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!

You're viewing a single thread.

151 comments

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.
  
  From what I understand, it's 'did this human read what we're about here and respond in a way that demonstrates they know what they're signing onto'?
  At minimum, it weeds out folks who don't take the time to write a couple sentences, and kinda acts like a crappy lock on a door. If someone's determined to start some nonsense, it's not hard to get in and try. But a lot of folks will try the door once, see it doesn't open right away, and fuck off. They don't want growth for growth's sake, so the fact that this stifles growth to a degree isn't a concern.
  But yeah, I agree it doesn't scale very well.
  
  This pretty much. Also I was answering a question, there aren't really any alternatives. Open, manual approval or closed is it.
  
  That does not seem sustainable.
  
  It can be with a larger admin/mod team.
  
  Maybe, but it doesn't do much to prevent trolls. Since registration is anonymous a human doesn't have any information on if they should approve the account or not approve the account. At most they have an IP address which is trivial to change.
  It doesn't really affect me, I don't use their communities but it sucks for their users who are cut off from two of the fastest growing servers. By de-federating they're essentially unplugging from the rest of the Fediverse, which is the entire point of using ActivityPub in the first place. If they're not federating then they're not different than Reddit or any other single-server community.
  I understand the worry about trolls and whatnot, but dealing with that is the moderation team's job in any community. No amount of registration restriction can prevent that outside of requiring a real government issued ID and manual identification checks.
  It seems like a kneejerk reaction, I think it'll be damaging to their community in the long-term as users just swap instances in order to be able to interact with the greater community.
  
  Beehaw has questions when you sign up. You have to explain why you want to be a member and how your addition to the community would be a positive one. Is a spammer or troll really going to spend the time writing up a few paragraphs so they can spam or troll just to get banned and have to do it all over again?
  Professional spammers might use a LLM bot to generate a reply, I suppose, but it still takes time and effort. When they inevitably get banned, they'll have to try again with a new response to these questions. Replies which don't sound exactly like the one they used last time.
  
  a LLM bot
  You answered the question. It's trivial to generate human-like writing at any scale you'd like. Maybe the admins will catch some maybe not. It doesn't matter one bit to the python script that is just churning them out. You can't know who is posting spam or who is real until they start posting.
  The amount of members in the community determine how valuable accounts are. Once the community is of a certain size where it is profitable to spam then there will be services that bulk sell accounts. You can buy Reddit accounts or Facebook accounts or Twitter accounts with all levels of karma or post history. The more annoying it is to make an account the more valuable the accounts will be on the bulk market.
  Unless the community remains tiny they'll be targeted just like anybody else.

151 comments