The issue with this is beehaw is large enough that them defederating from other instances is potentially a serious threat to those instances. Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation. Moves like this could be interpreted as an attempt to become the dominant instance, defeating the purpose of the fediverse.
I am not 100% sure where you are going with this, however I am going to say I agree that the move by beehaw is a blatent move to exert control on other instances, and it was never in question, in my mind atleast that it was their goal from my reading of their first post. I however disagree that they pose a threat to the other istances, they pose a threat if instances give in, like it apears sh.itjust.works may have done given their new post. Beehaw, sense the begining has been going arround acting like they have quite a bit like they are the arbitor, and everyone else should join them. I for one think the other instances of Lemmy should band together and let Beehaw wall themselves off. I do not think they would sucseed in this goal, and they would either give up on their imperialistic conquest or they would die a death of isolation.
it is a threat if users jump ship to beehaw from the smaller instances beehaw has blocked. but when I wrote that comment I wasn’t aware that lemmy.world is now three times the size of beehaw, at least according to this tally https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. that should counterbalance things.
I am not sure I have seen, in my time watching beehaw block first justify later, a mass transfer to beehaw before, but I uderstand the potential threat now.
Is there an Out of the Loop thread for this? I’m new here and not sure what’s going on.
Beehaw.org, one of the largest instances suddenly decided to also defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works…
They are becoming an incredibly insular community which would normally be fine…but the frustrating bit is that many of us have been enjoying and participating in content from many instances and then suddenly it gets taken away from us.
If they had defederated from the very beginning or if they were a much smaller community it wouldn’t be as frustrating imo.
I just want to be able to interact with people, not keep jumping through hoops to find which instances support other instances and making new accounts there.
Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation.
It’s just that network effects are real. I want to be where all the smart, fun people are, not on a ded site or nazi island. I don’t really care about who’s on my instance, just who’s on the network. Federation and decentralization were never huge selling points for me. And as Mastodon demonstrated, most people just want to log onto a big network and don’t care or want to think about instances.
I feel the same. I don’t care about the instance, I just want to interact with the communities.
It’s lousy being blocked by an entire section of the site and now labelled a bigot because some trolls made their accounts on the same instance as me.
Agreed, it sucks. But their admins are talking to our admins, and so far ours seem like they have their heads screwed on pretty well, so I’m sure it’ll only be for a short time.
Oust the shitheads, promote the stand-up sh.it.heads, I say.
To be honest I had no idea that people from this instance were doing it until one troll post bragging about getting us banned from Beehaw and explained how he did it, along with a comic book supervillian diatribe about how the Fediverse isn’t safe and long live Reddit.
Who gets so weirdly defensive and territorial over a website? Not even their own one at that? I loved spending time on Reddit but I can’t imagine finding other website and deliberately trying to make them a shittier place because I like Reddit.
People do this for just about anything, unfortunately. Review bombing video games that compete with their favorite game, vandalizing things in the colors of the sports team that’s playing against their favorite team, and so on. From the most insignificant internet fandom squabble to genocide. Our brains love tribalism, and if we don’t have strong principles of cooperation and peace, it always seems to crop up.
The hell, lol… do you have a link to that post?
just a heads up, in the past beehaw has accused other instances of brigadding, and being bigots over disagreements that had nothing to do with the such (I know that becuase that was story 3 and 4 respectivly) there is a decent chance that they have done the blocking over a difrent reason (like to exert a level of control) and then back justified. I will be really honest, do not take the beehaw admins word at face value for anything
such users will eventually be relegated to their own little isolated fediverse.
How though? The fediverse is… Federated. They can hop from server to server and be annoying to their heart’s content and everyone on every federated server will get exposed to it. That and the traditional tools of the trade whereby if your account ever gets banned, you just make a new one.
yeah, but they all want to be together. For other examples look at shitposter.club noagendasocial.com etc.
and its certainly part of the reason gab.com decided to deactivate federation from their implementation of mastodon.
Instances can decide to federate only with other instances that share a common Code of Conduct.
That means the LGBTI can have their own set of federated instances, the Nazi can have their own set, the NSFW can have their own set, and so on. There is no requirement for every instance to federate with every other one.
I mean, the url literally contains shit.
If we can’t say naughty words on lemmy I’ll have to find something else. Can’t there be a website with a middle ground between 4th reich HQ and baby preschool?
Can’t there be a website with a middle ground between 4th reich HQ and baby preschool?
Sometimes it feels like the internet is in an unstable equilibrium. A space starts off as a blank slate, not pulled in any particular direction. Then as soon as it gets a critical mass of either miserable jerks or stuck-up prudes, it spirals in that direction until it’s inhospitable to the average person.
This will keep happening.
I’ve seen DDOS attacks launched between rival guilds of MMORPGs. People will find an excuse to be assholes to each other online.
The defederation of Beehaw.org to protect itself is a feature, not a bug. It sucks for the people involved, but I’m liking how the community has managed to come together in light of the actions. Defederating works: it allowed Beehaw.org to ban the trolls and continue their community discussions.
And I say this as a lemmy.world user who was (and still am) cut-off from Beehaw.org. I’d like to get access restored there ASAP, but you know, I’m glad to see that the new tools available here on the Fediverse that didn’t exist in Reddit-world.
Future attacks, invasions, and other such rivalries between communities will only grow bigger, harsher, more serious as time goes on. Consider this whole situation to be just a test of the times to come.
Agreed. There are still more granular tools missing, but a core feature of a federated system is having instances with different ToS, different Codes of Conduct, and when two instances can’t see eye to eye… just defederate and continue business as usual.
On Reddit, mods would ban people “by association” for posting on subreddits they seemed incompatible with theirs… and creating alternate accounts to bypass those bans was considered “ban evasion”, a site-wide offense. That’s not even a concept in the Fediverse.
I mean the easy solution is to have your instance enable registration screening. That’s what it’s for. It takes less than a minute to answer most instances’ registration yet (based on experience) that simple barrier is enough to stop most trolls.
Until a Lemmy instance gets large enough to actually hire full time admins to catch and remove abusive content ASAP, I don’t see instances reasonably being able to go without registration screening because the trolls will seize on that opportunity every time.
Admins of larger instances see it all the time:
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New instance pops up, yay! And most instances automatically federate with new instances!
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It doesn’t have registration screening, this is quickly discovered by trolls and adbots and the instance gets filled with rule breaking content.
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Large instances start blocking it because by federating with an instance that is being used in this way degrades the quality of your own instance and adds a ton of workload to your (unpaid) mods and admins.
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The instance eventually enables registration screening, and other instances start unblocking it.
It’s happened with plenty of instances before and will probably keep happening as long as spam and trolling exist.
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welcome to the fediverse! Before you get “locked in” to a particular instance, take a look at your other choices and pick one that you might fit better in. https://fediverse.observer
For context, what has happened?
I think they were using the open sign ups to join and then harass people, a lot of which were in other instances, in particular beehaw.org. Now beehaw has defederated from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world.
Yeah, I’m sure it doesn’t feel great, but I didn’t get the sense that they were trying to personally attack everyone on the relevant servers, but more of a “we’re only four people, did not expect our instance to become a “default” community, and are completely underwater from a moderation perspective. We need to pull a rip cord to get this under control”
Wait did sh.itjust.works do anything? I thought the story was that beehaw.org cut them and lemmy.world off, but only for people browsing on beehaw.
No Beehaw did not like how Sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world are run, did a complant session about how their mod tools are not talored to give them an excise of power on users not based in their instance, and then cut them off saying “they are willing to negotiate reopening.” Personaly I see this like union bargoning, we are stronger all sticking together and not bending to beehaws wims
There’s a lot of vagueness there. I’d be interested in hearing more details about what they want from mod tools.
Make an account in another instance, there are lots of them.
When other instances have abstract requirements and a manual approval process that takes who-knows-how-long, though, that’s not always such an easy ask. People want to be where other people are, and those busier instances are the ones that set harder requirements.
When I left Reddit, I signed up on two instances: lemmy.ml and beehaw. I was eventually approved for lemmy.ml, but even now trying to access beehaw just hangs on the login page perpetually, presumably because I have not been approved and there’s nothing else I can do on my end.
Ironic that “accounts will be portable - if you don’t like the behaviour, practices, or community of one instance, you can take your data and leave” was touted as the big selling point of the Fediverse.
On more mature projects this is indeed the case. Lemmy only started federating a few years ago and is very much still in beta. We’ll get there eventually and it is already in the dev queue, but keep in mind that there are only two people working on the entire codebase full time. Don’t expect a Reddit level of fit and finish, but at the same time you also need not expect a Reddit level of corporate, shareholder-over-user antics.
Finally, since Lemmy is open source, if you really need a feature right now, then submit a pull request!
We’ll get there eventually
Get where? You appear to be responding from a technical perspective to a complaint about process. The complaint isn’t (primarily) that it is technically hard to migrate data, but that moderators themselves are putting deliberate barriers in the way of migration. It doesn’t matter how fast your car is if there are roadblocks every five meters.
Not all instances do that. Many instances accept you right away.
At the bottom of any webpage (rather than the app) there is an Instances link that lists pretty much all of them. Click a few that catch your eye.
You’d be better off without them, they (the runners of the instance, not the userbase) are a bunch of absolutely cowardly little liars. They were more than happy to accept the massive boon this instance gave them and at the same time agitate and concern troll here to try to drive a wedge in the userbase. I find that shit deeply irritating, especially since they claim to be apolitical and merely blocking instances for “hate speech” which (aside from being a political concept) was seemingly the false pretext they have for also blocking hexbear.net, which is currently forked but is the only instance with substantial usership to mandate pronouns and has much more aggressive anti-racist moderation.
If you simper enough, I’m sure they’ll be happy to have you back since they seem the type to feel they are never receiving enough sycophantic flattery, but that’s a bad trade for you.
If someone claims to be “apolitical” it’s a huge red flag, in itself.
Generally means they’re either clueless or that they want to delete particular views.
I do have concerns about this instance and free speech, but I haven’t bothered to do enough research yet. I’d love to hear more about it either way.
I also hate that I sometimes have to get off of a platform to talk about that platform. I was effectively copying things done for the League of Legends subreddit to here, and I didn’t really feel comfortable talking about it in Reddit DMs.
Exactly. Politics affect every little instance of your daily lives, from the taxes you pay, through the type of food you buy (local or imported?), to the sex of people you can get married to.
Being apolitical is just being ignorant.
The strategy is to just vote and move on. Don’t spend too much time on politics.
Can you link to me where Beehaw claims it was apolitical? From the inclusion of LGBTQ+ and feminism, Politics being similar to the politics subreddit, it would seem to me beehaw generally leans left in terms of culture.
Culturally it trends towards the Democratic Party style of talking a big game about progressivism and then being functionally conservative, but the admins are borderline Thatcherite in their rhetoric.
https://beehaw.org/post/524300
The very first sentence: “Beehaw is a community of individuals and therefore does not have any specific political affiliation.”
After acknowledging the first part I said, it continues:
“What we stand for and the space that we’re trying to make is compatible with many forms of politics. Unfortunately some political groups build themselves around and choose to elevate or tolerate hate speech. These are the only political groups that we are incompatible with.”
"Some of the instances that we have chosen to defederate with have explicit political stances and ideologies. Their political stance and ideology had nothing to do with the choice to defederate. The choice to defederate was based on the amount of hate speech present on the instance and/or explicitly endorsing it. "
Also, goddam is the post longwinded for a simple lie.
But how to pronounce “sh.it”?!
(Weird, don’t know why it automatically became a link.)
AFAIK that’s just standard link terminology. Any . followed by two characters is automatically interpreted as a link. It’s been that way on Twitter for quite a while.
What happened?
just replying so I remember to check back in
Pls use the save button instead :)
nkope
more comments = mkore boost!
We need a @remindmebot for Lemmy. The Reddit one is open source
https://sh.itjust.works/post/107627
Basically, Beehaw defederated from some newer instances. Partially because some people were being shitheads, but for other understandable reasons as well.
The moral of the story is, it’s ok to be a sh.it.head, it’s not ok to be a shithead. Not the same.
hey, I have been here awhile, and while I am not 100% sure the exact issue that triggered this, what I can tell you is generaly the beehaw admin team has shown themselves not to be the most trust worthy team when it comes to lemmy instances, so I would take their story with a grain of salt
these two instances’ open registration policy
So the problem they have is that they don’t make new users jump trough hoops?
deleted by creator
Eh, it’s not all bad. They want a certain tenor to their instance, and don’t have the tools to effectively deal with folks who want to screw with that. Lemmy is in a period of exponential growth, and open registration policies seem to be the exception rather than the norm.
If it’s an actual problem (I haven’t seen anything particularly problematic yet, but I’m your average good natured sh.it.head), they’re within their rights to use the few tools at their disposal to calm things down, work with the instances of concern, and retool their approach.
This is all a learning experience for everyone involved. I have no ill-will or butthurt over this move, just disappointment that we can’t have nice things right away.
@Cracks_InTheWalls sigh. So basically the jerks that were banned from reddit are trying to ruin things here. and getting themslves banned and a few instance to not talk to eachother till their gone. Oof.
I mean, that’s one part of it, but I do recommend reading the link on my comment here if you haven’t already. Before the redditors came, moderation was comparatively easy - lemmy traffic was pretty small. Additionally, most instances had (still have) a vetting process to try and weed out the trolls. sh.itjust.works is a free for all in comparison, and that’s one of the reasons I love it. Give a username and a password, and you’re off to the races (for how much longer, idk).
But imagine you’re a Lemmy instance admin in a pre-APIocolypse world. You’re building a community with certain values/norms, most everyone is agreeing to play ball, and you’ve got a nice little group. Then you have a bunch of sh.it.heads sign up. Some of them want to be shitheads. It gets extremely difficult to separate the shitheads from the sh.it.heads, because all of your tools are geared towards managing your previously small, mostly pre-vetted userbase and a small, mostly pre-vetted number of outsiders. End of the day, you’re one of only 4 hobbyist admins. So chaos ensues - not even just because of the shitheads, but just the sheer jump in activity in general. And there are some immediate choices to make.
I think this is a good object lesson in the realities of federated services and gaps that need to be addressed to make it as positive an experience as possible. Better to happen now than later. Lots of lessons to be learned over the coming weeks and months.
The main “gap” I see in all this, is the lack of user account migration.
Instances defederating is a feature, not a bug, it’s how instances with incompatible Codes of Conduct are supposed to interact: just go each their own way.
What’s lost in the process, is users getting taken for the ride. There should be an easy way for users to hop from one instance to another when they realize their current instance doesn’t meet their expectations.
That might require having to get verified into a new Code of Conduct on a different instance, maybe a review of whatever post history they want to import, maybe just a multi-accont UI. It’s something to be worked out.
Why do they need to grow a pair? They did what they felt was needed and used the tools at their disposal. Tell the people that caused the issues to act mature and as if they have functioning brains. Not sure how people are at fault for wanting to use the internet in peace and enjoy doing so.
it’s anti-competitive, which goes against the “no one group is in charge” spirit of the fediverse. Beehaw is a large instance with a lot of sway.
It’s not “anti-competitive”, it’s what freedom of speech looks like: you are free to be a shithead, you are not free to force others to listen to you.
Keep in mind that “defederating” is the opposite to a “site-wide ban” on places like Reddit, the shitheads can still behave any way their admins will let them on their own instance.
There is no “sway” when everyone can start their own instance.
there is no “sway” when everyone can start their own instance
people use social media to see posts and talk to people. they are gonna go wherever they can see the most posts and talk to the most people. federation is what keeps this gravitational pull from creating a monopoly as everyone flocks to the largest site with the most content.
thankfully beehaw is not the largest site with the most content — lemmy.world is bigger. otherwise, beehaw’s aggressive blocking of other instances might start causing users of those instances to jump ship to beehaw, killing off the competition and making beehaw a monopoly.
