1y ago

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

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500 comments

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.
  
  You said yourself that Beehaw is one of the largest communities. They aren't struggling for users, despite stricter rules and de-federation. If you actually read the announcement threads about the de-federation, Beehaw users love it and are very supportive of the decision. The outrage seems to be entirely generated by people who aren't members of that community, so who cares? If you're that unhappy make your own community (or cry) but don't pretend it's the responsibility of Beehaw to pander to non-members.
  And to the overall growth concerns, again - who cares? Lemmy doesn't have to be a 1:1 reddit replacement. I'd say many of us actually consider it's relatively low user count as a positive.
  
  You said yourself that Beehaw is one of the largest communities. They aren’t struggling for users, despite stricter rules and de-federation.
  The pond is very small; prior to last month it was a puddle. That bar isn't exactly high. Beehaw definitely aren't seeing the growth that .world is today (there's been a 40% increase in users here today alone), and I don't doubt a large portion of that is that fewer people are directing users their way due to the defederation.
  Beehaw users love it and are very supportive of the decision. The outrage seems to be entirely generated by people who aren’t members of that community
  I'm not sure we are reading the same Beehaw defederation post. The top comments on the post that got linked earlier in this thread are all native Beehaw accounts either expressing frustration or saying they will leave for other instances. Judging by the replies they aren't in the majority, but it is still a large portion of them.
  EDIT: my understanding of the Lemmy UI was flawed and I was wrong. The above commenter is correct here.
  but don’t pretend it’s the responsibility of Beehaw to pander to non-members.
  I'm not pretending its their responsibility. Its not. They don't owe anyone anything. I can still call them out for what I perceive as shooting themselves in the foot. Explain their motivations all you want, I understand what the Beehaw admins are trying to say, but I disagree with them and personally think this will have a longer-term negative effect on their platform than the trolls will.
  
  The top comments on the post that got linked earlier in this thread are all native Beehaw accounts
  No they're not. There is literally only one top level Beehaw comment in that thread and it's only mildly critical (along the lines of "I understand but this isn't the community for me"). Every other top level comment is from an external user, particularly the negative ones.
  Why are you lying?
  
  I apologize, you are correct; I assumed every account displayed as "[name]@[instance]" if it wasn't native to that instance, and that every account that was just "[name]" was a native one, but it seems like some (mainly kbin.social?) accounts don't do that.
  
  I don't know why that's the case. For whatever reason that thread had a lot of kbin people in it, but earlier threads in relation to de-federation had more Beehaw natives and they were generally very supportive of the decision.
  
  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.
- They want an echo chamber
  
  I thought it was because they lacked the ability to effectively moderate.
  
  That's correct.
  Moderator tools on Lemmy are still super, super basic when compared to Reddit's. There's a fair bit of work to be done yet.
  
  To some people having any moderation beyond "just block the trolls yourself lmao" means creating an echo chamber.
  
  That is the direct reason, yes, but the larger problem is that without effective moderation they are unable to curate the type of community they want. "Safe space" is a loaded term, but if you actually read Beehaw's documents (particularly the 'spirit of the rules' one) it is quite clear that they are attempting to create an online community where people feel safe and can be themselves free from attack and/or ridicule. The de-federation is because they are unable to deliver on this "safe space" promise at the moment. In my opinion that's absolutely fine and they should be praised for taking quick and decisive action to protect their community. It doesn't need to be some controversial thing that people attempt PR spin over. Just call it what it is. If people have a problem with it, unlucky.
  
  Which effectively creates an echo chamber, be it good or bad
  
  If the echo chamber I’m a part of prevents nazi and fascist ideology from becoming normal than I’m all for it.
  
  Excuse me if you misunderstood my initial comment but it doesn't argue against your statement at all. Again, a good or a bad one, an echo chamber is an echo chamber
  
  Oh, gardens can have diversity without being an echo chamber. As they said they don’t see another way to stop those people who like to shit in carefully created gardens.
  Nobody likes shit in their garden.
  
  Nobody likes shit in their garden
  The flowers do.
  (I'll just show myself out).
  
  If they wanted an echo chamber they would have defederated from all other instances.
  I'm sure they have a reason,whether it's the correct decision is another matter.
  
  To be fair, they are pretty highly defederated compared to most instances.
  
  it's just because the mod tools aren't where they need to be yet and beehaw does a lot of work to protect minorities. the mods weren't really happy with having to defederate and they plan on refederating once the tools are better or we get settled in
  
  And this is exactly why they have to defederate. People like you exists.
  
  He says, in an instance that banned downvotes.
  
  ...but he has 62 downvotes?
  
  He can't see them
  
  I mean---maybe? That wouldn't necessarily be malicious, but I think it's fair and appropriate to apply a healthy amount of skepticism and suspicion to their purported goals and reasoning. Beehaw is a self-proclaimed "safe space", and unfortunately that term has become a kind of dog whistle for militant identity politics.
  Particularly in instances, like this one, when thinly veiled patronizing is wielded to preemptively paint a large group of strangers with a very broad brush in the purported aim of protecting marginalized persons from "malicious" outsiders, my cynicism radar tends to beep very loudly. It may well in fact be true that the current suite of mod tools makes beehaw's managers powerless against an overwhelming tide of new traffic, but that wouldn't automatically rule out competitive motives.
  Federated or not, Lemmy represents an opportunity for wealth for whoever is best positioned if it ends up being a successor to Reddit, and what we're going to see is a round of jockeying and vying for position in the coming (ongoing) chaos. I'll admit that like many of us I'm very new to this platform, but the fact that defederation is possible at all leads me to believe that less scrupulous individuals in positions of ownership could with only small effort leverage it to enlarge their influence at the expense of competing servers.
  Maybe I'm dead wrong on a technical level; maybe I'm full of shit--I'll admit I basically don't know what I'm talking about except in the broadest possible terms, so somebody please correct me if I'm wrong--but I wonder if this isn't so much about creating an echo chamber as incentivizing people who identify with beehaw's stated ideology to come under its umbrella (with supposed protections for hate speech), and defederation is just a way to force people to make the same kind of unhappy, unnecessary choices many of us just made with Reddit.
  EDIT: I really can't thank y'all enough for this. It feels like I'm right back on Reddit. From the accusations that I must be a secret conservative because I dared to question motives to the folks unable to actually engage in discourse without manufactured disdain, it's like nothing has changed at all.
  Maybe beehaw doesn't have an axe to grind, but somebody sure does.
  
  My god, this post was unnecessarily long. I think they just don't weirdos posting dick pics and bombarding it with questionable content. Not everything is a culture war.
  
  I’m voting for full of shit based on the dotted line you drew between any safe space and militantism.
  
  Okay. To be clear, I wouldn't automatically assume anybody who wants to be free from hate speech has bad intentions, but I also think it's fair to be critical of any effort to stifle dissenting opinion--even uncomfortable opinion--with the justification that the censorship is to a third party's benefit, and it's immaterial whether the third party is children, a historically disadvantaged group, or any other class. That is, I don't say all this to accuse beehaw of ulterior motives--but I also wouldn't put it past anybody, and skepticism is appropriate (like always). More and more frequently, "safe space" really just means: We want an echo chamber, but it's okay because we know best. That's a red flag.
  
  When it comes to racism, sexism, and transphobia, the “dissenting opinions” are things like “you do not exist” and “you are sub human” and “you do not deserve rights.”
  You’re fooling yourself if you think that not tolerating hate == stifling dissenting opinion. How should one stand up for human rights? Moderately? Or militantly?
  Sounds like you’ve bought the old conservative line of bullshit on all this. “Oh they don’t permit sexism? We should be highly skeptical of this!! What about freedom of speech??”
  Le sigh
  
  The problem with defederation is the same problem with the position you're taking, that it conflates all opinion with whatever worst thing you can imagine, enabling you to insist that because some people are awful, everyone who doesn't agree with the proposition is (or in beehaw's case, everyone who doesn't join their walled garden). This isn't a case of "they don't permit sexism." They didn't permit sexism when they were still federated. Defederation is an extra step--they want you to use their server or otherwise not participate in their communities at all, and the explanation for why is that the people on lemmy.world are sexist. Maybe they're authentically overwhelmed, and it's certainly their prerogative, but one would be wise to examine their stated basis more critically, because heavy handed owners of platform infrastructure is why Lemmy is in this position in the first place.
  
  Now you’re just not reading. Look at this thread. It’s been clearly shown and stated publicly that they are simply overwhelmed by the explosive growth coming at them from instances like lemmy.world that have added millions of members overnight. They have a more intentionally managed community with high standards and hands on moderators and they cannot right now handle the sudden explosive volume. They are trying to scale up and their desire and intention is to refederate. Meanwhile you have spun up all kinds of tales in your head about how they want to control speech or ban it because of their militant identity politics. You’re making all of that up, when the actual explanations are right there in public for you to read. Try gathering more information and forming fewer judgments based on your internal biases.
  
  I simply adore it when the right tries to use the vocabulary of the left and only outs itself!

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