Like many of you, I woke up this morning to discover that our instance, along with lemmy.world, had been unexpectedly added to the beehaw block list. Although this development initially caught me off guard, the administrators at beehaw made an announcement shedding light on their decision.
The primary concern raised was our instance’s policy of open registration. Given my belief that the fediverse is still navigating its early stages, I believe that for it to mature, gain traction, and encourage adoption, it is crucial for instances to offer an uncomplicated and direct route for newcomers to join and participate. This was one of the reason I decided to launch this instance. However, I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls. Despite these hurdles, I maintain the conviction that our collective strength as a community can overcome these issues.
After this happened, the beehaw admins and I had a good chat about their decision. While our stances on registration policies might diverge, we realized that our ultimate goals are aligned: we both strive to foster communities that thrive in an atmosphere of safety and respect, where users can passionately engage in discussions and feel a sense of belonging.
Although the probability of an immediate reversal are slim given the current circumstances, I believe we have managed to identify common ground. It’s evident that, even in separation, we can unite to contribute positively to the broader fediverse community.
In the coming weeks or months, we plan to collaborate with other lemmy instance administrators to suggest enhancements and modifications to the lemmy project. Primarily, our proposals will concentrate on devising tools and features that empower us, as instance administrators, to moderate our platforms effectively.
In the meantime, while I understand may not be ideal for everyone, users who choose to participate on the beehaw instance will be required to register a separate account on their instance.
Thank you all for continuing to make this community great!
I’d just like to say that I appreciate your stance on open registration and making things as uncomplicated as possible. I signed up for a Beehaw account before this even happened, but I did find having to explain myself and justify my presence a little confusing. I also signed up for a discuss.tchncs.de account and I was so confused and thought their website was broken because once I clicked sign up, it didn’t do anything. Just span around in a circle. It wasn’t until I checked my email that I realised it wanted me to confirm my email. Here, things did just work. No complications, just entered my name, email and password, clicked sign up, and I was done! I guess you could say… shit just works on sh.itjust.works
Brief explanation of how defederation works.
Basically Beehaw and all its communities and users are now blocking everyone from this server. We can’t post to their communities and they can’t see anything that we post on third party communities either.
However, this server has not defederated Beehaw. Therefore, we can still see their users commenting on third party communities, and we can even reply to them, they just won’t see our reply, although neutral parties will.
Both Beehaw and sh.itjust.works are still able to contribute significant activity to Lemmy as a whole, just not directly to each other for now. Let’s all be diligent on reporting and banning trolls quickly so we can maintain the collegial atmosphere here.
What I don’t understand is why we can’t see me posts and comments read only on Beehaw. I can see it by going to their (public) website, why can’t I see it from here?
Because they don’t let us download from them right now.
So I guess a solution coild be having different switches for getting/sending data to an instance. So in this case beehaw could block receiving updates from sh.itjust.works but not block sending updates to sh.itjust.works. That way we could all still see the content from there while on sh.itjust.works just not interact with it. This could be displayed in the UI by having the comment box and all interaction buttons that would send an update disabled.
There might be an issue on GitHub you could comment on to suggest this. It’s the lack of flexibility in the mod tools that are currently available that’s leading to this “on / off" style of federation
The moderation tools are pretty rudimentary at the moment. I think the popular Mastodon forks allow for read-only de-federating. Lemmy’s software is just not very mature yet.
The moderation tools will come. De-federation is meant to be a nuclear option, with proper moderation tools it would be easy for instances to coordinate moderator actions (like, in this case, banning users from their home instance rather than having moderators run around deleting their posts). The overhead for moderation is too high and the tools are being created on the fly. Part of the excitement of being on the frontier of social networking 😎
I’m disappointed that we have to suffer because of a few bad apples but I can understand the situation. We’ll all have to do our part to report and remove these trash brain bigots from out instance. I really enjoy the laid back atmosphere of this instance but it is acutely vulnerable to trolls as evidenced by that shithead.
Honestly, I’ll take a risk of trolls over losing the atmosphere here any day. Don’t really need to see content from instances that are bothered enough to defederate anyways, there’s plenty of stuff here and on lemmy.world and other communities we’re federated to.
You don’t have to suffer. Everything posted on beehaw will be reposted elsewhere, that’s just the nature of the internet. And if you really want to interact with beehaw, just go make another free account over there.
And if you really want to interact with beehaw, just go make another free account over there.
IF they’ll let you in.
Or go to any of the other non-blocked instances.
Fuck em, I applied to several different servers and it took days to get accepted. Open registration is necessary
I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls.
Annnnnnd there it is.
What?
It’s almost as if they’re getting the result they were looking for. People saying they disagree with their choice are exactly the people they’re trying to avoid lol.
I was enjoying their tech and news communities, fuck me right? So toxic 🙄
Anyone else noticing that the only people getting pissy about this instance being defederated from beehaw due to trolls…
…Aren’t even from from this instance?
Just asshata from exploding heads feeling the need to come defend their right to be dicks.
I’ve been on the Fediverse since around 2015-2016 (don’t remember if it was just before or just after I went back to school). It seems like a lot of the newbies here don’t understand what the Fediverse is for and about. There’s a lot of anger and hate that the Fediverse is supposed to be free and open and all the instances all federate with each other, and it’s just like… No. That’s not the point. Why would we even architect ActivityPub to have whitelist and blacklist functionalities if we didn’t want server admins to be able to use them? The point of the fediverse is that you own your relationship to your server’s moderators, and you pick your server’s moderators based on their moderation style.
Think of it this way. On reddit, the administrators have full power over all communities. Don’t like it? You are welcome to have no avenues to participate in any of the discussions. On the fediverse every server has a team that has full power of that small section of the internet. Don’t like how they federate? Pick a different instance that better matches how you would like to interact with the fediverse. If you’re angry that Beehaw is doing this, it just means Beehaw isn’t a good fediverse home for you. You can just… Not go to beehaw for your fediverse needs. Do you like it here, but still want to see posts from Beehaw? Maybe an instance that federates with both is right for you. Because if you like what’s on beehaw, to some extent, you are enjoying the community that is there because they like how things are run there. There is an extent to which you have common ground with those moderators. An instance that federates both there and here is saying “We like what both of these moderation teams are about.”
Here’s another way to think of it. Let’s think about the internet as being the world. The Fediverse is one country in the world. Each project is like a city. You pick which city you want to live in based on what’s going on in your life and how you want to go about things. Here in the Lemmy city (which is very near the KBin city. Think New York and Newark), every instance represents a house with a garden. When you move into the Lemmy, when you pick your instance you move into a house where your profile lives, and then you go hang out in the communities in the back garden. Who your administrators choose to let into the garden is just them creating the atmosphere they want for their garden party. And almost every Lemmy garden has defederated from someone. Almost every server has set up rules about what it takes to walk through the back gate to come kick it in the back garden. The largest instance with a fully open door policy is lemm.ee, not lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. They’re the 3rd largest instance overall.
All beehaw.org is saying is that our house is very crowded and their bouncer can’t keep up with all the people trying to get into their garden party. And it’s what makes the fediverse beautiful. That’s the point of the fediverse.
I’ve been on the Fediverse since around 2015-2016 (don’t remember if it was just before or just after I went back to school). It seems like a lot of the newbies here don’t understand what the Fediverse is for and about.
These people might lack technical knowledge of how federation works, but they get the ramifications of federation just fine. The fediverse didn’t invent federated protocols in 2015, there are some truly large and successful federated networks we can learn lessons from.
Email is often used as a cultural touchstone to introduce people to the fediverse. You know what a major email provider almost never does? Blackhole customers from another major email provider en masse. They understand that the value of their service is in its interconnectness, and an email address that can communicate with everyone you know is much much more valuable than an email address that can communicate with a confusing subset of people you know. They don’t eschew blocklists, which are an essential tool for combatting abuse. But when deploying a block, they consider their own costs and also the costs to the network as a whole. This wasn’t always a given, there were many walled gardens before and some tried to operate email that way, they were not successful.
The internet itself is the most successful federated network in the world. Do you know what a tier 1 isp almost never does? Depeer other tier-1 ISPs in a way that disrupts the global routing table. Again, they don’t eschew selective peering, every few years somebody plays chicken with tier 1 peering agreements that could isolate Comcast customers from Netflix or Verizon customers or whatever. But in the end they do consider the costs to the network, and understand that the value of their service is it’s ubiquitous interconnectedness. Again, this wasn’t always a given. In the early days there were vigorous debates about who got to join the internet.
… every instance represents a house with a garden.
Beehaw has about 13 thousand registered users. At this scale the garden party metaphor looks pretty silly. A much better metaphor is that each fediverse app is a world, and each instance is a nation. Beehaw has a problem with the immigration policies of other nations (registration), and it’s enacted drastic trade and travel sanctions as a negotiating lever. As an independent nation, it’s entirely within their purview to do this, but as in real life the costs of doing so are high both within Beehaw and beyond.
The idea of federation/peering as a negotiating lever is always popular when a federated network is young, has poor abuse management tools, and the cost of severely damaging the network is low. But as soon as the network becomes useful enough to matter, the value of interconnectedness dominates all other concerns and people suddenly find other ways to resolve their disagreements.
So I disagree that people aren’t getting federation. They get intuitively that interconnectedness dominates the value equation in networks that matter, and are treating the Lemmyverse like it matters to them. The Beehaw admins are treating it like a toy they can break if it doesn’t work the way they want, and in doing so they will ensure that it remains a toy until the network routes around them and makes them irrelevant.
In another example, cell phone companies allow users to keep their number and call anyone on any service.
However they also have laws to block people who use that accessibility to troll others (spam calls).
You’re expecting an open sourced, volunteer network to have the same controls as private companies with departments dedicated to keeping these issues in check. Your analogy does not work.
In your country example, each country has users verified (passports) and travel between two countries is not allowed without proof of their verified identity which comes with other controls for restricting individuals on a case by case basis as they break the laws of the country they immigrate to. Lemmy does not have those tools yet, so until they do the point is moot. How about you help create those tools since you view the current status as such a travesty?
… an open sourced, volunteer network…
Are you talking about the early days of the internet and email, or the Fediverse today? I can’t tell which.
How about you help create those tools since you view the current status as such a travesty?
You say that like I’m the admin of an instance with 13k users with the platform to crowdfund additional developers on the core project. I have a simpler idea though, what if I engineer a crisis by splitting the network and forcing existing devs to choose between working on my pet features or forking the network with no notice. That sounds way easier.
I think your phrase “the Fediverse today” is significant, because Beehaw didn’t feel a need to take a breather a week ago, and both of their mod announcements re: defederation have pretty explicitly called it a temporary change.
Seems to me the mod team just wants a moment to evaluate what the new traffic is going to look like a week from now. I can’t think of an objection to that.
I’m talking about the fediverse since tech has advanced quite a bit from when email was first starting up which has increased the capability of trolls to cause problems.
As for why you should help out, you’re the one demanding access to a community that has set rules and doesn’t have the tools to enforce it exactly the way you want so… Maybe step up and stop complaining so much? How is it such a crisis that a community closes it’s gates? It’s likely not permanent and can be reversed when said mod tools reach the usability needed.
Yeah, that seemed fairly obvious to me and I’ve only been here for fiveish days. Even in reddit we had subreddits go private to keep their community from getting trolled which seems pretty similar but new refugees for some reason don’t understand that.
yes, some comments are so extreme like “i hope their community dies off”.
Dude, like… wtf? seems like they did good by separating even if temporarily.
I’ll try and create an account over there because I like the idea of a safe space to discuss some topics that are sensitive to the users but in any case I wish them the best and hope that they will be able to re-federate soon enough.
It’s almost like their arguments are entirely in bad faith.
Oh, so the person who posted their tiny penis on the feminism community actually admitted to it? Fascinating. They do know their post lasted like two minutes, right? I was more impressed with Beehaw’s moderation team acting so fast than I was with their quick shot.
this happened? >_>
@anthoniix pooky trolled some fiminatzis, beehaw had a midlifechrisis and then unfederated. that’s it really. why that took a 5 page magnus opus i don’t know.
wait is that what happened? beehaw defederated over one user/post?
There would have been more and there were probably more such posts. These kind of safe spaces inevitably attract trolls looking for the wrong kind of attention.
Yup that’s probably the case. But I’m a bit surprised if they were that quick and drastic over a single post. The way they made it sound was as if there was a ton of people engaging in a way they didn’t approve. not that there was just one troll.
I find their reaction understandable. In my experience, even one bad post can cause dramatic shifts in user demographics, so if you don’t take a heavy-handed approach it can really end up having lasting negative effects on the server.
Yeah it’s understandable given their goal. I’m just surprised is all.
Serious question: What is the alternative to open registration? Invite-only? What is the expectation?
Seems a bit kneejerk to defederate, that’s employing the nuclear option as the first step. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for dialog.
Unfortunately Lemmy currently lacks sophisticated moderation tools and any other tools other than full defederation. From Beehaw’s statements they would really have rather has options other than full defederation.
One way defederation and/or providing other instances read only access to a Lemmy would probably be very helpful feature to have. While not the most useful at the moment, since everything is so new, being able to vary other instances access on their instances age and age of accounts would probably be helpful in reducing the worst of the trolling/spam.
Yeah I’ve been reading into it and it seems like it’s more of an issue of the maturity of the software. Their post about their tools not scaling well make a lot of sense.
If the moderation team has the tools to handle a community of 10,000 people but suddenly the next week there is a new instance with 100,000 users trying to post in your communities then they simply cannot keep up. That results in bad posts being up for longer, spam being up for longer and it degrades the communities.
I’m sure they will re-federate as tools develop so that they can get a handle on the issue. I think there needs to be actions on both ends. Instances should bear some responsibility for the users who use their instance as well. If this instance is causing trouble for another instance then there should be tools available so that the local moderation team can deal with the problem.
All in all it seems like a software maturity thing. They simply had no other options available but to de-federate until the tools/manpower are available to hand the influx of users.
It’s just growing pains.
That being said, if you’re registering here just to harass people in other communities: Go fuck yourself.
Manual admin approval for every signup.
Why? What would you even check?
It’s not like you can interview the person and check their ID, etc. - it’s just meaningless bureaucracy that stifles growth.
From what I understand, it’s ‘did this human read what we’re about here and respond in a way that demonstrates they know what they’re signing onto’?
At minimum, it weeds out folks who don’t take the time to write a couple sentences, and kinda acts like a crappy lock on a door. If someone’s determined to start some nonsense, it’s not hard to get in and try. But a lot of folks will try the door once, see it doesn’t open right away, and fuck off. They don’t want growth for growth’s sake, so the fact that this stifles growth to a degree isn’t a concern.
But yeah, I agree it doesn’t scale very well.
This pretty much. Also I was answering a question, there aren’t really any alternatives. Open, manual approval or closed is it.
That does not seem sustainable.
It can be with a larger admin/mod team.
Maybe, but it doesn’t do much to prevent trolls. Since registration is anonymous a human doesn’t have any information on if they should approve the account or not approve the account. At most they have an IP address which is trivial to change.
It doesn’t really affect me, I don’t use their communities but it sucks for their users who are cut off from two of the fastest growing servers. By de-federating they’re essentially unplugging from the rest of the Fediverse, which is the entire point of using ActivityPub in the first place. If they’re not federating then they’re not different than Reddit or any other single-server community.
I understand the worry about trolls and whatnot, but dealing with that is the moderation team’s job in any community. No amount of registration restriction can prevent that outside of requiring a real government issued ID and manual identification checks.
It seems like a kneejerk reaction, I think it’ll be damaging to their community in the long-term as users just swap instances in order to be able to interact with the greater community.
Beehaw has questions when you sign up. You have to explain why you want to be a member and how your addition to the community would be a positive one. Is a spammer or troll really going to spend the time writing up a few paragraphs so they can spam or troll just to get banned and have to do it all over again?
Professional spammers might use a LLM bot to generate a reply, I suppose, but it still takes time and effort. When they inevitably get banned, they’ll have to try again with a new response to these questions. Replies which don’t sound exactly like the one they used last time.
a LLM bot
You answered the question. It’s trivial to generate human-like writing at any scale you’d like. Maybe the admins will catch some maybe not. It doesn’t matter one bit to the python script that is just churning them out. You can’t know who is posting spam or who is real until they start posting.
The amount of members in the community determine how valuable accounts are. Once the community is of a certain size where it is profitable to spam then there will be services that bulk sell accounts. You can buy Reddit accounts or Facebook accounts or Twitter accounts with all levels of karma or post history. The more annoying it is to make an account the more valuable the accounts will be on the bulk market.
Unless the community remains tiny they’ll be targeted just like anybody else.
That’s a bummer. I get it (somewhat), but I’m not really fan of that type of gatekeeping by beehaw. On the positive side, it makes me really appreciate this instance/community and makes me want to interact more on here instead. So I’m looking forward to that.
Yeah. They value heavy moderation as a way to sanitize their community. Fine if that’s what they want but this has quickly taught me that instance isn’t for me. Too authoritarian in my view.
I’m impressed with how The Dude seems to be handling things here.
I’m not really seeing it as gatekeeping. It’s a small mod team that woke up this week to a big chunk of reddit knocking on the door.
It strikes me as reasonable to want to pause for a minute and see what the actual new user numbers will look like on the other side of the blackout.
That is understandable. But there is also the other side: When people joined Beehaw, it was under the assumption that they would be joining the lemmy community, the fediverse. Now, they unilaterally decided to silo themselves, without polling their users, without giving any heads up and without requesting more moderators… Lets not kid ourselves, we need users, the more the better. Sure, we do not need the alt-righters and the nazis and all, but we need users. We need more content in the communities. Beehaw had a significant user base, the third biggest in the Lemmy-verse I think. They just decided to block the biggest (lemmy.world). That essentially broke the userbase in 2. That is a disservice to the whole “unreddit” movement. Absolutely pathetic in my view.
I honestly hope Beehaw users leave Beehaw and join us in Lemmy (as in community, not software). I would also agree with removing Beehaw from join-lemmy. They are using Lemmy software, but they are not really using the Lemmy community. At the very least, there should be a notice regarding that in join-lemmy.
Now, I was unaware that this was a unilateral decision, without input from their users, which renders my comment sorta moot.
You’ve changed my mind. Δ
I hear ya. I don’t know the first thing about what goes into running a big instance like that, so I’m willing to keep an open mind. But I really like this instance for its open approach. It fits with my understanding of how the fediverse would work, especially when some of the bigger instances were (at least initially) encouraging people to not all sign up on the same instance to balance the load of new users. By defederating, it kind of negates that aspect. People are going to need to sign up on multiple instances or just go straight to the big ones to ensure access to those communities.
But with everything being so new, I get it. It’ll be interesting to see how things evolve as the fediverse grows/ages. I do hope the block list gets reconsidered soon enough though.
@Wit changed my mind with their comment. I wasn’t thinking about it from the users’ side.
Wrong person haha, I think you meant @wit :)
Ok I just realized that @ tags don’t display the user’s instance unless you click on them and that’s super confusing, why in the world did they design it like that
I made an account here as a beehaw user and I’m glad that the two mod teams are in discussion. Servers have the right to cordon off their users, but I’d hate to miss out on the content. I feel mixed on the decision, as is represented by my dual accounts.
I fully support their right to defederate as they did, but I am a little concerned by the chilling effect that sudden removal of large userbases who had been communicating with each other creates. I don’t mean specifically in this particular instance because it happened very quickly, but what if the beehaw communities who are large and popular with many users from different instances get disconnected all of a sudden? You’ll get a retraction of users, communities and a general distrust of talking to users on other instances because that communication channel you’ve grown to rely on suddenly just poof disappears effectively on a whim of the instance admins. I do not disagree with Beehaw and what they chose to do. I am just trying to point out that it’s dangerous to defederate and should never be taken lightly.
Oh certainly. I wish that we had less nuclear options like more granular mod controls both on the instance and community level.
Any instance with owners that unreasonable will inevitably become not worth visiting.
That announcement from beehaw was how I found and subscribed to this instance lol
I know I’m kind of late to this party, but it seems to be a good time to take a moment to say, if no one else has, that there are apps out there like Jerboa, that allow you to keep track of multiple Lemmy accounts quite easily. :)
Just downloaded Jebora yesterday and I’m really liking it. I initially tried the lemmy.ml website as my first steps into the fediverse, but was sort of confused on how it all linked together. Jebora was a big help for me in finding instances to follow and just generally making my user experience better overall.
So I second this recommendation.
https://github.com/dessalines/jerboa
Link for the lazy
It’s also on the app store.
Same with the iOS app.
Play Store link for the lazy.
OMG I just flashed back to that “add account” bit on the sidebar…🤯
I hadn’t processed that it meant I could run more than one account from the same app. How cool!
Typing this on Jerboa. If you’ve used any third party reddit app then it’ll feel perfectly familiar. A little bare bones at the moment, but totally fine.
Better moderation tools are always welcome. I’m sure that is 90% of the problem, but it is just a software problem and it will be resolved.
I think there should be standards of moderation (simple things like average time to answer a report) that instances should have to adhere to in order to ensure the moderation:community ratio remains at a level to prevent the worst abuses.
The Beehaw moderator just release an update that is interesting and very good-willed. But I’m confused. I had no problem commenting in Nature and Gardening which is on the Beehaw instance. I thought this wasn’t possible as a sh.itjust.works user?
You can comment there and I probably can see it. They can’t because they’re not pulling sh.itjust.works data.
That makes sense! Is there a place we can see instances that we defederated, if any? I was trying to find Container Gardening which is in instance “I use arch linux FYI” but haven’t had any luck.
https://sh.itjust.works/instances shows instances .works is connected to, but I’m not sure of a way to find other instances that blocked this one. Although if they blocked us, then they didn’t deserve us anyways :^)
Yeah check sh.itjust.works/instances
It is possible, but Beehaw users won’t see your comment (I may be wrong, this is still a bit complicated for me as well).
In fact, no one outside of your instance will be able to see it, because everyone else’s version is in sync with beehaw, which doesn’t get your comments.
Defederating both sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world was such an asinine decision that I honestly hope Beehaw just dies. They are doing a disservice to the entire lemmy community. They just siloed their users. They did not poll them for that decision. I hope most of their users leave them.
I would also be for removing Beehaw from join-lemmy.org. They are using lemmy software, indeed, but they are not really using the lemmy community, not the most of it at least. Someone who joins Beehaw may notice that the community is significantly smaller than they had hoped and go back to other alternatives, which is obviously a bad outcome. We need users.
Like OP said, the long term goals of both instances are aligned.
Federation and defederation are just part of how the fediverse works. Don’t think of the fediverse as a reddit-like network that should always stick together and grow as one userbase. Rather, the focus should be on growing smaller communities that put their interests and users first (just like Beehaw did), while exchanging information with other communities where it benefits them both. If one instance doesn’t work for a particular user, they can always leave and join another one. That’s the beauty of it.
This. We don’t all need to be one big happy family… Federated does not mean a single site decentralized. It also doesn’t mean isolated.
There’s a million flavors of in between they the fediverse let’s us explore, and hopefully instances will rise and fall as we find what builds the best communities. Some will over-moderate, some will be totally unrestricted, some will be safe spaces and echo chambers who carefully manage what users are exposed to, some will vet their users carefully, and most will probably be open to whatever their users ask for
The goal is that instances become all sorts of different places, and users can freely move if they like somewhere else better
I’m all for them running their instance however they want. It’s not what I want and that just means I’ll be avoiding them.
At the very least there should be a warning that this instance blocks content from other popular instances…
Has there been a problem with bad actors on this server yet? I certainly haven’t noticed any.
There has been an individual who flamed beehaw via our server. It happened fast and while we can moderate what this user does locally, we cannot moderate on other instances… as others have stated, there is not much moderation granularity, yet.
Ohhhhh, that was an interesting nugget of information that I didn’t previously understand. Thank you for sharing that.
So, the only way to keep a bad actor registered in your instance from flaming in another one would be to revoke their account completely, then?
Other servers probably need to be able to block individual users from posting anywhere on their instance if we don’t want to end up as mostly disfederated, isolated servers.
The only downside with that is that since this is a server with no join restrictions, trolls can keep spinning up new accounts to troll with and the current mod tools don’t have other ways to handle that.
