this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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FediLore + Fedidrama

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Chronicle the life and tale of the fediverse (+ matrix)

Largely a sublemmy about capturing drama, from fediverse spanning drama to just lemmy drama.

Includes lore like how a instance got it's name, how an instance got defederated, how an admin got doxxed, fedihistory etc

(New) This sub's intentions is to an archive/newspaper, as in preferably don't get into fights with each other or the ppl featured in the drama

Tags: fediverse news, lemmy news, lemmyverse

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The post can be found here.

I find this news disconcerting coming from such a large instance so early on. Many of the criticisms of Lemmy I've been fighting against on Reddit have had to do with defederation and the possibility of getting cut off from your favorite communities on your main account. I handwaved that away as being extremely unlikely save for the exception of NSFW or extreme political content. But this news has taken me quite by surprise. Perhaps I should have seen it coming given the community Beehaw is trying to foster.

This really makes me wonder what will happen to instances that make this decision. Will their communities diminish in favor of the more accessible ones? Will this decision hurt Beehaw in the long run? What does this mean for the Fediverse in the near future when fighting against its detractors has been such an uphill battle?

Thoughts?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've read the post: my take on it is that there's not enough moderation tools, and the only one that really works against servers with open registration is defederation.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't the admins create all the communities there? So, instead of spreading the moderation role it's concentrated amongst the 4 admin? Seems like they just bit off more than they could chew.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I think the mods have expressed that this was more of a decision driven by the lack of efficient modding tools as of the moment. Of course, also taking into consideration that they really do want to stay true to their ethos in the first place. I personally feel better interacting within Beehaw because the community is headed in a healthier direction as opposed to just being another reddit dupe/reddit refugee camp

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's valid. The news worries me in terms of Lemmy's growth and success, but simultaneously it's exactly what the Fediverse was designed for. Communities are able to determine what their boundaries are. I guess my issue is that Beehaw had the largest communities for many different topics and now they've cut the second largest instance off from those communities. In the long run what that means is that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works are probably going to recreate those communities themselves. Since those are going to end up invariably being larger communities, it means beehaw's versions of those communities are probably going to empty out and become ghost towns comparatively.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Possibly and that’s the beauty of it. People will stay for different reasons and it seems that the standard of good-faith interactions on Beehaw will make a certain demographic stay. It’s not so difficult to exist in two different instances anyway especially because those two that you mentioned have open registration. We’ll just have to see how it goes moving forward

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

the standard of good-faith interactions on Beehaw will make a certain demographic stay

That demographic being people who think they're better than others? There are nice people on lemmy.world too, you know. I've already seen you call people refugees in a kind of condescending manner. Practise what you preach mate... good luck with Beehaw.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Whenever I hear about such decisions, I fear we might end up with a "netsplit" like event in the Fediverse at one point.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

From what (admittedly little) I know about the fediverse I can't see this being a good decision for Bee's long term growth. I respect their stance but I simply think there isn't enough content for small groups to sustain yet. Reddit thrives on a newsfeed style experience, if there's nothing to scroll people won't stay. The only reason I'm here is because I can scroll everything in all, which is how I found this post, for example.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree. The all new feed with federation is the only thing that has enough content for me as well. I could see users moving away from all the involved servers or maybe just beehaw. There are still a lot of instances that link with beehaw, lemmy.world and shitjustworks so you can see everything.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Worth noting though that if this causes a migration away from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works it'll just lead to another instance growing to the size that beehaw.org seems ready to defederate from. It seems their primary issue is those instances not requiring any kind of moderation for signups and I would argue that's one of the factors that creates larger instances.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It almost certainly is, since it's a lot easier to create an account if you don't have to justify why you want the account made, and you also don't have to wait several hours for the moderators to approve your account.

You can just click a few times and go.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean, "long term growth" isn't desirable. Growth isn't sustainable. If they have a critical mass of community, then there is nothing that says they need to grow until they destroy themselves.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Long term growth is necessary to keep any online community alive. Not necessarily accelerating growth. But if a community has less members coming in than the ones who leave over time it will eventually die, no matter what platform it's on.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Replacing membership wouldn't be growth. Failing to replace membership would be negative growth.

Edit: Suffice to say that insufficient growth is NOT a problem any major instance is dealing with right now, and the reasons given for defederation are potentially transient situations

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[–] silentassasin 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just signed up a new account after having started with Beehaw. I joined them because they were growing and seemed to have a good attitude about the whole thing.

This is pretty sad to see as, like you, I think this is going to hurt them in the long run. I could be wrong though. This whole thing is new territory.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Does this mean that I need to run my own Lemmy to federate from all the sources I'm interested in, if I want content from beehaw and lemmy.world and a.n.other.example.org if they are not federated together?

If I do create my own, do I have to persuade those servers to accept my federation?

So much I don't understand. Wait... I think I get it: if lemmy.ca federates with all these places, I see it all and can interact with it? Are the federated/defederated lists openly available somewhere?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Yes! If you look at the bottom of any instance, there's an "Instances" button that will show you which instances are allowed/blocked. You shouldn't need to create your own server if you can find an instance federated to all the ones you'd like. Defederation seems to be the exception to the rule, though beehaw.org has a larger blocked list than I've seen on other instances. In their defense, some of the sites they've blocked look pretty horrible...

As for making your own instance, I'm afraid I don't know what the process is to federate with other instances...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is so cool, thank you! I would never have thought to click on any of those links

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes! Modlog is also a really useful link. It has opened my eyes to the moderating habits of different instances. I learned to keep away from lemmy.ml (all the allegations of tankies seem to be true there), but lemmy.ca (which I see you're also a member of) seems really solid. I trust /u/smorks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Wow. Just Wow. So much information. These two tools tell me more about an instance than the 'blurb'.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Any idea if kbin has something similar? There is a link to the Modlog, but I can't seem to find a link to an overview of the instances it federates with.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I tried digging around for you, but I didn't have too much luck. I see their moderation log, but the most promising thing I could find for an instance list is:

Statistics -> General -> Below the statistic listing the total number of posts, there's a triangle Fediverse symbol on the left side of the screen. Clicking on that drops down an empty menu titled "Instances". I suspect that that's where you'd find the list if it were there. Perhaps Kbin hasn't implemented it yet.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I initially registered there, thinking it would be a more moderate instance compared to Lemmy and their controversial admins. Never ended up hearing back in regards to an approval or even disapproval. Ended up on kbin since then. This will be worse for beehaw than Lemmy or other instances that stay federated, because now users there have to really think if that's truly what they were looking for, especially if they came from Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep as someone who also has an account on Beehaw, it was never trying to become a Reddit replacement, the admins there have made dozens of posts in Chat describing their goals and aspirations of their instance. I liken it to more of a cozy corner of the internet.

That won't work if users sign up for multiple new accounts on pages with open-signups in order to troll and post hateful messages on their instance.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah, they weren't expecting the influx or better put they were unprepared for the obvious. If they just wanted to use the Lemmy code but be a more closed community, they should have stayed entirely unfederated from the start. This middle-of-the-road "we federate just with some instances" isn't gonna cut it long term. You can't have the cake and eat it too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Never ended up hearing back in regards to an approval or even disapproval.

You may have been approved and never notified. The process for that is rough.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Kinda glad I chose a lower key instance in terms of ideology and size (lemmy.ca). But it would be nice to have a single log in associated with the full fediverse.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Does anyone know if the admins at Beehaw tried discussing the problem with their counterparts at the other instances? (I'd search the comments to that post for an answer, but I don't think there's a good way to do that yet.)

One more reason to start a personal instance I suppose.

Update: I received this answer from the Beehaw admin.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Generally they would and it seems those users have been banned already from their home instance also.

There was a couple of incidents that I think prompted this, users with bigoted names from one of the open-signup servers putting up stupid troll posts on Beehaw's Feminism and LGBTQ+ pages. Banning said user would probably just cause them to create a new account and continue trolling so they probably wanted to curb that problem from the source rather than having to remove and ban reactively every time, especially bc they are a small team.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

About open registration: we had a debate about that too, but actually decided closed registration didn't make that much sense because anyone can just go register on another instance and participate in our communities, so what was the point of gatekeeping registrations?

And ultimately that's a very broad problem with the fediverse. Yes, you can curate your own local community all you want, but if you accept content and comments from the other parts of the fediverse, it's actually a bigger moderation problem than something centralized. And there's a liability problem: even if you police your own communities well, someone could subscribe to something unsavory across the web and you're technically "hosting" it.

Federation isn't easy to get right. Ultimately it makes moderation less scalable, not more, because every little instance has to moderate the whole fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I know this is an unpopular move for many Fediverse users including Beehaw. I support this move by the Beehaw admins because they are overworked enough managing the site, they don't have the energy to be constantly chasing trolls spamming accounts posting harmful posts and messages onto their community.

They have a stated ethos, and they should do whatever necessary to be able to keep up with the growing user base. Of course it will stunt their growth but between pursuing growth and keeping the vibe on that instance, they choose the vibe and I respect that decision.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It's interesting to me how this will play out. Personally I think it will hurt beehaw more than the other instances. The issue today on Lemmy is that communities are too small. I'm trying to kickstart a few and I imagine any community that is on beehaw today will now have a split community on one of the two unfederated instances.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

imo it's one of those tough situations that comes with the mix of federated instances and this style of forums. Mastodon had similar issues back in the day, with some instances defederating from .social, but usually not quite as high profile as this, and most users felt less of an effect. for me, Beehaw's more walled garden lead me to choose another instance, and I pretty quickly decided to create a couple accounts on different instances to prepare for these issues

more than anything, l hope moderation tools improve to the extent that these issues can be avoided more

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This is going to happen a lot, I think, while things shake out. If Beehaw don't trust Lemmy.world to ban toxic users, then defederating makes some sense. I think it's probably self-harming, though, because it'll lead to communities like Technology being replicated on other instances, and those are the big Beehaw draw.

You can always have multiple accounts on multiple instances. A pr0n alt was common on Reddit, and is the only way to get at adult material here. Maybe in the fediverse it'll become common to have a safety alt, and a spicy alt too.

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