How the beehaw defederation affects us

Yeah, the level of entitlement is insane.

Hopefully beehaw dies off quickly.

I don't get why you hope for this? Isn't the point of fediverse to have lot of different instances for different people?

Beehaw will continue existing as it chooses to exist, with or without lemmy.world. Isn't that a good thing? That's decentralization. That's what we want more of.

I disagree. It's like a poorly implemented private subreddit. People didn't complain that that was possible before and I don't see why they should now.

The crazy part is that they want to be able to view and comment on other instances’ posts but not vice versa

Where did you get this idea from? They won't be able to interact with other instances from Beehaw. They clearly don't want to based on this action.

Yeah, the solution is just to leave beehaw though. It takes a few minutes to make a new account on another instance. If they really want to access the beehaw stuff they could join an instance that is still federated with them, that way they could see the beehaw posts and the lemmy.world posts.

It's probably best just to abandon beehaw entirely though and use alternative communities in the Fediverse.

People really shouldn't see that as a bug, it's a feature. Reddit does something you don't like? Too bad. One instance in the fediverse does something you don't like? It's incredibly easy to leave. Maybe some day you'll be able to transfer accounts to other instances, that'd be neat.

I made a new account yesterday. The beehaw node was a choice but I did not take it. I won't be making two accounts to access "all of this content" and this little bit over here.

I'm not sure what would change my mind but it would need to be very enticing.

And yet they still have the largest communities by an order of magnitude.

The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users.

It's correct what you say, but the idea bugs me the more I understand it.

It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance. These other users can have nothing in common with the causing users, or might have even opposed them in their wrongdoings.

There is also a level between users and instances; communities. Maybe the problem was with one specific community, yet all other communities who happen to live on the same instance feel the same consequences.

Defederating individual communities would feel better for me, but ultimately I think a problem caused by individuals should be solved with these individuals, not with groups which are more or less meaningfully associated with those individuals.

This makes perfect sense.

I guess that's an improvement. I mean their users seem to like the set-up. I just don't like not being able to create communities and having such a small group of users in control.

It just seems ripe for abuse like we saw in Reddit.

But that's the wonder of the Fediverse, each user can pick their instance.

I'm by no means the one who coined it. I just read it someplace else, but I find it fitting too!

Serious question though, if a server defederates, do the communities hosted on other servers just become completely un-moderated? This seems like a serious liability for the overall community.

I'm not the most savvy person there but it simply means to me that the defederated server cannot post or interact with the matching server. Moderation still works on both ends, enacted by their respective teams. This is akin to a server-wide "mute" button directed to content from another server.

Because they have community rules? It's pretty normal for communities and online spaces to have rules and moderate those rules and if you misbehave aka ignore said rules, you get either your comment deleted or banned. Just like in real life, if you are at my house and you don't follow my rules and just dig holes in my garden or destroy something because it's fun, I will show you the door. Same goes for online places. The server/instance owner/host etc makes the rules

We really shouldn't. That wouldn't actually solve any issues. It just means that the versions of posts we're looking at on other instances aren't "true".

Beehaw is defederating incorrectly. The best thing to do is to abandon them (considering the size of lemmy.world, that's what's likely to happen). It should not be common practice to retaliate with more defederation.

Just think how fun it will be with people telling you to "read the thread" when you can even see it and dont know it exists.

This is what I did... I have an account on beehaw, but I had to unsubscribe to communities like Futurama@lemmy.world on my beehaw account because it is now unfederated... and I opened an account on lemmy.world and now subscribe to Futurama here.

But this means I have 2 accounts now, one on beehaw for general browsing and all communities from lemmy.ml or lemmy.ca etc, and an account on LW for a couple of communities...

I understand federation, but in a way it's not without problem.

undefined> I think that as the fediverse grows, it might become common/necessary to have a few accounts in order to see everything you want to see.

Exactly. And that's good, because that's how the internet is supposed to function in the first place.

(Plus, it helps against the enshittification and all that)

public debate platform like Lemmy without controlling who enters is a horrible idea

Reddit is a public debate platform (even before Lemmy) and they don't control who enters in any way, is that really a horrible idea as you say?

But Reddit has open registration.

We don't need no "moderation", we don't need no thought control.

Well, they're not actually disconnecting from the network, just from some communities. Deferation should be indeed only be used as a last resort but I think it's a good feature to have.

I mean, I came here to give Reddit the middle finger, but I also didn't know it existed before. Now that I do and I've been learning about the fediverse, I really like the idea. I think this concept is a good idea, and I'm actually glad to have joined the day before this whole separation drama thing kicked off. I've learned a lot about how this works, and can see the real world impact of an instance defederating.

I'm hoping for more diverse communities myself. Still have English as a barrier but those multilingual folk should have more options.

Let's not waste our breath pretending a place called "antiwoke" is anything but a racist right wing cesspool. There's literally no other purpose it could serve.

And of course you have censorship on the internet. You need to censor, literally every platform out there that has existed for a reasonable amount of time on the internet has to censor even if it's just to comply with local laws.

In other words, if you don't censor you open up your doors to hosting child porn, it's that simple. So I hope people can see that censorship is a necessary evil and not some binary choice you can make.

So the question is what you censor, not if you censor. And of course there will be things that people straight up don't want. You don't have to be accepting of everything. In fact it's actively detrimental to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

I'm not gonna blame anyone if they want to kick out communities like "antiwoke" because it's quite clear what's gonna come out of them.

There's nothing wrong with an instance curating which communities they allow. If people want those communities they can create them on another instance. The thing about the Fediverse is that there's no one person/organization that decides what kinds of content are allowed, but that doesn't mean it needs to be a free-for-all.

I also support users blocking the communities/magazines they wish to, as long as the community isn't doing anything specifically illegal.

I came to lemmy to have some personal autonomy over my social media, I strongly dislike the types of toxic rhetoric that the above mention community push and my response would be to personally block them and move on.

There is merit to lawful freedom of speech, despite the abuse that we will naturally see in it's use. At some point our internet use will have to be understood as the same as the physical public.

The great thing that the fediverse can bring is that we can both have that freedom and personally block out the aggressors in a way that we couldn't in the physical public world.

The fediverse was designed for censorship that is what they want

I think fragmentation is more susceptible on Lemmy due to the instance design, i.e. there are unlimited instances on Lemmy, each with multiple communities ("subreddits"), but only one instance on Reddit. So there could be 100 c/gaming on Lemmy, but only one r/gaming on Reddit.

It could just be the subreddits I'm subscribed to, but I don't have any fragmentation on there. The most fragmentation I have is something like r/games (discussion) and r/gaming (pictures), so they serve different purposes.

Maybe we are just seeing teething issues on Lemmy right now though, but seeing something like this is disappointing (spoken from someone who is on neither instance).

EDIT: spelling

But this is (to most people and those exiling Reddit) the beginning of the fediverse and something new. To start fragmenting so early isn't a great look. Can mods ban people on these instances? Still learning how all this works.

So now we've gone from mods making bad decisions from a single subreddit, to mods doing it to entire instances.

You'd think federating with larger communities would be a good thing, so there's more content and communication and Lemmy doesn't die and everyone goes back to Reddit.

To play devil's advocate for a minute, they're main points was that moderation actions right now are disproportionately focused on users coming from here and sh.itjust.works, and that the suite of available mod tools is not robust enough for them to handle such a high volume.

I don't think defederation was the right idea, personally but I don't think it was the wrong one from their point of view either. They're trying to intentionally cultivate a culture over there rather than to moderate over an evolving one, and at the moment its too much work for them with the high volume of users. They don't appear to have any ill-will against this instance as a whole or you. We can disagree with the decision but still respect it as their choice to make.

In the future if their internal culture solidifies I imagine they can refederate with us here; by that time we might have established our own communities to rival the high quality ones over there (gaming and technology) I can see already that lemmyworld is growing pretty well and has a load of communities that are start to thrive!

Never heard back in regards to my registration approval, which was nothing but polite. Kinda shows for me where they're at if they pull something like this. Current beehaw users should think long and hard about whether they really want to support this.

They believe it’s allowing users to troll them.

What's stopping trolls from creating new instances just to troll them?

Doesn't their decision actually "invite" trolls to do so?

Pretty pointless, then.

Another question: how can I tell which communities I joined are from that instance? I tried to unjoin but I can't see anything that tells me which instance they are.

I don't remember there being open registration here. I signed up and had to wait a few days to get approved. Lemmy World has been great so far.

I don't remember there being open registration here. I signed up and had to wait a few days to get approved. Lemmy World has been nothing but great so far.

Because they want only 4 people to have absolute power managing every single community and registration.

Surprise Sherlock, it isn't doable!

And then they have the audacity to demand the ability to comment and view other instances' posts without giving those instances the same right to their content.

the thing is, this is an awful strategy for getting people onto a platform. The reason for reddit's success was that there were forums for pretty much anything you could think of centralized in one place.

99.9% of people don't care that much about which app, which instance, which server, whatever, they're just there for the content. The fact that so many reddit users are up in arms about it is a legacy from when it was a much more niche platform than it is today. But in general, this confusing mess of federation, moderation philosophies, defederation, it doesn't matter which instance you choose because they federate, but actually it does matter because some of them don't, a wall of text needed to explain what happens when the mods of two different servers have a disagreement and how the federation protocol works, it's just not a good strategy for getting people onto the platform.

What exhausting nonsense

Let me see if there’s a better way.

I'm also searching and gathering, let's share! Also tagging @Homo_Stupidus@lemmy.world

https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances#all-lemmy-instances

3rd colum from the right (BI) shows the number of instances blocked from this instance. It does not tell you which instances are blocked specifically, but gives a rough idea with an overview.

https://lemmymap.feddit.de/

Bottom left you can check 'blocked' and see a visual graph of red defederations. This view becomes increasingly unusable as lemmy grows, and already takes some time to load.

I don't understand this post at all apparently. If I am now subscribed to beehaw, does that mean i'm exempt from being defederated? Or do I need to try signing up for lemmy.one?

You seem to know what you're taking about.

Why would the Beehaw admins make Beehaw a Lemmy instance? Would it not be easier to achieve what they want through an old-style bulletin board or literally any other forum software?

This feels very much like using a laptop as an umbrella. You can, but why would you?

Less like a prison. You can actually exit them and join another instance.

Yeah, but the problem is at the moment you might reply to their posts/comments in other instances without realising they aren't going to see your response?

It just seems a really complex UX for little gain.

No, this [retaliatory defederation] is a bad idea... This idea of defederation is an extreme step... The issue is that this extreme action is being used incorrectly.

I think this is an eminently reasonable take, but I'd like to present what I hope is also a reasonable counterpoint:

A major instance misusing defederation at a time when the broader community is under stress IS an extreme action. In order to reduce their own moderation load, beehaw has:

• increased the moderation load on other instances that need to keep threads like this one where people are processing difficult feelings under control
• created a massive increase in workload for people that answer newcomer questions who will now get a flood of questions around asymetric replication and zombie posts/communities
• made the federated network worse for everyone by sundering large/established communities.

In short, because defederation is such a heavy hammer with many external costs... it's a really big deal when a "load-bearing" instance misuses it.

I agree that retaliatory defederation shouldn't be the norm, especially for small instances. But when a top 5 instance uses defederation carelessly against other top-5 instances, the repercussions reverberate throughout the lemmyverse. It's probably anti-helpful for lemmy.world to act unilaterally in this regard, and it's probably too much to hope for consensus among other major instances that this is a misuse of defederation... but if 4 of the top 5 largest/most active instances could agree... I would love to see a 2d or 5d period for beehaw to restore federation and if they don't for the majority of the network to coordinate a permanent defederation with them.

I'd then love to see a sort of united nations of major instances established to articulate some minimal cross-instance governance aimed at ensuring individual major instances respond to stresses in ways that accommodate the overall health of the federated network... And sanctions if they don't. I sort of despair that such a cross-instance body could be established or agree to anything given the differing values of the individuals involved... but when instances hosting a double-digit percentage of active users and communities decide to pop on and off the network willy nilly... that's bad behavior that imposes costs for every other member of the network and shouldn't be shrugged aside.

Very well said, and I agree 100%. It's like burning down a house to smoke out a rat. Or using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Or shooting flies with a canon... you get the point.

You will see them on other instances though? Like I can reply to a beehaw post/comment on lemmy.ml, but they won't see my response.

I mean, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4 has its roots somewhere ...

can you imagine having to check 500+ servers to see the blocklist every single time someone adds a comment?

Defederation happens much less often than new comments are posted. The visibility information is also the same for all comments, posts and communities on one instance.

So the check would not have to happen in real time for each comment. It can probably be done once per hour/day for the whole instance as a low priority task.

I like the idea of a visibility indicator.

You only need one check. Eg. if the user is about to comment on a beehaw.org post, check if beehaw.org is federated.

If Beehaw has say the main gaming community, then that's going to be subscribed from users from all different instances, so there will probably be more comments from non Beehaw users on there than Beehaw users.

Hopefully the main communities move out of Beehaw to an instance that doesn't block large communities though.

It's the Issues page on either the Lemmy or the Lemmy-UI repository (I don't know which one is more appropriate):

https://github.com/LemmyNet

I don't have a GitHub account so I haven't submitted anything there, but feel free to suggest my idea.

I'm wondering if a fundamental separation of users from content would be the best way to go. Apart from simplicity, I'm not sure I see any benefit to the current model of instances holding both our identities and the content we want to browse.

Ahh that makes me feel a bit better at least!

Yes but the best way to go about it is acting on individual basis, not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.