this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
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[โ€“] [email protected] 149 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (50 children)

Beehaw "moderators" don't have an issue with their user base checking out other communities. As is clearly obvious from the fact that they aren't defederated from all other instances.

They do have an issue with droves of unvetted users from other instances trolling and harassing their community though. And the most effective way to deal with that currently is to defederate from the instances that the majority of those bad-faith users are coming from. The unfortunate (and unintentional) side effect is that Beehaw users won't be able to interact with any of the users from those instances.

This is a situation born out of a combination of

  • lack of manpower and moderation tools
  • gaps in the configuration of inter-instance interactions
  • the way the internet works

You can disagree with this decision and users are free to switch, but this meme is a poor caricature of the actual effects of Beehaw's actions and (at least in my estimation) of their intentions.

The decision to defederate is less of an attack or an indictment against the other instances and more of a practical necessity for them to protect their community.

If the user base of the lemmy verse keeps growing I wouldn't be surprised if either

  • more granular control over the way instances interact with each other is implemented and the restrictions are softened or
  • the amount of spammers and trolls reaches a level that forces more instances to vet their users and the defederation is lifted entirely or
  • more powerful moderation tools show up and in combination with a greater number of people moderating makes the pre-screening of users unnecessary
[โ€“] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I saw a wave of the harassing spam they were getting right before they defederated. One was a meme about lynching drag performers. Another was a picture of an erection that was posted in what looked like every feminist and trans friendly space, asking if it was bigger than the ones owned by the denizens of the communities. I'm sure it was just a small fraction of what they were dealing with as more shitty little hatemongers find their way to Lemmy, but I happened to catch it by sorting by new at exactly the wrong time. I can't blame the Beehaw mods for not wanting to deal with the psychological toll that comes with manually moderating that kind of content.

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I saw dick-pic spam.

There's a lot of words we can use, but its a lot faster to just say they got harassed by the whole slew of NSFW-spam, porn-spam, harassers and such.

[โ€“] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

Sure, but a lot of users here are minimizing how bad it was, so I wanted to be specific about how explicitly hateful it was.

[โ€“] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah. I'm surprised by how hostile ordinary users have been at this point. Beehaw defedrated after the mods were swamped and most of the content they had to deal with was from these two instances.

I have accounts on both and I was just reading a discussion on beehaw where both the owners of lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had chimed in and everyone was talking about how to get federated back in the future after beehaw have had a chance to get more moderators and the influx of users stabilizes at the end of the month.

My only gripe is that all of my negative interactions at this point have been with people from lemmy.ml so why do they remain while the other two were defederated? But that might be just my experience.

[โ€“] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think shit and world got defederated because they don't have that "why do you want to join" question on the sign up page, and so is easy to make spam accounts on.

[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Well sort of. They got defeated because it was users from those communities causing a large portion of incidents that needed moderation. Open sign-ups are fine if you have some other way to filter users.

[โ€“] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I agree. They've been quite open about everything so far and their main issue was the modding implications of open sign up. The tools just don't exist yet to manage it effectively and keep the kind of community they want, so it's just easier to defederate for now until they do. They have a dialogue open with shit just works and said that the admin of lemmy.world hasn't replied to their message, but that it's fine if they don't want to talk too.

I am a bit disappointed that inter-instance sniping has started so early though. I personally am on both instances and am going to try and treat both in good faith for now

[โ€“] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Fortunately, @ruud made a comment https://beehaw.org/comment/298646. They should be working together soon.

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Oh good that's promising. Ultimately this platform generally is only going to work en masse if everyone tries to work with each other. I know they don't have to necessarily, but it's nice to get along

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I agree with Beehaw's decision, until moderation tools are strong like on Mastodon to quell targeted hate spam and other such 4chan level trash...They have every right to defederate Lemmy and any instance that compromises the wellbeing of their community. I do hope these issues which have caused this situation are resolved overtime. I'd donate to help the effort. Decentralized social media feels like the future of how we interact with others with internet-based communication. It needs support to get off the ground and run faster than sites like Facebook or Twitter.

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