hey folks, we’ll 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.
we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).
an unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t 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 don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t 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 what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:
- these two instances’ 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 don’t care about what our instance stands for
as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:
There’s a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it’s 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 can’t even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.
Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t 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 it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re 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 (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.
thanks for using our site folks.
Not a beehaw user directly, but I use many beehaw communities.
I appreciate the forwardness and transparency in this matter. As you’ve outlined, both in this post and in subsequent comments, this seems to be, rather than a full defederation, a conditional one. I’m totally for that, and I think the ability to do so is one of the key concepts that makes Federation such a useful and powerful tool. Those instances who cannot or do not moderate content that your instance doesn’t believe in can simply be removed from the equation.
I hope to see more of this accountability being held between instances in the future. At the end of the day, our communities are fragmented by nature, and there are times we should remove separate communities explicitly. A good example I can think of is on Mastodon all the instances with CSAM or nazis.
The Fediverse gives us a greater ability to fine-tune our communities and curate the experience members thereof get to have, as well as what content they can be exposed to. I’m glad to see people taking strong action in favour of their community, and so long as it comes from this perspective, with genuine communication with the community, everything will work out.
/rant
Just a heads up so you can try to plan ahead: on Reddit one of the tactics used by those with hateful agendas was to shut down progressive threads by purposely creating drama in that thread to overwhelm the moderators so that they had to lock the thread thus stopping all discussion. Sometimes they did this by being awful and dragging in well meaning users into fights, other times I they’d drop a few “I’m just asking questions” comments focussing on hot-button ideas that they knew would rile up arguments. It was very deliberate tactic and one that I don’t think moderators ever figured out how to deal with effectively, because short of babysitting the thread with their full attention from start to finish there was no way to prevent entire threads from devolving into attacks and arguments.
The crazy thing was how effectively one or two people with hateful agendas could derail an entire comment section of well meaning people and, by getting the thread locked, shut down the discussion and spread of progressive ideas.
I bring this up because Beehaw is perhaps uniquely vulnerable to this sort of ‘attack’, and you should expect to see it in the future. By joining other federated instances and using these tactics to stir up drama in Beehaw threads they can, by forcing your hand to defederalize, restrict the access of those other communities to the progressive ideals and ideas posted on Beehaw. The end result is isolating progressive ideas inside our walled garden, while users of the rest of the Lemmy instances start to only see more right-wing extremist views, normalizing them to otherwise everyday people.
I don’t have a solution to this. But it’s something to be aware of in discussions with the moderators of other instances, that a handful of people with this exact agenda can make their community look bad in order to restrict their users’ access to progressive ideas.
As a temporary solution de-federation is a fine idea. Permanently, I fear you guys may be shooting yourself in the foot. I joined a few days ago after seeing you were federated with most of the larger instances, and you had a decent number of communities similar to subreddits. Again, I understand how you can see this as necessary to maintain a safe space, but it will most definitely be the death of Beehaw in the long run. I’ll probably swap to another instance for now.
Completely agree with this decision, and it actually comes as a bit of a relief; I saw a statistically significant number of lemmy.world users who admitted to being denied from Beehaw because they didn’t want to “write an essay” or aggressively disagreed with the disabled downvotes (something that I’ve grown to appreciate).
I’m expect that the large influx of disruptive users is from the reddit migration, and I’m hopeful that the majority of the users will either adapt to the culture we’re trying to build here, or find their own niches in other communities. As you noted in your post, and in my own experience moderating real life groups, allowing a disruptive influence in a safe space can have serious negative effects on group cohesion that can persist for a long time, if it doesn’t alter the culture outright.
I think this is very disappointing, and exceptionally selfish, to split up some of the largest Lemmy communities while a mass Reddit exodus is ongoing. We should be sticking together and trying to grow the Fediverse as a whole, rather than trying to wall off any one single community at this point. That said, I hope this is the end of this approach, and that smaller instances, particularly ones that support a particular community won’t be pushed aside as well (hello from Lemmy Portugal).
This is really hard to process.
I came to beehaw because it seemed to very welcoming and the fediverse provided freedom which was excellent. It is difficult to process because now users on beehaw are being told “you can be open and welcoming as long as you don’t dare integrate your beehaw and lemmy world experience”. Hopefully the beehaw staff understand that ultimately, users desire freedom to choose how they want their online experience.
I can only see this hurting beehaw in the future and hopefully this is a short misstep and not a permanent decision. The only reason that beehaw has seen massive growth is because of the association with lemmy world and other popular instances. This fragmentation will only hurt Lemmy when Reddit was seen as a “one stop shop” for all posts.
If anyone has an issue with defederating to reduce stress (and worse) for our volunteer mods, please watch the Documentary “The Cleaners” (2018) about how moderators in Manila for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter & Co. got PTSD (and worse) from moderating content. Or at least this video about the traumatic life of a Facebook moderator by The Verge.
That’s kinda sad, because it reinforces the clutter of decentralisation even more :(
Disappointing to see the largest lemmy instances fracturing so early. But this also confirms my decision to self host my own instance - to avoid this sort of thing.
I am not going to stand for this.
I didn’t come here into the fediverse to have instances dictate on their whim that I’ll not have access to something.
This goes completely against the idea of having an unified platform. You can of course do whatever you want, but I’ll not be part of a closed garden.
Well I was worried, but I can still access the communities I’m subscribed to from those instances so I can appreciate this more.
My biggest issue with Reddit has been the lack of nuanced discussion. Everything is just black or white. If we can keep that element out of this instance I’ll be happy.
I am a moderator on the lemmy.world sailing community through my Beehaw acct. Will this affect that?
@alyaza I think the “solution” here is worse than the problem.
Unsurprisingly this has made some people very ANGY. So much of the anger is coming from the sort of people that it validates to me that I’d rather be a part of a “lib SJW hugbox” run by “dictators” than whatever those people see as their ideal community. Why is it that freedom of speech maximalists are never pleasant people?
Of course it’s not an ideal solution, but barring better moderation tools it seems like the least bad solution when considering Beehaw’s goals, which don’t include 100% unfettered free speech or having to federate with every single other Lemmy instance out there.
I’m glad to see you telling us and coming forward on this, and that these steps are being taken. Lemmy is a small project, so expecting it to have robust mod tools isn’t realistic. Former Redditors here probably know that some subs have closed indefinitely simply because without good third party mod tools they’ll be near impossible to run safely.
Everything does feel quite new and volatile on this side of the Fediverse. The Mastodon instance I use has a very long list of blocked instances, especially since it’s aimed at LGBTQ+ users. There’s some messed up people out there, and I appreciate the action on the part of the admins. Just slapping a “safe space” sticker on something does not automatically make it one, and it makes me feel really good to be on an instance that understands that.
