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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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.
- 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
- set up shop on an instance
  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.
  Why don't you have a second account?
  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.
- 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.
  
  Apparently signing up there means I am locked to that community?
  There is a feature request to allow accounts to be transferred to other instances. So that's in the works.
  We are already seeing that with people in droves showing up on lemmy.world. for that matter who owns the instances?
  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
  
  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
- 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.
  
  largest tech community in the fediverse
  TIL. I assumed between lemmy.world, programming.dev, infosec.pub I'd had my tech feed basically covered
- 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 really miss this feature from Reddit is Fun. I'm using Jerboa on Android and I hope it can have an equivalent in the future
  
  With the platform at the size that it is currently, I'm inclined to agree with you. But I think in the future, lemmy may become large enough that having a public tagging system would be useful.
  Ideally, the two preferences can coexist. The multireddit equivalent would just be a private tag, exclusive to your account. But you could make it public, either anonymously or posted to your account, e.g. tag@pyrojoe@lemmy.world.
  Then, all the public tags can be merged at will, so if I make a new account and want to see all communities about birds, I can select the bird tag. If I want to make edits to the tag list without affecting the public tag, I would even have the ability to copy the public tag to my own private tag and prune the communities I don't like without decreasing their public rankings.
  I think this would provide flexible levels of functionality to those who want it, but there may also be hidden consequences of this method that I'm currently missing.
- 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.
- Head back to Reddit the way you came then, friend.
  
  No, discussion is welcome here. Even mine, even yours.

500 comments