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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.

106 comments

  • we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space

    Fully agreed. I'd personally rather have less overall content, if it means that the sense of community remains strong.

    • Same here. Less content is just fine with me if it means better community interactions, because the community has been my favorite thing about being here so far, as new as I am.

  • So you miss the cyber suburbia safe space of reddit and find the rest of the net is scary and sad.

    Reddit really has ruined a generation of internet users.

  • 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.

  • Ok so TLDR for people who don't quite know what this means.

    Beehaw are going for a walled garden approach and cutting off our access to content from some of the bigger instances. This is fine, it's their right as instance admins and it creates a safer space for anyone who was only browsing Beehaw local communities anyway. It's best they've done this now before even more people join, but it does suck for those of us who already built a nice feed.

    As users we now have a decision to make. If you're an active member of a community on one of these two instances, you'll probably need to migrate your account.

    If you're an active member of a community on another instance, bear in mind if that instance grows large you may then be in the same position.

    The bad news is there's no easy way to migrate accounts here like there is on Mastodon, and we're going to have to resubscribe to everything all over again from whichever instance we move to. Unless anyone knows any handy tool or anything?

    (p.s. It seems like I can still click through to my communities on, say, lemmy.world but presumably they'll no longer update. This is going to really confuse people as there's no visual indicator that the community is blocked from my pov)

  • My questions are:
    Will you defederate from every instance that has an "open registration policy" if it floods beehaw's feed with shitposts?
    What type of trolling are you seeing?
    What can you tell to mods of magazines/communities or admins of instances to look out for?

  • This has quickly become my favorite instance and this is yet another example of exactly why.

    I applaud what you’re doing here, and the community you’re working to build. Thank you!

  • Count me in the "support" column. Beehaw has always been very open about what it is and isn't, and all of the people who are bringing up how freedom of speech is more important than anything can find some level of explanation in Gaywallet's post/essay "Beehaw is a community". Beehaw admins/mods don't have the tools to moderate more even-handedly, so the decision to defederate for now and re-assess when more resources are available makes perfect sense to me. I'm also in the camp of "smaller and higher quality is more important than growth at any cost." This is how you can have a community where dissenting voices are allowed, such as how I've seen opinions I personally disagree with allowed to be discussed in more detail than they probably would be elsewhere. I also saw a post by someone that I believe was from one of these instances (it was either deleted or isn't viewable due to the defederation), and it was pretty clear that they were purely operating in bad faith - essentially saying that the users here are silenced and oppressed by heavy-handed moderation. For context, they also made a post elsewhere that shared information that essentially boiled down to "North Korea actually isn't bad, it's all imperialist propaganda!"

    In the end, the federated nature of Lemmy means I can just create another account elsewhere if I feel the need to interact with the defederated instances. Jerboa (my main way of using Lemmy) makes it pretty quick and easy to add multiple accounts, so it really wouldn't be much of a hassle.

  • Thank you for letting us know! I understand that it's a difficult and nuanced decision to have to make. For what it's worth, I really appreciate this call. Most of the reason I chose beehaw was to have a safe place where I felt able to open up more and actually participate in a community without fear of hostile or aggressive interactions, and having bad actors infiltrate would probably have sent me back into my online shell again.

    I know not everyone will be able to understand fully, but especially if you're neurospicy and have difficulty regulating emotion, rock-bottom self esteem, executive functioning issues, etc. it is exponentially harder to deal with, process and compartmentalise (if possible at all) negative experiences online. I know for myself I need space and time to be able to build up resilience and internal processes to handle it, and bring thrown in the deep end is more destructive than helpful (I'm 36 and had it tried on me multiple times with people using the 'cruel to be kind' approach. All it does is dismantle what little self esteem I scrape together).

    Tl;DR, thank you for making this decision and keeping beehaw a safe place to be until you get the tools and resources you need to open up again. 🥰 I know that if I do want to go and check out the other instances, I can just make a new account over there and still have my cosy place here to retreat to if needed for wholesome discussions. <3

    • As someone who works with kids that are very emotionally driven and often have low self esteem, I fully get you :) You're awesome, and we're glad to have you here!

  • I respect it. I saw someone who said on lemmy.world that Beehaw needing a "Why are you joining?" was requiring an essay. I typed in like 8 words and I got in.

    • Yeah I think I wrote one sentence that was basically just "I like the vibe you are going for"

      • At least half the applications are blank or literally just say something along the lines of 'i wanna try out the fediverse'. People aren't reading our docs or paying attention to rules. Many just want a reddit replacement. We explicitly do not want to be a carbon copy of Reddit, that platform has a ton of toxic behavior that we don't want here.

  • 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.

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

    • 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.

    • 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.

      • Growth for the sake of growth isn't always bad. I think the problem with Reddit is that it's growth for the sake of profit.

        When we try to grow our communities it gives us wider influence over what a space looks like. Imagine if there is a cause a lot of users here want to promote and fight for, but they're defederated from some of the biggest instances?

        The ability to grow gives you a seat at the table, and also allows you to influence others. That's essentially why people often centralize in one place on social media platforms.

        I do understand your point of view though, I still disagree but respect it.

    • 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.

  • I understand and respect your decision here. Are there any plans to defederate from the porn instances?

    • not as of now, no. while we can't personally accommodate porn (in part for the same moderation reasons lined out here), we don't have an objection to NSFW so we've only defederated with instances that host content that's illegal or legally dubious

106 comments