutes to manually copy over all my subscriptions (and I believe there are automated ways to do that now). Hardly the end of the world 🤷♀️
No. This is just a problem that hasn't been solved yet! It will be in time haha.
They basically shadowbanned us because they are lazy... jokes aside, they don't have the manpower to moderate all the bots away. At least that's their reasoning.
laughs in tiny instance
The benefit is nobody bothers to de-federate you so you can subscribe to communities/magazines everywhere, the downside is a relatively barren /all.
That, and you have to search for communities and then subscribe to them manually - my biggest challenge rn
Neither of these are downsides, to me. Curation is key.
I could just log in to BeeHaw...
Or just ignore them and let become less popular and soon enough the important communities will move away or be replaced. I really dislike how many influence communities are in such a one dimensional instance, luckily I have already seen a few of those moving over to .world or elsewhere and I can't wait!
I like to have people with all sorts of backgrounds and opinions in my instance, not just everyone with the same black and white viewpoint!
Yeah, it's a hard balance to follow. Of course you want full, natural diversity of people and opinions in a group. But hateful right wing toxicity is also way overrepresented online, and has to be moderated against if you don't want a niche online platform to turn into 4chan or whatever
Yeah. Beehaw is trying to make an echo chamber and it's best to stray away from that approach.
Yeah, many subreddits were/are getting ridiculous in this area. Silencing people is not the way. I'd rather openly discuss why something that's said was shitty then pretend the person never said it.
This said, astro-turfing is a thing, and that is a downside to low or no moderation...
Yeah that's why defederation is pointless. Its the sticking a stick in your bike spokes meme of the fediverse.
Depends on your use case. Since Beehaw has no open registration, but approves new users, that makes a difference.
If you want a moderated registration process, and people can join you through the backdoor, leaving that door open is like sticking a stick in your bike spokes.
I think in general is quite effective against instances prone to trolls or bots.
If they let you in, sure.
Why have they done that? Has Lemmy World done something? Or are they trying to keep themselves exclusive?
Yeah man beehaw is supposed to be like a safe space for minorities and stuff. It’s been around for a while and is strictly moderated. Once all this Reddit shit calms down and there are better moderation tools on the lemmy side they’ll rejoin - it’s just too much to deal with without the right tools right now Ave they are still working on making the tools.
This Reddit shit sped up a lot of stuff that was already in the works.
Ah ok, thanks for that. That's a shame though, so far what I've seen of Lemmy has been so much less toxic than Reddit, you'd hope it wasn't necessary for them to defederate. However if they feel it is necessary, then fair enough I guess.
Well, by definition you don’t see the crap that moderators are removing, so it’s hard to say how toxic it has truly been from their perspective.
Fair point.
https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Thanks, that's really interesting and a good explanation from them. Appreciate the share.
Ironically, I couldn't initially open the link in my app, probably because the defederation! Got it to open in a browser though.
They're curating a particular community to try to avoid trolls and shitposters and lemmy.world was growing so fast that they didn't have the mods or tools to keep everything in line to their satisfaction on their own instance. Once they're happy with their mod abilities they'll probably refederate.
Since Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had fully opened sign ups with no vetting during the big migration, Beehaw was getting a lot of trolls and spammers coming from those instances. Since Lemmy is kind of new there weren't enough moderation tools for them to fully deal with that with their team so they defederated until those tools exist.
Beads?
Gob's not on board.
I was under the impression that when Beehaw chose to defederate, it only broke the community link. I thought that someone on lemmy.world could still see the local cached versions of posts, and could even continue posting content. However, only lemmy.world users would see the new comments as the local cache isn't pushed back to the Beehaw post.
What I'm still unclear on is if sh.itjust.works users could see lemmy.world posts to a cached Beehaw post. My guess is no, right? If Beehaw was still federated, the Lemmy.world user post would be synced to the Beehaw post, and then this would be synced to the sh.itjust.works local cache. Is there a mesh feature to Lemmy? Where the local cache of sh.itjust.works will sync comments from the local cache of lemmy.world comments to a beehaw post?
Do you have any insight why did they do that?
It was due to their (our) open admission policy.
They wanted a more curated experience, and were concerned that our instances would be full of trolls and bots
Honestly that strikes me as perfectly reasonable of Beehaw.
Maybe a little kneejerk to de-federate preemptively, but given their stated moderation goals I totally get it.
Beehaw has sign up requirements to curate the type of community they are. These other instances do not, allowing anybody.
Since any account can be used for in any instance still federated with the instance they made their account on, Beehaw was upset that their curated community was being interrupted by troves of unregulated members of the large, general servers. The tools for moderating Lemmy are also still in their infancy, so the Beehaw moderators were finding it harder to do their jobs.
So they defederated for the time being.
Communities need ways of adding restrictions to posting. Some reddit communities used stuff like Karma counts to prevent bots from joining or even account ages. Eventually bots and spammers found ways around it such karma farming using reposts or using tools like chatGPT to generate post topics that might trick legitimate posters to upvote..
I don’t know of a foolproof way to prevent all spammers, but some kind of tooling is needed to help moderate communities and filter out obvious spammers and trolls
Yeah, where's !/c/lemmydrama?
Drama only exists when people aren't kind to each other. So, no thanks?
Is there some way to just not see the remnants of communities from defederated instances?
Block them individually. There's no way currently to block an instance as a user.
I don't even think about bees
I blocked peehaw when they first pulled this. They can live in their own little bubble
I mean, that is literally the purpose of fediverse and federation, right? so people can have their own little bubbles and be as connected as they wish?
How to block entire instances?
Instance admins can do it.
You can't. Not unless you run your own instance of Lemmy and defederate them.
Can there atleast be a way to let users outside of beehaw see posts and comments but not participate, rather than completely detaching and leaving a void of content?
Finally a good YSK
This is how you know we left Reddit
If someone from lemmy.world posts to a BeeHaw community right now, I know BeeHaw users won't be able to see the post, but what about other lemmy.world users? What about users from kbin.social or any other instance? If people from other instances can still see the comments that seems like you could still have a conversation, just with a group of people that can't see it. Not sure how it works though, so curious if anyone here knows for sure.
If you're from Lemmy.World and post in a Beehaw.org community then Lemmy.World users will still see your post. But no other instance will. This is because all other instances look to Beehaw to get Beehaw posts. And without Beehaw federation your post never makes it to Beehaw and therefore it never reaches/gets relayed to other instances.
My understanding is that other users on the same home instance would still be able to see each other's content.
What are you talking about? The apps all allow multi login. So why is this an issue?