As this #RedditBlackout accelerates the Fediverse experiment, I feel the urge… the need… to chime in with my 2-cents.
My summary of the current lay of the land: Beehaw saw a wave of pornography spam and decided to shut Lemmy.world off and Defederate from this server. I’m too new to this community to fully understand the wants/needs of each individual server, but I’ve been around the internet long enough to recognize that porn-spam is an age-old trolling technique and will occur again in the future. Especially as small, boutique, hobbyist servers pop up and online drama/rivalries increase, online harassment campaigns (like coordinated porn spam attacks) are simply an inevitability.
Lemmy.world wants open registrations. Beehaw does not: Beehaw wants users to be verified before posting. This is normal: many old /r/subreddits would simply shadowban all 1-year old accounts and earlier… giving the illusion that everything is well for 5+ or 10+ year old accounts, but cut out on the vast majority of spam accounts with short lives. This works for Reddit where you have a huge number of long-lived accounts, but its still not a perfect technique: you can pay poor people in 3rd world countries to create accounts, post on them for a year, and the these now verified accounts can be paid for by spammers to invade various subreddits.
I digress. My main point is that many subreddits, and now Lemmy-instances/communities, want a “trusted user”. Akin to the 1±year-old account on Reddit. Its not a perfect solution by any means, but accounts that have some “weight” to them, that have passed even a crude time-based selection process, are far easier to manage for small moderation teams.
We don’t have the benefit of time however, so how do we quickly build trust on the Fediverse? It seems impossible to solve this problem on lemmy.world and Beehaw.org alone. At least, not with our current toolset.
A 3rd Server appears: ImNotAnAsshole.net
But lets add the 3rd server, which I’ll hypothetically name “ImNotAnAsshole.net”, or INAA.net for short.
INAA.net would be an instance that focuses on building a userbase that follows a large set of different instances recruiting needs. This has the following benefits.
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Decentralization – Beehaw.org is famously only run by 4 administrators on their spare time. They cannot verify hundreds of thousands of new users who appear due to #RedditBlackout. INAA.net would allow another team to focus on the verification problem.
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Access to both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login – As long as INAA.net remains in the good graces of other servers (aka: assuming their user filtering model works), any user who registers on INAA.net will be able to access both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login.
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Custom Moderation tools – INAA.net could add additional features independently of the core github.com/LemmyNet programming team and experiment. It is their own instance afterall.
Because of #2, users would be encouraged to join INAA.net, especially if they want access to Beehaw.org. Lemmy.world can remain how it is, low-moderation / less curated users and communities (which is a more appropriate staging grounds for #RedditBlackout refugees). Beehaw.org works with the INAA.net team on the proper rules for INAA.net to federate with Beehaw.org and everyone’s happy.
Or is it? I am new to the Fediverse and have missed out on Mastodon.social drama. Hopefully older members of this community can chime in with where my logic has gone awry.
There’s a bunch of other instances. Like mine at discuss.online. Nothing new is needed.
Seems like you’re just suggesting everyone use beehaw with federated accounts.
My much simpler stance is: they don’t want lemmy.world users on their instance, I’ll respect that, I unsubbed from their communities and found the same elsewhere.
They’re not the only Lemmy servers in the world, Lemmy is still new overall, I don’t see any problem in “rebuilding” the 2 big subs they have somewhere else, I’m already putting my effort in contributing to make it so.
edit: typo
I think one thing that hasn’t been mentioned here is the huge gap in the size of the communities. The largest beehaw communities have almost 20k subscribers while the largest I’ve seen from other instances seem to cap out at about 5k. I think the problem is that most of the users who still federate with beehaw will undoubtedly end up there. This presents serious difficulties for growing competing communities.
Beehaw’s limited registration will turn off many users and eventually instances with open registration will catch up.
This comment is a month old so you will be happy to know that you are right. That is what happened.
You’re basically describing how the fediverse works I think.
How is it different than the current situation where both lemmy.world and beehaw.org are connect to lemmy.ml?
Given my perspective as part of the #RedditBlackout wave, I think its needed for me to explicitly point out this perspective this week. I recognize that you folk who have been hanging around the Fediverse longer than me already recognize this as reality. But this is a new world for a lot of the folk joining up Lemmy.world.
The issue, is that we were sold on “It doesn’t matter which server you sign up for” on https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. See this quote:
Don’t overthink this. It doesn’t matter which instance you use. You’ll still be able to interact with communities (subreddits) on all other instances, regardless of which instance your account lives 🙂
This oversold the community, got a bunch of former Redditors signed up here, and now a bunch of people are feeling kinda-sorta betrayed by the values already.
Consider it the equivalent of how subreddits used to ban members that used to participate in subreddits they don’t agree with. Instances will by default federate with each other when their users interact, unless one of them opts out of it. Another analogy how email servers block those servers that have been the origin of too much spam etc This is a feature, and not a bug, and is the same way problematic servers are kept out (not saying that Lemmy.world is problematic).
But the good thing is that you can change your profile easily to any instance that has not been defeferated and interact with beehaw again, if you really want to. I am not sure if Lemmy has a back up and restore option yet like Mastodon, but if it does, you could move all your data along with your profile to the new instance.
Unlikely to occur. Beehaw’s admins hate dissent and anyone questioning them. Well before the blackout, they literally had a “no sources” rule because users kept questioning the mods. Likewise their current “rule set” states what they say, goes, and that everything is up to them, not the rules. They say that with all cases (except obvious trolls), that they will always warn first. I have yet to ever see any kind of warning from any of their admins.
They were being questioned on sh.it and on lemmy.world, so they blocked both. You can check their modlog to see just how little spam they had to deal with.
You can also pop in to look at their discord to see how much they dislike the criticism.
