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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
All this talk of defederation and blocklists makes me generally uneasy. I understand how itās easy to fall into. Nobody wants political extremists and criminals and bad actors and stuff on their instance, so it makes sense you might want to ban trollfactory dot xyz, nazihq dot us, and/or uncompromisingmarxist dot boats, or whatever.
But I think the stupidest shit I saw on reddit were the subreddits that would ban you for even posting on an ideologically competing subreddit, with no consideration for the message youād written. This is worse than that because itās the opposite, and includes even reading the content.
Imagine if when you went to post on /r/RestaurantOwners, and its AutoMod had the power to then immediately ban you from even looking at /r/antiwork and /r/WorkReform. Imagine posting to /r/conservative to correct someoneās error only to get permanently banned from viewing any āleftistā subs ever again. This is the vibe I get from this and as much as I want to avoid creating nodules of extremism and hatred, I want less to have people grabbing my head, taping my mouth, and averting my eyes from things they donāt like when they donāt even know what my thinking is.
I feel like widespread trigger happy banlists are the death of small instances, too. Maybe one small instance doesnāt catch some newly registered asshole for a day or two but itās too late. The 16-hour a day lifestyle moderator on a massive instance who has gangstalking delusions over nebulous ātrollsā has already blacklisted all 150 of your users permanently and listed your domain for defederation as officially owned by the Nazi party in a massive register shared by the top 100 largest instances. The number of times Iāve heard this story with small Mastodon instances is more than I care for.
Youāre not banned from looking at anything. Just go to their instance, abide by their signup rules and donāt do the shit they defederated to avoid.
A very good take on the pros and cons of this kind of thing.
Personally as someone with an account on Beehaw I donāt think Iāll mind mostly. Iāve been pretty happy with the communities they have already made and been quite impressed with content amounts.
Letās be honest, this federated forum/link-aggregator is in its infancy. Rexxit brought it into the lime light and just kind of put a magnifying glass on these sorts of growing pains.
Iād like to point out that most of the criticism Iāve seen has come from outside the community. I donāt feel like this will be a long term thing only. Itās really an attempt at trying to preserve the community brand and feeling for its members especially while things are still young.
Yeah, I personally would understand the decision more if they at least tried having mods. They donāt. Their mods are just the admins. The admins are also the only ones able to make communities (magazines for kbin viewers) on beehaw.
The admins at Beehaw have been explicit that this choice is not about locking their users in but about keeping bad actors out. But all of this is new, so the tools to accomplish that are crude for now.