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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!

151 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.
- i joined the fediverse to shitpost, but more importantly to create a new community.
  beehaw's actions are VERY bad for the fediverse. for any social network to succeed it needs USERS. and when you have an entrenched giant, you need all the help you can get. federation is great but it also means a more spread out community which makes it hard for any one instance to succeed. what beehaw is doing is just chopping the legs off the fediverse right when it's finding its footing.
  also to an outsider, the fediverse is already confusing enough. now we can to deal with the whole "oh you can join this server and not that" and "if you join here, you can see them but they can't see you" nonsense. closed registrations turn away people, this sort of chaos also turns away people.
  i'm personally blocking all beehaw servers. i appreciate moderation is hard, and sad that trolls are coming in so early. but moderation is a solvable problem. instead of opening applications for more mods, they decided to go the cowardly route.
  
  I get that we need more users. But allowing the communities who were here first to get torn apart is not how you do that. The beehaw users have already shown the ability to grow communities from scratch. That's exactly the kind of people we want here.
  But they also need to be given space to build those communities. This is essentially the core concept of Lemmy, that federation allows you to have large high activity communities coexisting in peace with small niche communities. You get to have both things on the same platform, because instances that come into conflict can defederate without having any impact on the network as a whole.
  There are many bigger reasons that the platform is confusing, the beehaw situation doesn't even move the needle. If anything, I think the defederation has helped many people start to understand how cool the federated structure can be.
  I understand you're frustrated they couldn't just moderate the problem away, but seriously man, don't be so dramatic. Beehaw is cutting the legs off the fediverse? Bro if the fediverse fails it won't be due to the actions of beehaw, I can tell you that much.
  
  To gain users, users need to find a space that matches what they want. If you want a 4chan style environment, beehaw.org is not for you. If you want a beehaw.org style environment, then maybe it's a GREAT place to be. It's getting angry at users for wanting different things from the experience that will reduce the number of users, not that some spaces are different from others
  
  There was already a community blocked from this very node and lemmy.world as well because they are VERY enthusiastic of tanks and were flooding other communities.
  I don't see that much tragedy and drama coming out for that so .. eh, hard to take these kind of comments seriously, especially when they show to not have even understood how the federation works.
- 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?
  
  Because they don't let us download from them right now.

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.

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.
- Unfortunately Lemmy currently lacks sophisticated moderation tools and any other tools other than full defederation. From Beehaw's statements they would really have rather has options other than full defederation.
  One way defederation and/or providing other instances read only access to a Lemmy would probably be very helpful feature to have. While not the most useful at the moment, since everything is so new, being able to vary other instances access on their instances age and age of accounts would probably be helpful in reducing the worst of the trolling/spam.
  
  Yeah I've been reading into it and it seems like it's more of an issue of the maturity of the software. Their post about their tools not scaling well make a lot of sense.
  If the moderation team has the tools to handle a community of 10,000 people but suddenly the next week there is a new instance with 100,000 users trying to post in your communities then they simply cannot keep up. That results in bad posts being up for longer, spam being up for longer and it degrades the communities.
  I'm sure they will re-federate as tools develop so that they can get a handle on the issue. I think there needs to be actions on both ends. Instances should bear some responsibility for the users who use their instance as well. If this instance is causing trouble for another instance then there should be tools available so that the local moderation team can deal with the problem.
  All in all it seems like a software maturity thing. They simply had no other options available but to de-federate until the tools/manpower are available to hand the influx of users.
  It's just growing pains.
  That being said, if you're registering here just to harass people in other communities: Go fuck yourself.
- 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.

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.
- yes, some comments are so extreme like "i hope their community dies off".
  Dude, like... wtf? seems like they did good by separating even if temporarily.
  I'll try and create an account over there because I like the idea of a safe space to discuss some topics that are sensitive to the users but in any case I wish them the best and hope that they will be able to re-federate soon enough.
  
  It's almost like their arguments are entirely in bad faith.

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

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.

That announcement from beehaw was how I found and subscribed to this instance 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.
  
  Oh certainly. I wish that we had less nuclear options like more granular mod controls both on the instance and community level.
- Any instance with owners that unreasonable will inevitably become not worth visiting.

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
- Typing this on Jerboa. If you've used any third party reddit app then it'll feel perfectly familiar. A little bare bones at the moment, but totally fine.
- OMG I just flashed back to that "add account" bit on the sidebar....🤯
  I hadn't processed that it meant I could run more than one account from the same app. How cool!

Better moderation tools are always welcome. I'm sure that is 90% of the problem, but it is just a software problem and it will be resolved.
I think there should be standards of moderation (simple things like average time to answer a report) that instances should have to adhere to in order to ensure the moderation:community ratio remains at a level to prevent the worst abuses.

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.

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.
- 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
- 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.
- At the very least there should be a warning that this instance blocks content from other popular instances...

So I don't know what solutions you have discussed with the other instance admins, and I actually know little about how it all works currently, but I had a thought about this for the fediverse as a whole: the admins/moderators of a user's home instance should be moderating/responsible for that user's engagement with communities on other instances.
Right now if Person A creates Instance A and a community on that instance becomes really popular fediverse-wide, Person A is stuck in the lurch of dealing with all of the engagement from everywhere else in the fediverse. If Instance A has 10 users or 100000 users, they still have to deal with x-thousands of users from all over the fediverse. More than likely they'll just want to defederate, especially if they are small. At the same time, if Person B creates Instance B that invites trolls (on purpose or not) it seems that they have little say in what their own users do on Instance A's community. In fact, as you pointed out, Person B might not even know that a user from their instance is trolling Instance A.
Instead, if mods on Instance A take any action against the user on their instance, mods on the user's home instance (AKA Instance B) should immediately and automatically be notified. Then the moderators from Instance B will need to respond how they see fit with the user. If they don't see a problem, maybe they do nothing (e.g. the two instances have different philosophies.) But if they do see an issue, they then have the opportunity to respond in whatever way makes sense. Then, between the two instances, if the actions taken on either side seem appropriate, the two instances can continue to get along (i.e. federate). If they disagree in some way (maybe Instance B thinks Instance A is too draconian or maybe Instance A thinks Instance B is too lax) they can part ways (i.e. defederate).
As an extension to this, it could help Instance B from being a source of brigading. If they suddenly see a bunch of reports coming in from Instance A they would be able to take action on their own side to stop it, either through temporarily defederating or some other mechanism.
All in all the purpose would be to give both instances the chance to deal with the issues before defederating; hopefully alleviating some of the pressure off of Instance A, and giving Instance B the opportunity to show whether they should be trusted (or not) in general.
This could be taken a step further and their could be trusted and untrusted federations. Trusted federations work like normal and untrusted federations require mods from the user's home instance to moderate all engagement before it actually posts to the remote instance. This puts a burden on the home instance, but that's actually the point. If you're willing to grow to large numbers and federate widely, then you need to be willing to moderate your users' content, rather than imposing your users on everyone else (until they defederate.)
Edit to add: I should mention that I very much appreciate this instance and that I was able to easily create an account, and, I was disappointed by the defederation as it seems like the kind of thing that will kill Lemmy from scaling to something mainstream. I don't think that's what the creators of Lemmy want though, anyway.
- I like your idea but ....who would really want to bother?
  It sounds like potentially parenting any/all of your users.
  
  The alternative is to become a platform where people go to register in order to be assholes. If the user population of your instance is too big for the moderation team then close registrations until the workload is small enough.

I do think that the open sign up could become a problem in regard to bots. That being said, they could just as easily open their own instance.

Love this. There is absolutely no need to feel hate towards each other, I can definitely see both sides of the argument as valid concerns. Each instance has their own way of curating a community, but as long as the end goal is the same and communications are open, we all win. For now let's just focus on making this instance a better place to be, the day we all reunite as one will come eventually.
- Love this. This is the beauty of federation.
  
  It's an organic and messy beginning, but the good should 'bubble up' leaving the detritus to rot in the bowels of the community listings.

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.

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.
Might I also suggest alternatives such as lemmy.blahaj.zone which is open to anyone to register without explanation as long as, y'know, you're not an asshole. Though it sounds like beehaw might block them in the future given their stance, but for now they're federated.

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.
- Kinda like creating an instance "tinder profile"?
  Where each instance toggles their settings on what's allowed/what they're looking to foster?
  
  Huh. Not how I'd have put it, but sure.
  Probably more a list of dealbreakers than a list of kinks, but effectively that.
  Ferinstance where personal relationships are concerned, I imagine there's a big matrix of people who (require | don't care about | despise) (weed | guns | porn), with each combo having a distinctly different character.
  Pick some number of more-ideological items, and you'd have a basis for this.
  Obviously as the number of dimensions increases you get increasingly more fragmentation of the demographic, and correspondingly smaller pools of matches, so it would behoove people to prioritise and limit their filters carefully to find a good compromise between quality and quantity.
  I think it's very likely there'd end up being maybe half a dozen core filtersets that most instances would pick between in order to strike that balance.
  People could of course go make their own filterset (with | without) (blackjack | hookers), and if they can draw enough like-minded people to be worth grouping up with, more power to their elbow.
- 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.

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.

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.
- It's tough. The platform has minimal tools, at least from my limited mod permissions, or maybe anyone's? Lemmy itself needs to mature the code-base to enable more granular and distributed functionality.
- I've tried joining a few times but it always just hangs. I think there might be something wrong with registration.

Just a quick idea I had, and this may have been suggested before and maybe be untenable. But... Could communities be made invite/approval only as well as instances?
For example, on beehaw they want to ensure that everyone posting to their communities have been vetted in some way. So could have all the communities not allow posts by who haven't agreed to beehaw's "content policy"? Either by naturally having an account on beehaw, or by submitting a request to a moderator of the community.
Would allow people on other instances to see and follow those posts (but not post themselves, unless they go through beehaw's approval process), and beehaw people to go and interact with other communities on other instances.
- I like where you're coming from, but this in particular seems uneccessary. You can view Beehaw stuff without an account. Does suck that it won't show up on your feed from sh.itjust.works, but there's nothing stopping you from adding communities over there to an RSS feed if you are interested in it for pure reading purposes. Vetting for participation is just your instance being federated or your account living on their instance.
  (Actually, there's an app feature I'd be interested in, combo lemmy client and rss reader to add defederated communities to the mix in one program. If only I hadn't stopped learning programming as a kid because arrays confused me.)
  Edit: My reading comprehension is shit, but leaving these comments here. I don't think community-level pre-vetting outside of the larger instance is something admins of more restrictive instances would entertain, but I could be pleasantly surprised.

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.

This is what's flawed about lemmy and the fediverse.
You are not being genuine with your intentions.
Users should not be at your mercy. If you really cared, you would ask the community what and how they feel about this.
The issue with you and beehaw admins is you bullshit, and are not sincere about your intentions.
There is nothing admirable about lying to the users about what is REALLY going to happen.
Don't bullshit and tell the truth.
Totalitarian rule is how you are going to run the instance.
- wat
- This is what is great about the Fediverse-it you think your instance is a bullshitting totalitarian hellscape (wat?) you can join another instance or start your own.
  Whether people will stay federated with you is another matter.
- What are you on about?
- No, this is what makes the fediverse work. It doesn't matter if you are being honest with your intentions or not. It's your instance, you get to do what you want with it - that's the honest part. No tricking people for years and then charging them.
  If you don't like the actions an instance is taking, host your own.
  
  Although this user is kinda huffing their own farts, I think they are speaking to something that needs to get solved in the long term.
  If you make an account on an instance, create a bunch of posts and comments, then your instance makes a choice you totally disagree with... It's easy for everyone to say just leave and find another instance, but leaving that history and effort behind kinda sucks. Even if you're not at the mercy of an instance's admins, your account is.
  Lemmy/Kbin really need a mechanism to migrate an account so users are totally free to find their own home, and client apps need a way to transparently mix content from different accounts so you can join two instances that have de-federated from each other. Again, it's easy to say you just need to make an account on each, but the UX of doing so is terrible.
- Care to explain what lies you think are being told, and why you think that?
- Something I find neat about this new setup is that crazy shit like this is the first comment I see scrolling down, despite its downvotes. Is this a better system that pushing upvoted comments to the top and downvoted ones being hidden? On first glance, I'm not 100% sure.
  
  Just switch from 'Hot' to 'Top' and it sorts how you would expect. I think Hot is basically 'which post had an upvote/comment most recently'
  e: oops, double post
- If you don't like the way the admins are doing things, you are FREE to go to another instance or start your own.
- Why is this the first thing I see on the auto sort? Unrelated to lemmy, but there should be an option on Kbin to auto sort by top.

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