sh.itjust.works Main Community @sh.itjust.works

2y ago

Beehaw defederating update - sh.itjust.works

Like many of you, I woke up this morning to discover that our instance, along with lemmy.world, had been unexpectedly added to the beehaw block list. Although this development initially caught me off guard, the administrators at beehaw made an announcement shedding light on their decision.

The primary concern raised was our instance's policy of open registration. Given my belief that the fediverse is still navigating its early stages, I believe that for it to mature, gain traction, and encourage adoption, it is crucial for instances to offer an uncomplicated and direct route for newcomers to join and participate. This was one of the reason I decided to launch this instance. However, I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls. Despite these hurdles, I maintain the conviction that our collective strength as a community can overcome these issues.

After this happened, the beehaw admins and I had a good chat about their decision. While our stances on registration policies might diverge, we realized that our ultimate goals are aligned: we both strive to foster communities that thrive in an atmosphere of safety and respect, where users can passionately engage in discussions and feel a sense of belonging.

Although the probability of an immediate reversal are slim given the current circumstances, I believe we have managed to identify common ground. It's evident that, even in separation, we can unite to contribute positively to the broader fediverse community.

In the coming weeks or months, we plan to collaborate with other lemmy instance administrators to suggest enhancements and modifications to the lemmy project. Primarily, our proposals will concentrate on devising tools and features that empower us, as instance administrators, to moderate our platforms effectively.

In the meantime, while I understand may not be ideal for everyone, users who choose to participate on the beehaw instance will be required to register a separate account on their instance.

Thank you all for continuing to make this community great!

67 comments

I'd just like to say that I appreciate your stance on open registration and making things as uncomplicated as possible. I signed up for a Beehaw account before this even happened, but I did find having to explain myself and justify my presence a little confusing. I also signed up for a discuss.tchncs.de account and I was so confused and thought their website was broken because once I clicked sign up, it didn't do anything. Just span around in a circle. It wasn't until I checked my email that I realised it wanted me to confirm my email. Here, things did just work. No complications, just entered my name, email and password, clicked sign up, and I was done! I guess you could say... shit just works on sh.itjust.works

Brief explanation of how defederation works.
Basically Beehaw and all its communities and users are now blocking everyone from this server. We can't post to their communities and they can't see anything that we post on third party communities either.
However, this server has not defederated Beehaw. Therefore, we can still see their users commenting on third party communities, and we can even reply to them, they just won't see our reply, although neutral parties will.
Both Beehaw and sh.itjust.works are still able to contribute significant activity to Lemmy as a whole, just not directly to each other for now. Let's all be diligent on reporting and banning trolls quickly so we can maintain the collegial atmosphere here.
- What I don't understand is why we can't see me posts and comments read only on Beehaw. I can see it by going to their (public) website, why can't I see it from here?

That's a bummer. I get it (somewhat), but I'm not really fan of that type of gatekeeping by beehaw. On the positive side, it makes me really appreciate this instance/community and makes me want to interact more on here instead. So I'm looking forward to that.
- Yeah. They value heavy moderation as a way to sanitize their community. Fine if that's what they want but this has quickly taught me that instance isn't for me. Too authoritarian in my view.
  I'm impressed with how The Dude seems to be handling things here.
- I'm not really seeing it as gatekeeping. It's a small mod team that woke up this week to a big chunk of reddit knocking on the door.
  It strikes me as reasonable to want to pause for a minute and see what the actual new user numbers will look like on the other side of the blackout.
  
  That is understandable. But there is also the other side: When people joined Beehaw, it was under the assumption that they would be joining the lemmy community, the fediverse. Now, they unilaterally decided to silo themselves, without polling their users, without giving any heads up and without requesting more moderators... Lets not kid ourselves, we need users, the more the better. Sure, we do not need the alt-righters and the nazis and all, but we need users. We need more content in the communities. Beehaw had a significant user base, the third biggest in the Lemmy-verse I think. They just decided to block the biggest (lemmy.world). That essentially broke the userbase in 2. That is a disservice to the whole "unreddit" movement. Absolutely pathetic in my view.
  I honestly hope Beehaw users leave Beehaw and join us in Lemmy (as in community, not software). I would also agree with removing Beehaw from join-lemmy. They are using Lemmy software, but they are not really using the Lemmy community. At the very least, there should be a notice regarding that in join-lemmy.
  
  I hear ya. I don't know the first thing about what goes into running a big instance like that, so I'm willing to keep an open mind. But I really like this instance for its open approach. It fits with my understanding of how the fediverse would work, especially when some of the bigger instances were (at least initially) encouraging people to not all sign up on the same instance to balance the load of new users. By defederating, it kind of negates that aspect. People are going to need to sign up on multiple instances or just go straight to the big ones to ensure access to those communities.
  But with everything being so new, I get it. It'll be interesting to see how things evolve as the fediverse grows/ages. I do hope the block list gets reconsidered soon enough though.

Anyone else noticing that the only people getting pissy about this instance being defederated from beehaw due to trolls....
...Aren't even from from this instance?
Just asshats from exploding heads feeling the need to come defend their right to be dicks.
- I've been on the Fediverse since around 2015-2016 (don't remember if it was just before or just after I went back to school). It seems like a lot of the newbies here don't understand what the Fediverse is for and about. There's a lot of anger and hate that the Fediverse is supposed to be free and open and all the instances all federate with each other, and it's just like… No. That's not the point. Why would we even architect ActivityPub to have whitelist and blacklist functionalities if we didn't want server admins to be able to use them? The point of the fediverse is that you own your relationship to your server's moderators, and you pick your server's moderators based on their moderation style.
  Think of it this way. On reddit, the administrators have full power over all communities. Don't like it? You are welcome to have no avenues to participate in any of the discussions. On the fediverse every server has a team that has full power of that small section of the internet. Don't like how they federate? Pick a different instance that better matches how you would like to interact with the fediverse. If you're angry that Beehaw is doing this, it just means Beehaw isn't a good fediverse home for you. You can just... Not go to beehaw for your fediverse needs. Do you like it here, but still want to see posts from Beehaw? Maybe an instance that federates with both is right for you. Because if you like what's on beehaw, to some extent, you are enjoying the community that is there because they like how things are run there. There is an extent to which you have common ground with those moderators. An instance that federates both there and here is saying "We like what both of these moderation teams are about."
  Here's another way to think of it. Let's think about the internet as being the world. The Fediverse is one country in the world. Each project is like a city. You pick which city you want to live in based on what's going on in your life and how you want to go about things. Here in the Lemmy city (which is very near the KBin city. Think New York and Newark), every instance represents a house with a garden. When you move into the Lemmy, when you pick your instance you move into a house where your profile lives, and then you go hang out in the communities in the back garden. Who your administrators choose to let into the garden is just them creating the atmosphere they want for their garden party. And almost every Lemmy garden has defederated from someone. Almost every server has set up rules about what it takes to walk through the back gate to come kick it in the back garden. The largest instance with a fully open door policy is lemm.ee, not lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. They're the 3rd largest instance overall.
  All beehaw.org is saying is that our house is very crowded and their bouncer can't keep up with all the people trying to get into their garden party. And it's what makes the fediverse beautiful. That's the point of the fediverse.
  
  I've been on the Fediverse since around 2015-2016 (don't remember if it was just before or just after I went back to school). It seems like a lot of the newbies here don't understand what the Fediverse is for and about.
  These people might lack technical knowledge of how federation works, but they get the ramifications of federation just fine. The fediverse didn't invent federated protocols in 2015, there are some truly large and successful federated networks we can learn lessons from.
  Email is often used as a cultural touchstone to introduce people to the fediverse. You know what a major email provider almost never does? Blackhole customers from another major email provider en masse. They understand that the value of their service is in its interconnectness, and an email address that can communicate with everyone you know is much much more valuable than an email address that can communicate with a confusing subset of people you know. They don't eschew blocklists, which are an essential tool for combatting abuse. But when deploying a block, they consider their own costs and also the costs to the network as a whole. This wasn't always a given, there were many walled gardens before and some tried to operate email that way, they were not successful.
  The internet itself is the most successful federated network in the world. Do you know what a tier 1 isp almost never does? Depeer other tier-1 ISPs in a way that disrupts the global routing table. Again, they don't eschew selective peering, every few years somebody plays chicken with tier 1 peering agreements that could isolate Comcast customers from Netflix or Verizon customers or whatever. But in the end they do consider the costs to the network, and understand that the value of their service is it's ubiquitous interconnectedness. Again, this wasn't always a given. In the early days there were vigorous debates about who got to join the internet.
  ... every instance represents a house with a garden.
  Beehaw has about 13 thousand registered users. At this scale the garden party metaphor looks pretty silly. A much better metaphor is that each fediverse app is a world, and each instance is a nation. Beehaw has a problem with the immigration policies of other nations (registration), and it's enacted drastic trade and travel sanctions as a negotiating lever. As an independent nation, it's entirely within their purview to do this, but as in real life the costs of doing so are high both within Beehaw and beyond.
  The idea of federation/peering as a negotiating lever is always popular when a federated network is young, has poor abuse management tools, and the cost of severely damaging the network is low. But as soon as the network becomes useful enough to matter, the value of interconnectedness dominates all other concerns and people suddenly find other ways to resolve their disagreements.
  So I disagree that people aren't getting federation. They get intuitively that interconnectedness dominates the value equation in networks that matter, and are treating the Lemmyverse like it matters to them. The Beehaw admins are treating it like a toy they can break if it doesn't work the way they want, and in doing so they will ensure that it remains a toy until the network routes around them and makes them irrelevant.
  
  Yeah, that seemed fairly obvious to me and I've only been here for fiveish days. Even in reddit we had subreddits go private to keep their community from getting trolled which seems pretty similar but new refugees for some reason don't understand that.

I really get where they are coming from and it's an unfortunate aspect of things that when you try to be open it can allow for so many negative consequences. However I will say for my own part I tried signing up for beehaw initially and my application was never approved. I am not a bot or a toxic person so I still need a community even if beehaw won't accept my application for reasons I can't understand.
- I've tried joining a few times but it always just hangs. I think there might be something wrong with registration.

Serious question: What is the alternative to open registration? Invite-only? What is the expectation?
Seems a bit kneejerk to defederate, that's employing the nuclear option as the first step. It doesn't leave a lot of room for dialog.
- Manual admin approval for every signup.
  
  Why? What would you even check?
  It's not like you can interview the person and check their ID, etc. - it's just meaningless bureaucracy that stifles growth.
  
  That does not seem sustainable.

Hey @TheDude@sh.itjust.works! I think we may be on the same side of the fence with a lot of this. I just got my server online, but I'm self hosting with a couple old Dell R720xds and R730xds so I've got you matched in the hardware department at least :-)
Hopefully in this for the long haul and want to help collaborate with other communities and contribute to the development as much as I'm able.

I was going to add a lemmy and bluesky node but when I discovered they were only libtard echo chambers like the old Twitter was and anyone with opposing views wasn't welcome, I abandoned those projects because my take is the fediverse is about free speech and free speech has no value if you aren't allowed to disagree.

That announcement from beehaw was how I found and subscribed to this instance lol

I'm happy to see that the first 2 lemmy instances I've joined are run by nice people. Sometimes it feels like there's a shortage of nice, but not today.

Oh, so the person who posted their tiny penis on the feminism community actually admitted to it? Fascinating. They do know their post lasted like two minutes, right? I was more impressed with Beehaw's moderation team acting so fast than I was with their quick shot.
- this happened?
  
  @anthoniix pooky trolled some fiminatzis, beehaw had a midlifechrisis and then unfederated. that's it really. why that took a 5 page magnus opus i don't know.
  @TheDude @magic

Fuck em, I applied to several different servers and it took days to get accepted. Open registration is necessary
- I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls.
  Annnnnnd there it is.
  
  What?
  
  It's almost as if they're getting the result they were looking for. People saying they disagree with their choice are exactly the people they're trying to avoid lol.

I made an account here as a beehaw user and I'm glad that the two mod teams are in discussion. Servers have the right to cordon off their users, but I'd hate to miss out on the content. I feel mixed on the decision, as is represented by my dual accounts.
- I fully support their right to defederate as they did, but I am a little concerned by the chilling effect that sudden removal of large userbases who had been communicating with each other creates. I don't mean specifically in this particular instance because it happened very quickly, but what if the beehaw communities who are large and popular with many users from different instances get disconnected all of a sudden? You'll get a retraction of users, communities and a general distrust of talking to users on other instances because that communication channel you've grown to rely on suddenly just poof disappears effectively on a whim of the instance admins. I do not disagree with Beehaw and what they chose to do. I am just trying to point out that it's dangerous to defederate and should never be taken lightly.

Defederating both sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world was such an asinine decision that I honestly hope Beehaw just dies. They are doing a disservice to the entire lemmy community. They just siloed their users. They did not poll them for that decision. I hope most of their users leave them.
I would also be for removing Beehaw from join-lemmy.org. They are using lemmy software, indeed, but they are not really using the lemmy community, not the most of it at least. Someone who joins Beehaw may notice that the community is significantly smaller than they had hoped and go back to other alternatives, which is obviously a bad outcome. We need users.
- I'm all for them running their instance however they want. It's not what I want and that just means I'll be avoiding them.
- Like OP said, the long term goals of both instances are aligned.
  Federation and defederation are just part of how the fediverse works. Don't think of the fediverse as a reddit-like network that should always stick together and grow as one userbase. Rather, the focus should be on growing smaller communities that put their interests and users first (just like Beehaw did), while exchanging information with other communities where it benefits them both. If one instance doesn't work for a particular user, they can always leave and join another one. That's the beauty of it.
  
  This. We don't all need to be one big happy family... Federated does not mean a single site decentralized. It also doesn't mean isolated.
  There's a million flavors of in between they the fediverse let's us explore, and hopefully instances will rise and fall as we find what builds the best communities. Some will over-moderate, some will be totally unrestricted, some will be safe spaces and echo chambers who carefully manage what users are exposed to, some will vet their users carefully, and most will probably be open to whatever their users ask for
  The goal is that instances become all sorts of different places, and users can freely move if they like somewhere else better

Has there been a problem with bad actors on this server yet? I certainly haven't noticed any.
- There has been an individual who flamed beehaw via our server. It happened fast and while we can moderate what this user does locally, we cannot moderate on other instances... as others have stated, there is not much moderation granularity, yet.
  
  Ohhhhh, that was an interesting nugget of information that I didn't previously understand. Thank you for sharing that.
  So, the only way to keep a bad actor registered in your instance from flaming in another one would be to revoke their account completely, then?
  Other servers probably need to be able to block individual users from posting anywhere on their instance if we don't want to end up as mostly disfederated, isolated servers.

I've made some suggestions on my Lemmy.ml alt in the original defederation announce thread. Taking a look at the API, it should be possible to make a bot that addresses at least some of the concerns.
- This is something I looked at as well and an option. It does require someone to volunteer their time and make the tool. Sounds like a fun project but I'm already stretched pretty thin so it would have to be someone else.

The Beehaw moderator just release an update that is interesting and very good-willed. But I'm confused. I had no problem commenting in Nature and Gardening which is on the Beehaw instance. I thought this wasn't possible as a sh.itjust.works user?
- You can comment there and I probably can see it. They can't because they're not pulling sh.itjust.works data.
  
  That makes sense! Is there a place we can see instances that we defederated, if any? I was trying to find Container Gardening which is in instance "I use arch linux FYI" but haven't had any luck.
- It is possible, but Beehaw users won't see your comment (I may be wrong, this is still a bit complicated for me as well).
  
  In fact, no one outside of your instance will be able to see it, because everyone else's version is in sync with beehaw, which doesn't get your comments.

I know I'm kind of late to this party, but it seems to be a good time to take a moment to say, if no one else has, that there are apps out there like Jerboa, that allow you to keep track of multiple Lemmy accounts quite easily. :)
- Just downloaded Jebora yesterday and I'm really liking it. I initially tried the lemmy.ml website as my first steps into the fediverse, but was sort of confused on how it all linked together. Jebora was a big help for me in finding instances to follow and just generally making my user experience better overall.
  So I second this recommendation.
  
  https://github.com/dessalines/jerboa
  Link for the lazy

I think flexible federation is likely a good thing, and means we can have separate meta-communities with different basic attitudes, so people can be in the kind of spaces they want. My first experience of the fediverse was mastodon, and while the format wasn't really my thing, I loved the amount of individual control it gave users over what they could see.
I wonder if there could be some kind of system to make this simpler, chunkier and less-drama, though.
What if there were:
different individual policies that instances could subscribe to
coalitions based on adoption of specific policy bundles, and allow-lists based on them.
coalition-curated deny-lists of non-compliant instances.
A little bit Schengen area, a little bit NATO.
Ferinstance I can see some instances only wanting to talk to others with curated signup, curated community-creation, no-NSFW, specific political leanings etc - and I can see some instances not wanting those things. Some people may want very safe spaces, others may want in-your-face free speech. Both are reasonable (imho), and there's no reason both sides can't have what they want, without it having to be a big deal.
Possibly this could be layered, I haven't worked out the mechanics yet - but even if you have groups around rules ABCDE, AB, ACE, BCD, etc - it would still help set and stabilise people's expectations, and help them reach consensus, preferably with a bigger granularity than single servers - and reduce the number of nasty surprises down the track.
- I don't like the idea of coalitions at all. To me it feels like the coalitions would become very "us vs them", i.e. you must defederate all instances that allow any topic in this list or we will defederate you. It leaves no neutral ground, creates echo chambers, and deepens the political divide that plagues our society.
  IMO it's better if
  Lemmy allows individual users to block all communities from an instance or all users from an instance, sort of like defederation but per-user.
  Instances have the rule that "when you interact with other instances/communities, you must follow all their rules, or we will suspend your cross-instance posting rights for X days".
  Then instances can act like neutral infrastructure/identity providers and each user can decide exactly how they want to interact with the fediverse without causing fragmentation.
  
  Then you will need to follow users around other places that they interact. You just get more work creep at the end of it all.

67 comments