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Beehaw Support @beehaw.org
alyaza [they/she] @beehaw.org

ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works

hey folks, we'll be quick and to the point with this one:

we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.

we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is--particularly with federation in mind--basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we're being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).

an unfortunate reality we've also found is we just don't have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don't scale well. we have a list of improvements we'd like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible--but we're unanimous in the belief that we can't wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.

aside from/complementary to what's mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:

  • these two instances' open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
  • the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
  • our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
  • and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don't care about what our instance stands for

as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:

There's a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it's not just that, there's a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it's really hard to trust and support who's around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there's more hostility around them. They'll even shut themselves off when there's fake nice behavior around. There's a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it's not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can't even assess that for people who aren't from our instance, so we're walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn't sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.

Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren't open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.

and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it's in effect. but we hope you can understand why we're doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.

this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community's owner, i should add--we just have differing interests here and that's fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we'll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.

thanks for using our site folks.

910 comments

  • Just a heads up so you can try to plan ahead: on Reddit one of the tactics used by those with hateful agendas was to shut down progressive threads by purposely creating drama in that thread to overwhelm the moderators so that they had to lock the thread thus stopping all discussion. Sometimes they did this by being awful and dragging in well meaning users into fights, other times I they’d drop a few “I’m just asking questions” comments focussing on hot-button ideas that they knew would rile up arguments. It was very deliberate tactic and one that I don’t think moderators ever figured out how to deal with effectively, because short of babysitting the thread with their full attention from start to finish there was no way to prevent entire threads from devolving into attacks and arguments.

    The crazy thing was how effectively one or two people with hateful agendas could derail an entire comment section of well meaning people and, by getting the thread locked, shut down the discussion and spread of progressive ideas.

    I bring this up because Beehaw is perhaps uniquely vulnerable to this sort of ‘attack’, and you should expect to see it in the future. By joining other federated instances and using these tactics to stir up drama in Beehaw threads they can, by forcing your hand to defederalize, restrict the access of those other communities to the progressive ideals and ideas posted on Beehaw. The end result is isolating progressive ideas inside our walled garden, while users of the rest of the Lemmy instances start to only see more right-wing extremist views, normalizing them to otherwise everyday people.

    I don’t have a solution to this. But it’s something to be aware of in discussions with the moderators of other instances, that a handful of people with this exact agenda can make their community look bad in order to restrict their users’ access to progressive ideas.

  • Not a beehaw user directly, but I use many beehaw communities.

    I appreciate the forwardness and transparency in this matter. As you've outlined, both in this post and in subsequent comments, this seems to be, rather than a full defederation, a conditional one. I'm totally for that, and I think the ability to do so is one of the key concepts that makes Federation such a useful and powerful tool. Those instances who cannot or do not moderate content that your instance doesn't believe in can simply be removed from the equation.

    I hope to see more of this accountability being held between instances in the future. At the end of the day, our communities are fragmented by nature, and there are times we should remove separate communities explicitly. A good example I can think of is on Mastodon all the instances with CSAM or nazis.

    The Fediverse gives us a greater ability to fine-tune our communities and curate the experience members thereof get to have, as well as what content they can be exposed to. I'm glad to see people taking strong action in favour of their community, and so long as it comes from this perspective, with genuine communication with the community, everything will work out.

    /rant

  • I think this is very disappointing, and exceptionally selfish, to split up some of the largest Lemmy communities while a mass Reddit exodus is ongoing. We should be sticking together and trying to grow the Fediverse as a whole, rather than trying to wall off any one single community at this point. That said, I hope this is the end of this approach, and that smaller instances, particularly ones that support a particular community won’t be pushed aside as well (hello from Lemmy Portugal).

  • This is really hard to process.

    I came to beehaw because it seemed to very welcoming and the fediverse provided freedom which was excellent. It is difficult to process because now users on beehaw are being told "you can be open and welcoming as long as you don't dare integrate your beehaw and lemmy world experience". Hopefully the beehaw staff understand that ultimately, users desire freedom to choose how they want their online experience.

    I can only see this hurting beehaw in the future and hopefully this is a short misstep and not a permanent decision. The only reason that beehaw has seen massive growth is because of the association with lemmy world and other popular instances. This fragmentation will only hurt Lemmy when Reddit was seen as a "one stop shop" for all posts.

  • Completely agree with this decision, and it actually comes as a bit of a relief; I saw a statistically significant number of lemmy.world users who admitted to being denied from Beehaw because they didn't want to "write an essay" or aggressively disagreed with the disabled downvotes (something that I've grown to appreciate).

    I'm expect that the large influx of disruptive users is from the reddit migration, and I'm hopeful that the majority of the users will either adapt to the culture we're trying to build here, or find their own niches in other communities. As you noted in your post, and in my own experience moderating real life groups, allowing a disruptive influence in a safe space can have serious negative effects on group cohesion that can persist for a long time, if it doesn't alter the culture outright.

  • Disappointing to see the largest lemmy instances fracturing so early. But this also confirms my decision to self host my own instance - to avoid this sort of thing.

  • I'm one of those new members of this community. I have been welcomed in and am thankful for being given the benefit of the doubt. And I can appreciate how much work it must be to maintain a safe space for everyone.

    I stopped using reddit, and uninstalled RIF from my devices this last Sunday, and very quickly realized how much time I was putting into doom scrolling and reading discussions that would end up making my blood boil. Shortly after that, I began to feel a sense of freedom, and I realized how much toxicity was on reddit from a new perspective.

    On Tuesday I joined lemmy.world. I was intrigued by the concept of federated software, and was hopeful I could find a community of people there. At first, everything was great (I may have been only noticing the good), and I started to look for specific communities that I might have an active interest in. I also saw a post from beehaw, explaining what they're about. I thought, "That's neat", but I didn't pursue it at the time.

    On Wednesday morning, I started to notice some of the things @alaza is referring to, and it was disheartening. I tried to ignore them, but once they were noticed, they couldn't be unnoticed. I asked to join beehaw that same afternoon, and was accepted shortly thereafter. I look forward to growing with this community. And am grateful that one with these goals exist.

    I'll bet defederating was a tough decision, and one that wasn't taken lightly. Having moved from one network to the next, only to find the same toxicity I was running away from in such a short time, I am thankful that careful decisions like these were made when necessary to preserve the spirit of acceptance and a safe space for everyone. I hope, as this software matures, that we can begin growing more than sheltering, but I can see how both will be necessary at times for our community itself to grow and thrive.

    PS: I'll inevitably use the wrong terms (community, instance, federated...). I've got a sliver of a grasp when to use each one. I'll be cheerfully learning more about it going forward.

  • I'm in support of temporary defederation, if just to hold out until better tools come around to moderate things coming from outside Beehaw.

    I've visited Lemmy.world and there are people there mocking other instances for having a tighter registration policy and not having an open registration. They say we are gatekeeping. But even if we try to explain, I think they wouldn't understand what the reasons are.

    Frankly, they are chaotic there. I will be eager to watch the developments in the coming weeks.

    • Yeah, I browsed the thread about the defederation on lemmy.world, and I get the same vibe that you do from it. A couple folks who seemed to get where we're coming from commented, but pretty universally their comment responses just demonstrated a total lack of ability to imagine that anyone might want something other than the maximalist experience of the fediverse. By and large they don't seem to understand what were trying to do here, which I guess reenforces that defederation was the right move for now.

  • I definitely do find this a little disappointing as I think the Lemmy community is too small at the moment to create unnecessary divides and schisms. Success in my mind is predicated on many communities from Reddit coming to servers and forming a common denominator community that achieves critical mass.

    It’s clear to me that some of the communities on the 2 you are defederating from you instance have become more popular and are already the defacto “place to be” for certain subreddits.

    All that said, I’m happy that my main server (infosec.pub) has not unfederated from those 2 instances so I am able to still participate on those 2 servers AND interact here on my “main” account. This lets me get the best of both worlds. It’s very exciting to see the Lemmy model working in that regard!

    • There are various definitions of “success”. One instance’s definition may well be “replace Reddit”, and another’s might be “create a welcoming community where users feel safe”.

    • It isn't really unnecessary - as mentioned in the post, this is for the very explicit purpose of making Beehaw easier to moderate so that it can stay closer to its intended vision, and these two instances' explosive growth is what made moderating incoming traffic from them so difficult.

      In any case, the goal is here is not necessarily continuous growth, to revolutionize social media, or to replace Reddit - it is to build an intentional community which users find nice and inviting to participate in. Besides, there are still other vectors external to Beehaw through which one might interact with this pocket of the Lemmyverse. Like you said, you'll still be able to interact from other places like infosec.pub.

  • Firstly, I want to say I appreciate your dedication to creating a well moderated and maintained community.

    However, I feel like this is an overall bad decision.

    Essentially what I'm thinking is, how is this sustainable?

    The amount of control that youre trying to achieve here is going to create an increasingly small and insular community. Also, there is a serious risk of burn out on the moderation end if you're attempting to currate this much, the more this server grows the harder this is going to be to maintain.

    With the type of platform that this is, we're going to have a wide variety of people. A lot of them are just going to be bad people. Simply defederating won't fix this, and it will also be a problem here even with manually approved sign ups.

    If people want to, they will just lie to get in. Essentially your system right now relies on people not lying to you when they sign up. A targeted harassment campaign could easily overcome that.

    What's next? Are we going to deferate kbin.social and mastodon.social? Why don't we just defederate every instance? Even the biggest social media platforms have a seriously hard time moderating content they actually don't want on their platform. You can literally find porn on Youtube.

    Tipping your hand on the scales this much is really stressful for a small team, and often doesn't lead to the outcomes that you thought you wanted. I hope in the near future you refederate, but I understand if you don't.

    • Just want to point out, in early Mastodon days - People did defederate from mastodon.social because the moderation tools were not good enough.

      With time and with better moderation tools, we believe we will refederate.

    • I think you've got valid concerns here, and while it doesn't completely address them I think it's worth keeping in mind that Beehaw isn't here to be the next reddit, and growth for the sake of growth isn't the goal of this instance. Having a smaller scope and a more tightly knit community here is probably actually desirable, in the long run. Also, I don't think there's too much concern about people making fake applications to get in, as that's a much higher effort (and thus lower volume) vector of attack for bad actors.

      With respect to sustainability, we'll hopefully get better moderation tools in the (near) future to solve these problems in a way besides total defederation, but at the moment lemmy doesn't support that kind of granularity. As better tools become available, refederation is not off the table.

    • As someone who used to moderate default communities on Reddit, I can see how you can reach this conclusion. I agree with many of your points in that it isn't possible to completely block attack vectors, but I don't agree with the idea that we need to interact with a lot of "bad" people. I think the feeling that we need to interact with a lot of "bad" people comes from so much experience with bad platforms and the cultures that originate from these places. I think it's also important to note that we are not here for growth at all costs. We do not intend to be at the scale of YouTube or anywhere close. In the end our experiment may be a failure, but I'd rather try something new than give up before I even try.

    • In my opinion this might have a bad effect too, trolls will see this as a reaction, a reaction that they maybe were looking for.
      Beehaw is showing that trolls have a huge effect in its mods, making them go out of their way to troll more.

    • Agreed. This won't stop any bad actors from simply creating accounts here, and will only potentially stop otherwise good people from participating.

  • I love Beehaw. It was the first general instance that was suggested all over the place, even the top on join-lemmy.org for a long time. I respect what you're doing, and that's why I joined. I like the local communities and cohesiveness. And I know it's just a few instances right now (pending revisits), but I'm worried that might increase. That, and DotWorld is growing quickly and has a lot of the 1:1 communities popping up to match beloved subreddits.

    It hasn't made me rethink being a Beehaw member at all, because I do respect the ethos and understand, but it also means I have to make another account to feel like I can truly interact fully across the Fediverse. But between my Beehaw account, my kbin I've decided to leave within the kbin verse for the moment, making a new one will mean 3 accounts I've got to keep up with (really 4 with the NSFW-only one). It's not difficult to do, especially toggling between them in Jerboa, but it kind of defeats the bigger purpose and unification. Just a ramble to vent. Like I said, I get it. Hope everyone has a good rest of their day.

  • New users: "I'm tired of Reddit telling me what I can't see! Top-down decision-making is ridiculous! I'm going to check out Lemmy!"

    Beehaw: "Hold my beer and watch this."

    • This is a false dilemma. With reddit you had no choice but to accept the top-down decision. With federation you are free to take your activity and traffic elsewhere. If you don't approve of the decision being made here you're not beholden to this community and the choices of its administration.

  • How ironic! I had just subscribed to several communities on those instances this evening. Go figure. I guess I should reproduce my community subscriptions over on kbin. But wait, does this mean I can't even SEE that I subscribed to those communities here?

    • But wait, does this mean I can’t even SEE that I subscribed to those communities here?

      yeah it sucks. the ideal here for us would be an intermediary step of some kind between total defederation and federation that does something like let Beehaw users go out, but doesn't let lemmy.world users come in, but that's far off if it's even possible

    • Same. I just got here and already I'm seeing obstacles. That doesn't give me warm, fuzzy feelings.

      • I'm hoping that kbin won't pull the trigger. And that eventually this will be worked out. And also that eventually there will be some way to cross-connect accounts across the Fediverse, so I can (for example) share my community subscriptions across all my accounts...or whichever accounts I want, anyway.

  • This is disappointing considering how popular some of the beehaw communities are (for instance beehaw.org/c/gaming) and now they have been completely ostracized from part of the lemmy community. Or at least the fastest growing part. (mostly because they have open registration). Personally I think this will only hurt the platform as a whole and fragment further, what is by nature, an already fragmented community.

    I get why it is being done though. Especially with there being no verification for those servers. They become easy ways to make troll accounts.

    Lemmy needs better federated mod tools to say the least (or so it appears to be). There has to be a better way to do this.

  • I’m glad to see you telling us and coming forward on this, and that these steps are being taken. Lemmy is a small project, so expecting it to have robust mod tools isn’t realistic. Former Redditors here probably know that some subs have closed indefinitely simply because without good third party mod tools they’ll be near impossible to run safely.

    Everything does feel quite new and volatile on this side of the Fediverse. The Mastodon instance I use has a very long list of blocked instances, especially since it’s aimed at LGBTQ+ users. There’s some messed up people out there, and I appreciate the action on the part of the admins. Just slapping a “safe space” sticker on something does not automatically make it one, and it makes me feel really good to be on an instance that understands that.

  • I understand, and appreciate the move.

    My very first post on lemmy.world was raided by trolls from an alt-right instance(?). It was not a good experience, and a big reason why I immediately migrated here to beehaw.

  • I respect your decision, and the transparency behind your thought processes. Beehaw’s stated values, and the culture that you have grown and maintained were what led me to choose it initially. I’ve enjoyed reading and interacting with the people and content here, and the extra thought and effort that goes into typical posts compared to other similar servers.

    I hope you’re able to find people you can trust to share the administrative burden, that improved moderation tools are not far off, and that this decision will be earnestly reconsidered in the coming days/weeks as growth from the Reddit Exodus stabilizes.

    I believe the Fedverse as a whole will be a poorer place for being defederated from Beehaw.

    That said, based on this decision I’ve decided to migrate my primary account to a regional instance. I want to continue to participate in and interact with the Beehaw community, but I’d also like the freedom to explore the wider fediverse and find diverse communities for my niche interests and hobbies. I just hope bad actors from my, and other instances don’t cause further defederation and fragmentation.

  • Thanks for working so hard on this community. I’d like to echo so many here when I say I’d prefer a strong, helpful community vs a large low-effort post community. Do what you have to do to keep this instance healthy. Thanks again.

  • This makes sense considering the current state of Lemmy's moderation tooling. I briefly ran an instance with open registrations a while back, and quickly got blocked by other instances. The frustrating thing was that there was no place in Lemmy's UI where I had any visibility in what local users on my instance were doing on other instances. No local activity log, notifications of reports or external moderation actions taken against my users like how mastodon forwards reports to the original server, no way to see what potential abuse users who registered on my instance were engaged in unless they engaged in that behavior locally on my instance, which had remained empty. After realizing how bad the tooling was I just shut it down.

    Hopefully things improve. I am at least more hopeful here because everything is open source, we can take this feedback to the devs and design moderation and abuse prevention tooling together as a community, collaboratively, and hopefully build better moderation tools than reddit ever had.

910 comments