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ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works - Beehaw
beehaw.orghey folks, weāll be quick and to the point with this one: ##### we have made the
decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this
is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a
decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our
thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary. ā we have been concerned
with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy isāparticularly with
federation in mindābasically since it began. i have already related
[https://beehaw.org/post/520044?scrollToComments=true] how difficult dealing
with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four
Admins, and increasingly weāre being confronted with external vectors we have to
deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below). an
unfortunate reality weāve also found is we just donāt have the tools or the time
here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some
pretty rudimentary mod powers that donāt scale well. we have a list of
improvements weād like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and
federation if at all possibleābut weāre unanimous in the belief that we canāt
wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now,
while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain. aside
from/complementary to whatās mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by
and large, boils down to: - these two instancesā open registration policy, which
is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it
makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior; - the
disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two
instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on
those two instances; - our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a
vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to
participate in; - and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not
possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account
for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom
explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of
whom simply donāt care about what our instance stands for as Gaywallet puts it,
in our discussion of whether to do this: > Thereās a lot of soft moderating that
happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But itās not just
that, thereās a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust
and support to open up, and itās really hard to trust and support whoās around
you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when
thereās more hostility around them. Theyāll even shut themselves off when
thereās fake nice behavior around. Thereās a lot of nuance in modding a
community like this and itās not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes
people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only
works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we canāt
even assess that for people who arenāt from our instance, so weāre walking a
tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isnāt
sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a
short timeframe. > > Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically arenāt open
to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw
problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of
energy to undo. and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people
legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful
while itās in effect. but we hope you can understand why weāre doing this. our
words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle
platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want
a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you
disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with
the understanding it was an informed decision. this is also not a permanent
judgement. in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and
interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, weāll reassess whether
we feel capable of refederating with these communities. thanks for using our
site folks.
Interesting bit of news for the threadiverse. All three of these are fairly large lemmy instances
No one on beehaw can create communities except the admins, with the promise that they will personally split the ones they have into more distinct topics as it becomes necessary. As such, that also makes them automatically the mods. Itās one of the reasons I decided against it, as well asā¦ * gestures to headline. *
I was quite curious what removing the downvote button would do to foster actual discussion, since its use is frowned upon in my one remaining reddit kebble sub, and everyone who remains each week is shockingly cordial with one another. Pity to see beehaw crashing and burning so fast like this.
Is it crashing and burning if it aligns with their explicitly stated goals? Seems like theyāre sticking to their guns and having a well moderated community by doing this. Some people will want that, some wonāt. But if we want this federation thing to work, we canāt start whining about instances making choices about what their users interact with. If anything Iām glad this is happening early so that people can see how the federation stuff will play out and get used to the idea.
Having thought it over, I think the only two ways this can go are that beehaw defederates with almost everyone who isnāt a carbon copy of themselves in order to lighten the load, or they put more admins/mods in control (is this possible? I assume it is). Nothing else is going to stem interaction between yāallās instance and every person and post on the fediverse that breaks the rules. What they wanted to do is admirable, but really doesnāt scale well with the amount of interaction being seen now.
Temporary measures while they expand their abilities would be the much more expected way for this to go. If instead their solution is to just defederate everything all the time forever because people not signed up for beehaw didnāt sign up for beehawās rules, they might as well have built a wordpress forum for way less money than theyāre spending. Thereās going to be too much.
Iām a bit confused by your comment. They say in their post that they will reevaluate when Lemmyās mod tools improve. More granular control over federation could help too. Itās a temporary measure.
Itās not like theyāre taking extreme action because they want to cause schisms. āThey will defederate with everyoneā only seems to apply if every other huge instance also has high numbers of trolls. Maybe not so unlikely, but mod tools on Lemmy will hopefully improve by then. Note: you sign up for beehawās rules when you choose to interact on beehaw, not when you sign up to beehaw. The issue they are dealing with here is that they have had to disproportionately moderate users interacting on beehaw coming from those instances.
And at the end of the day, if beehaw becomes too isolated, it takes like 5 clicks to open a different instance in my browser and sign up there instead.
For reference, Beehaw blocks almost 400 instances.
Iām assuming most are troublesome communities and it makes sense. But, I do worry they are block happy. I wish they at least had reasons listed or a megathread with reasons for transparency.