What defederating would mean:
- We won’t see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.
Pros:
- There is less confusion, you can’t respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.
Cons:
- We won’t be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won’t see any of our content.
Summary
Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our ‘front page’).
beehaw.org users already can’t see our posts/comments anywhere so it’s not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn’t really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.
What do you think?
Please don’t defederate. Just have it reserved for actually intentionally malicious or negligent instances.
Honestly I think this is an interesting real-world experiment in the entire federation paradigm. It’s going to happen again and again, there’s no escaping it. How does the ecosystem work when two large instances can’t communicate directly? We’re going to find out.
It was an issue in Mastodon originally too, but Mastodon added more flexibility to the platform and the nuke option wasn’t the only option.
I’m not sure we will be able to read beehaw comments & posts, see :
https://lemmy.world/post/149743
or :
https://kbin.social/m/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/t/24341/How-the-beehaw-defederation-affects-us
Edit: I think I might be wrong here
Lets avoid defederating. I am not to sure why beehaw.org defederated Lemmy.world, i understand it’s not a final decision but more of a quick mitigation to deal with de difficulty related to the reddit exodus. Right?
I think we need to avoid defederating as well, should only be used for the most problematic, habitual cases of malicious intent imo.
We need to let this grow and solidify a bit more before we start to really get in the weeds as far as our identity as a community.
But surely we hope that this level of users is permanent? I think it’ll be in place until lemmy has better moderation tools, which could be quite some time. It has the benefit that it is Open Source though so anyone can help.
They are waiting for better moderation tools yeah :)
The problem is mainly that open registration allows quick ban evasion, making it very hard to remove bad actors that are using instances with open registration (without admin approval).
But admin approval just slows it down right? Like how is the admin going to know you aren’t a bad actor?
It also really slows down the sign-up process which will cripple the growth of the Fediverse.
Yeah, it’s a pity, this is the worst time for defederation, when the userbase is seeing a boom in growth.
Yeah, it seems some are happy to burn down the whole thing if it means they can rule over the ashes.
My gut feeling is that defederation should be done as little as possible. I’m quite new to all this, but to me, it feels like it should be user preference instead of admin/mod preference. I have no clue whether that is even possible though. Perhaps there should be more filters than just Subscribed, Local and All to alleviate certain issues.
I still don’t understand the decision beehaw made
Now im sitting here wondering if I offended anyone over there lol. It’s hard to imagine, but since I’ve seen no bad actors myself, I’m starting to think that it’s possible I did, unknowingly, with zero intent to do so, and they just have a really strict thing going on. I doubt it’s the case, or I hope not at least.
No it wasn’t you. There were a couple of accounts that went in and spammed a whole bunch of bigoted posts.
Ahh whew. Lol. Ya that’s messed up. 😕
It isn’t the case.
The first problem was actual trolls using were using lemmy.world’s open and automated registration (beehaw makes you write why you want to join and manually approves registrations based on that) to troll Beehaw.
The second problem was that the moderation tools aren’t mature enough yet to deal with problem one with anything between manually banning every troll (which will immediately come back by creating another lemmy.world account) and total defederation from the instances most of those trolls are coming from.
Because Beehaw’s mission statement is to be a safe space, it was decided to go with the defederation option.
However, the defederation isn’t planned to be permanent. Improvements in mod tools and/or maturing of communities are said to be reasons to refederate again.
Edit: spelling
Thanks for the info. I can see the logic on their part.
I don’t either.
They were struggling with moderation, and a disproportionate number of people they were addressing were coming from those two instances, which happen to have open registration.
Not sure I agree or not, but thats what they said
What happened? Why are they making this move? I think it’s a bad idea to start defederating, especially this early.
Edit: How effective or practical, for lemmy.world in the future, would a voting system be for defederating? In case it comes to that for us.
Cause it seems like a very dramatic approach, with only a few people making the decision to drop a ton of content yknow.
Not sure if it’s possible even, I know it comes down to our admin, but they seem pretty cool. I dunno just thinking aloud.
What happened? Why are they making this move? I think it’s a bad idea to start defederating, especially this early.
- Beehaw admins explained the move in this post: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
- This post explains what it means for
lemmy.worldandsh.itjust.worksusers: https://lemmy.world/post/149743.
They said they couldn’t deal with the level of abuse and spam that came from lemmy.world users. They have a much more restrictive content policy and smaller, centralised moderation team than most other instances which exacerbated the problem.
What’s dumb is that if someone wanted to troll them they could just make an account on any number of smaller instances that they federate with. I mean, eventually they will have to be completely siloed off to prevent outside trolling.
I hope they ran this defederation thing by their users first.
Yeah, I suspect they will move to a whitelist the moment that functionality becomes available. Or just defederate entirely from everything and become a walled garden.
Tbh, that’s kinda hard to believe. I have seen zero malicious activity in my 4 days here. Maybe their standards are just higher than mine, not sure that’s a good thing in this case but whatever. Damn that sucks, beehaw had some good stuff.
From what I saw on their post, it seems there are bad faith actors registering in lemmy.world just to harass beehaw.org.
Sigh.
Who tf comes online just to troll “beehaw” some obscure instance on an obscure platform? That’s crazy to me lol.
I mean, there are trolls on Reddit to be fair, it’s not terribly surprising that if a lot of Reddit users move to some place, a bunch of trolls will come with, either because they too don’t like reddit’s changes, or because they see new communities to mess with. And I can imagine that, if someone is a troll and gets enjoyment out of bothering people and causing anger, that a community that is pretty restrictive in it’s rules and tries to maintain a “calm” and “safe” sort of vibe is probably going to be a more satisfying target?
Beyond that, I do think I recall seeing one of the beehaw admins saying something about not wanting theirs to be the place all the redditors move to, because they don’t want keeping the community run and moderated to be a full time thing and because they want quality over quantity, in terms of their community. If they feel like they’re reaching the limit of how big a community they can comfortably handle and dont want it getting much bigger, then a controversial move like this that might lose them some users isn’t going to be a problem for them.
I’m not saying I like this move, I don’t personally have any real stake in it obviously not being hosted on either instance involved but I worry that fragmentation like this while people are starting to really look into the platform as a whole isn’t a great look for lemmy, -but I do get where they are coming from.
What’s the deal with beehaw? Can anyone Eli5?
The main thing is that beehaw has an application process for creating a new account, while most lemmy instances do not. They defederated because they were struggling to keep troublesome people out since banned users could just create a new account on another instance and get back in.
Their moderation/admin policy is very strict, and they only have a few admins to manage it.
Beehaw mods want more curation of users and content on their instance and they think the mod tools available to them are not sufficient to handle users coming from other instances so they decided to defederate a couple of instances, from which, they say, too many trolls are coming due to their open registration policy.
Go ahead and defederate them, they’re the ones that want to be closed off in their little centralised liberal safe zone.
I don’t think not wanting fascists and trolls galore makes it a liberal safe zone, they just don’t want the truly wild west. There’s a lot of people out here now which weren’t just a month ago.
It’s their decision and you should respect that. I also don’t agree with the defederation and the rest of their policies but you can just not use it. No need to turn this into a political conflict.
But it is a political decision.
There is nothing political about people not wanting to waste unnecessary time moderating social media.
But this is political. Beehaw mods have said so
Safe spaces and freedom of trolls/bigots is not political. No where in the beehaw explanation do they cite politics as a reason for this. If someone kept calling me a idiot commie and I blocked them, I’m not blocking politics I’m blocking trolling.
Except their excuses are pretty poor. Modlogs are always public info, and you can see that there were only one or two trolls. That doesn’t warrant blocking hundreds of other users.
So then you agree? It’s not political?
Whether it was the right decision or not, they said they made it because trolls were coming from those communities and those communities have open sign ups. They also said it’s not permanent so it’s not like they’re trying to silence a group of people perceived to mostly be on those servers. Just a group of mods/admins that took maybe too severe of a step to protect their base/their time/their own mental health.
