sh.itjust.works Main Community

Who else here is chilling on their own instance watching this shit unfold with some popcorn 😂

This is surfacing a fundamental division between mindsets in federation: the people who say don't worry about which instance you're on are bought into the promise that federation can "just work" like email. But the reality is that if you care about moderation at all (like, even to the extent of being for or against having any of it) then sooner or later you're going to have to make harder decisions about instances.

It's pretty normal for long-term fediverse users to change instances several times over the course of however long this stuff has been around. It's unclear to me whether any existing Lemmy instances would be a good fit for me in the long term TBH and I would expect that to be true for some time, as so many instances are still figuring things out internally.

Defederation decisions like beehaw made are extremely normal and rational. With their level of moderation staffing and for their user base, they determined it was unsustainable to remain federated with instances that were generating more moderation workload. If it wasn't them today it would be another instance tomorrow; this will keep happening.

Also, I see a lot of folks saying this is lazy for beehaw, but it's important to understand that from their perspective, this problem wouldn't arise if moderators here were keeping a cleaner house and preventing bad actors from using the platform. (Not saying either take is entirely correct.)

In a sense, moderation best practices on the fediverse are inimically hostile to scaling the fediverse up to new users. (And if you ask folks with smaller but prosperous instances that have healthy internal vibes, they'll probably tell you this is good.)

This is much more fraught on Lemmy than it is on Mastodon, because you're building communities hosted on a particular instance and there's not currently a way to move the community. So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?

Similarly, to avoid endless duplication of communities, folks have been encouraged to participate with existing communities instead of starting a new one on their own instance everytime. But anyone here who has gotten involved with communities on Beehaw will now no longer be able to do so unless they move to a different instance. (Which may be hard, as open instances that are easy to join are the ones that are harder for small instances to handle, which is what caused this in the first place.)

Some of those folks are going to create their own alternative communities on their servers, which to any third-party servers not in the loop on the defederation drama will be potentially confusing. This has the potential to create a cultural tend toward polarization of community norms between everything goes and what we see on Mastodon as content warning policing, but of which are, to me, undesirable.

The best case scenario is that the majority of large communities end up being hosted on instances that have sufficiently rigorous moderation standards and sufficiently robust moderation staff to not impose an unsustainable workload on smaller instances. Then as long as everyone who's not a nazi federates with those instances, things should go smoothly...ish. But that's hard both because "sufficiently rigorous" is different for everyone and because moderation labor doesn't grow on trees.

They made the users suffer for their unwillingness to cope with their situation.

Instead of planning ahead and only accepting a limited amount of users, which would have severed only a fraction of users from us, they decided to grow to become one of the biggest instances, and now took some interesting communities with them, along with cutting off their own users from communities here.

I hope their user base migrates to other, more open instances, and the communities lost will spring into existence elsewhere.

I think it's easy to take this personally but I think it's more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user's bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.

I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit.

I can completely understand why they did but it really sucks that it had to happen. Hopefully, as the Fediverse grows, better tools are made available so instances don't need to defederate from each other.

With that said, I think it's a pretty amazing concept that they can. Terrible, sure, but nonetheless amazing.

I also wasn't aware that other instances vetted their users? This was the first one I picked. Is there a plan to address the issues beehaw brought up?

as someone who just joined, and is still trying to understand "federated" can someone give me an ELI5 rundown of what this means? I thought it didn't matter which instance you joined because they were all connected, does this mean that other instances can just... block an entire instance?

Can't bothered beehaw users just simply block the instances they don't like by themselfes? Does this have to be instance-wide?

I was never able to sign up or log into Beehaw. It's very limited in terms of who it allows to sign up, and the waitlist is probably incredibly long.
This cutoff means that I'll have to live without being able to participate in a lot of discussions, which defeats the purpose of joining the fediverse entirely.
It's just as useful to me as using Reddit right now, even less so with how much less popular Lemmy instances are currently.

beehaw are trying to be a perfectly moderated and "high quality" community and they are struggling to keep up with it when federated to other large instances.

I think they might need to change their methods because it is inevitable that some crap is going to be going on in low effort posts and comments, but defederating one very large instance from other very large instances is against the whole idea the movement.

I specifically just deleted my beehaw account and created one here because of this... This move makes me reconsider this whole lemmy thing.

I understand why they did it, four mods is not enough for the traffic. However, I think they could've anticipated this better than just removing one of the largest instances. Hire more mods. It seems beehaw has banned so much that I am honestly unsure why they want to be federated. I like the idea of beehaw, some things, like limited communities and no downvotes are really smart. But the closed community mindset may kill it.

Correct me if I am wrong.

A "federation" is a form of state structure in which parts of a state are state entities with legally defined political autonomy within a federation.

Federation, in contrast to confederation, provides for a certain coordinating administration. That is, you still have no freedom here, and you don't even know who pays the electric bill in your new entity.

I think it's also important to note, beehaw has the largest amount of blocked communities

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

It‘s the bubble concept I already curated for myself on Reddit by filtering out what feels like half the website. Except now I can sort of choose my pre-made bubble, which is more effort to be certain (have to research the admins of a chosen instance a bit and understand their rules and values), but I don‘t mind that.