Some of y'all getting angry need to look at yourself in the mirror. The whole point of federation was to allow communities to do things like this if they want.
A lot of new people are going to see this mudslinging and rightfully turn around. Nobody is coming to Lemmy to see drama between instances.
I mean some people absolutely do love and feed on drama, but is that who we want to attract? They're not the nicest bunch to have around in my experience.
exactly this; the whole point was so instances could pick and choose who they wanted to interact with
I'd always heard that federation was good because if you get an instance infested with fascists, you (and everyone else who doesn't want anything to do with them) can just cut that instance loose and let it drift away
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it. The fact that federation has been the only discussion since the blackout is not good for the alternatives to reddit. My whole life is tech and if it's this distracting to me I can't imagine any remotely average user being interested. The fact that this was the perfect time to be part of an alternative but the whole experience has mostly just proven reddits "give it a week" response true.
kbin is only live a month or so.... of course there will be problems and missing moderation tools - it wont be much better for lemmy.
There is no perfect time - some people will stay some will go back to reddit witout any change. thats a user thing not the fault of beehaw or the federation of servers.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.
That was never going to happen, not even in the best possible case.
Far left and far right are always going to split off. Do you want to be having discussions about race with neo nazis? I don't. Let them go to their own dark corner of the internet.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.
No. If an instance hosts toxic communities then your instance can choose to defederate from it. You don't have to wait for the centralized authority to ban them. It's about being able to choose your admins and form a web of "good" communities.
I think what I’m still trying to learn and adjust to (having come from Reddit) is how it’s different in terms of filtering out certain subs you wouldn’t want to see there. Like I don’t want to subscribe to conservative I can just not do so or filter it out, whereas this feels like whoever runs beehaw is choosing what communities we can interact with? Or is Beehaw itself and the communities contained within similar to Reddit?
Essentially what I’m looking for is something more akin to the forums of old with entertainment, tech and less toxic news. Decent communities to discuss subjects on while still keeping up to date on things.
I'd also like a way to filter out certain communities, I'm sure that's already on the todo list.
And yes, the 4 people who run Beehaw are choosing what communities you can interact with by defederating other instances, this means people from those instances can't comment on beehaw and you won't see posts from them.
Reddit admins did something similar when they banned subreddits, except the difference is that on lemmy if you liked those banned communities then you could create an account on their instance and continue participating in those communities.
The idea is for instance admins to curate an experience for their users by choosing which instances they federate with. That's why beehaw has defederated from around 200 instances https://beehaw.org/instances while my instance has defederated from 4 https://partizle.com/instances
I do think it's fair to criticize the decision to try to be one of the largest instances while only having four moderators. They should have accepted a place as a midsize instance with midsize communities in order to maintain their moderation goals. Or they could have worked to get more moderators. Blaming the defederated instances and mod tools seem disingenuous at best. That said mod tools undoubtedly need improvement.
To be fair, they said the reason they were defederating from those two instances in particular is because most of their moderation involved people from them. They didn't expand beehaw beyond what they could handle, the rest of lemmy expanded beyond what they could handle. If this really is just a temporary measure, which is also what they said, then I think it's pretty reasonable.
That's because they defederated from the two largest competing instances. I'm talking about the communities users not the instances. The issue is that beehaw has the largest and therefore defacto default communities. The timing is bad and will likely affect wider adoption. The biggest problem is that it is entirely foreseeable and solved by either accepting a smaller community (closing signups) or improving moderation capabilities (getting more moderators or investing in an alternative moderation system) before it meant splitting the threadiverse in half.
I'm not denying that it sucks, but if you'd told anybody this was going to happen a month ago they'd have just laughed at you. Of course they were unprepared. Everbody has more than they can deal with. Adding more mods isn't as simple as picking some names out of a hat, and this isn't a thing anyone was preparing for. There currently are no alternative moderation systems, everything is too new and until recently was all way to small for that to be important, and they just have more work then they can deal with trying to suddenly moderate all of the threadiverse.
This was a bad option that sucked, but every option was a bad option that sucked. I'm more concerned with how they deal with things as they normalize over the coming weeks and months than I am with how they're trying to put out the fires in the short term.
But they chose a nonstandard moderation strategy that limited their ability to scale moderation with users. The default system is that communities are moderated independently of admins (not saying admins don't form communities or that there's no overlap between admins and mods) whereas on beehaw only the admins can create communities and therefore are the primary moderators.
Now I'm not saying that there's anything inherently wrong with the system they've chosen but the fact that it is nonstandard and in fact built into the core precept of beehaw means that this was easily foreseen.
Easily forseen if you knew that lemmy was suddenly going to have a hundred times as many users in the space of a couple weeks. That was the thing no one was prepared for though.
lemmy.ml has a completely different idea of how it wants to be run. That happens to have been hurt a lot less by a sudden massive influx of new users, but that wasn't the reason it was different. What do you even think beehaw could have done that would have better given their goals?
The admins have always been clear that they’re not trying to replace Reddit, and I’m quite sure they were not trying to be one of the largest instances.
If they weren’t trying to get large then how did that happen? Based on admin comments, beehaw was one of the more active instances when the first wave of migration happened; and a decent amount of the pre-first wave posts about lemmy I saw on Reddit were about how Beehaw was a good instance to join as it was defederated from lemmygrad.
I'm not saying this has anything to do with replacing reddit but it is bad for the larger threadiverse community. Notably there were several other instances that closed registration for the purposes of not growing quicker than they could handle long term (see lemmy.ml). Beehaw has most of the largest (and therefore defacto default) communities. Active steps to avoid that would have allowed them to maintain their moderation goals while growing in an organic and sustainable way that benefits the larger threadiverse community.
I was strictly replying to the part of your comment where you said they made a decision to try to be one of the largest instances – imo they did not make a explicit decision to try to be that, but rather the growth was a side effect of the circumstances around reddit users checking out the fediverse.
Is closing registrations is better than having an application with questions that weed out low-effort users? IMO it’s probably a wash. beehaw has only banned one user from the local instance that I know of, so the application process seems to be working overall. The issue is that other instances are growing too quickly and needing to moderate those users, not their own.
I do agree this isn’t great for the threadiverse and I wish it hadn’t come to this, both on a personal and community level. I was subbed to the knitting community on lemmy.world, it was the most active of those communities that I saw, and now I’m locked out. Idk if I want to move to an alt on a different instance, or self-host my own so that I’m fully in control of what I can see, or what. :S
No the issue is that four moderators for the whole instance was always unsustainable and allowing the communities to become the defacto defaults without growing the mod teams was a bad idea. This was easily foreseen and corrected. Blaming other instances is not at all fair.
you do not understand the problem. The growth was on every server of the fedivers - so moderationg users from different servers was to much work. how should they stop people from other servers? two options - block any individuell(which is to much work with so many open registration servers - they can just spamm new servers) or nuke the server where most of the trolls come from.
I DO understand the problem. They only have an issue with an influx of users because they are the largest (defacto default) communities. A position that was incompatible with their moderation system from the get go. Had they had more sustainably sized communities none of this would have been an issue.
The moderated, reasonable stance is that everyone is right! Beehaw probably could have done things differently, including making a stickied post that they don’t want to be the default large instance, and/or acquired a lot more mods to manage the federation of other large instances. On the other hand, Lemmy doesn’t have the same principles as Beehaw and prioritized the growth of their userbase over a filtering system. To you it looks like one is worse than the other, that’s because you want to see content from everywhere and don’t share the principles of the other federation - so you’re probably not a good fit for Beehaw atm (and if anyone is blindsided, I don’t get it.. I could see it written all over Beehaw that they are trying to promote certain principles over growth, I don’t share in those principles but I can respect that they were direct about it).
Everyone on the Fediverse should expect to see instances un/re-federate several times over especially in the growing stages. The critique is fine but it should definitely be tempered with reasonable expectations and not unnecessary ridicule.
The idea that people are missing content on Lemmy/Beehaw/Kbin instances that get defederated are looking at this from a “this should be super convenient” mentality which, convenience is why Reddit expects you’ll go back. Quality of content, genuine community-building, and/or responsible upper management doesn’t have as much value there, it is inherent in them being a VC, convenience is what matters most on Reddit/TikTok/Twitter/etc.
On the Fediverse, the one thing that should be said more is that the instance you join, you should prepare to be involved locally through that instance more than anything else. The idea you can or should just join anywhere was something I wrong wrong about, as was much of the Reddit people saying “join Lemmy it doesn’t matter where, it’s all federated.” I don’t blame them or myself, it’s a newer concept and nuance is lost at the entry- level to anything. If people were coming to the Fediverse for fully federated, more convenient content than they should try Mastadon, because they’re farther along and had their own issues to deal with during the Twitter migration that propelled them much like these instances that are still growing and learning will, in time.
That's not necessarily true. There's both approaches at work here, one is the "themed community" one, and the other is the "universal citizen" one. That user/forum migration has not been implemented from the beginning (but it will hopefully asap), speaks rather more about the mindset of the developers. I myself would find it an absolute no-go if i would be participating in the technical desigh of a social server network, if servers were to own users and communities. That would lead to the exact same problems as corporate sites pose -- they are governed by people with specific mindsets, and that is to be avoided.
You have largely missed the mark on my motivations for posting and familiarity with the fediverse. Ultimately, this is an issue of responsible community building. As it stands the beehaw communities are the only ones with subscriber counts over 10k. There is absolutely no way new users will not end up there without the larger threadiverse community making an active effort to phase out the beehaw communities in favor of more open ones and if that does not happen the same four admins will continue to have an outsized effect on the network. This is bad for everyone.
This simply solidifies my opinion that I've had all along that Beehaw is a trash instance full of sensitive censor-happy ninnies and I hope they all resolve the issues they are having to eventually be finally free from trolls and assholes in their humble & beautiful walled-garden paradise echo chamber. All the best for them.
That's been my view too. There's definitely a need for moderation, but I've been on the internet for quite some time and the vibe from Beehaw is very much concerning. Any time I've seen a community run like that, it always always ends up feeling like an echochamber run by a dictator. I want an internet that's mostly wholesome, not a "happy fun camp where there's all smiles and you had better not frown!"
I have a beehaw account. I've only experienced one user who's a bit too intense about their thoughts. Everyone else has just been chill. The admin aren't defederating from lemmy.ml, the other big instance, and have no plans to do so. They really were just overwhelmed by the two feds they blocked because of trollish users. It's not as intense as you make it sound.
I think it's great. I want an account there for the occassions when I want to visit a safe space or a SFW website. It doesnt have to be your identity. You can go to different instances in different contexts, for different modes of interaction. And a third unrelated instance can remain federated with them both, if that's amenable to all parties.
Yeah I don't feel quite as harshly but as soon as I saw they didn't allow downvotes I knew their philosophy wasn't for me. Too bad about losing their gaming group though.
Isn't the whole point of the fediverse that you get to create and craft your experience for your community? There's a really good reason defederating is a feature. I don't get it, Beehaw decides to use the features of federation so now we: firstly become tribalistic (them vs us), and secondly decide to get angry? Like it or not, this is what you signed up for when you wanted federation.
I don't see the point of getting angry like this, and really don't see how this negativity being conducive to a thriving community. Some new people are going to explore fediverse, see tribalistic mudslinging among instances, and say "not for me."
I'd say respect their decision and move on, if it's not for you it's not for you.
Isn't the whole point of the fediverse that you get to create and craft your experience for your community? There's a really good reason defederating is a feature. I don't get it, Beehaw decides to use the features of federation so now we: firstly become tribalistic (them vs us), and secondly decide to get angry? Like it or not, this is what you signed up for when you wanted federation.
Yes, exactly
like we're not owed Beehaw's cooperation; it's their instance and if the users want to do this then that's their perogative
Regardless, this is being blown out of proportion; Beehaw outright said that this was temporary
Its both a value add and a negative. For those more focused on their own community (Like beehaw) it's an obvious positive. But for many users, losing access to certain communities on your own instance of choice is going to be a negative. I personally don't blame Beehaw for favoring the former. I think improved moderation tools and more granular federation would at least make the move less of a blow to users.
Yeah, they're saying "look, we only have four mods, have a highly targeted type of community we are trying to build, and have had to disproportionately moderate users from these instances" which seems reasonable on it's face.
That's kind of the beauty of Lemmy/Kbin right? You can spin up an instance with whatever rules you want. I think people are reacting to the fact that during the Reddit exodus Beehaw kind of looked like a "default" general instance, including me.
But that's a misreading on our part, not them going back on that.
Absolutely. It’s disappointing that this person read a post made by the Beehaw admins that was written with nuance and grace, and then decided to respond with vitriol. That’s exactly the kind of attitude that is so prolific on Reddit, and I am happy to leave it behind. Thank you for your reasoned reply.
OP, I encourage you in the future to choose grace.
This kind of post right here is the gold standard for why I chose Kbin over other instances. Well reasoned, free of vitriol, and looking to build a new culture outside of the one a lot of us left behind on Reddit.
Vitriol is a strong word to describe what I said about Beehaw. I do not hold a bitter spite to what Beehaw did, in fact I understand and accept their decision as prudent and appropriate for their community.
I simply hate how they act benevolent where the reality is the opposite; that their admins are legitimately overlords akin to a full-time power-abusing reddit moderator.
Regarding your comment that I need to act with more grace, my apologies. You are correct, I should be less aggressive in my opinions and will self-censor henceforth to protect and maintain the humility of the discussions that occur here.
I simply hate how they act benevolent where the reality is the opposite; that their admins are legitimately overlords akin to a full-time power-abusing reddit moderator.
What do you mean by this? Do you have examples? Maybe you’re correct and I just haven’t seen it, but every example I’ve seen of them responding to something has been great.
Regarding your comment that I need to act with more grace, my apologies. You are correct, I should be less aggressive in my opinions and will self-censor henceforth to protect and maintain the humility of the discussions that occur here.
yeah, this is the weird thing; Beehaw's reasonings are incredibly reasonable, and they're not saying that the other parts of Lemmy aren't good enough for them, which is what I think a lot of people are getting mad at
that and thinking that they're entitled to access to Beehaw
Federation allows the admins of a server to decide what kind of servers they want to federate with, but also to defederate from others.
It's only two servers that were creating problems with all the trolling and intolerant comments that came from there. Beehaw didn't isolate itself/blocked everyone else in the fediverse.
I think this is a fair choice for Beehaw to make, but I am frustrated that now I have less content to read. I wish we had better community discovery tools.
The sad reality is that during the reddit blackout, people were pushing lemmy (specifically Beehaw) as the reddit replacement because yay decentralized, federated, fun!
For a lot of those reddit refugees the effort they put into making content and trying to make Beehaw their home is gone now.
They're not going to want to start all over at a new instance and rebuild yet again.
I think the issue is that everyone's so focused on seeing Lemmy as a "notReddit" that they outright get pissed when it doesn't work the way they think it should (like Reddit except the parts they think are bad)
Lemmy (and kbin, and other similar platforms) and Reddit have the same niche, but they're not the same thing
I feel like the concept of "decentralisation" is good for the consuming users and people who want to discuss an interesting topic/subject, but not really for OC/content craetors... They just want their work to be as exposed to as many people as possible (exposure -> more clients -> bigger brand/value -> profit???), and defederalisating goes against that principle.
Exactly. I've been trying to rebuild my account on lemmy.world but it's disenheartening and honestly makes me want to not bother. The answer isnt defederating, the answer is find some mods.
This defed thing and finding my feed now not updating from communities I joined on lemmy.world and now having to explore other instances that seem unlikely to defed from lemmy.world and vice versa makes it apparent it's not a substitute for a reddit subscription feed yet with the risk of sudden cut off.
Aside from lemmy I had been using squabble and even with like only 14,000 users it felt very active because creation of communities and posting was so much simpler. There I've gotten more of a subscription feed experience that feels bit more reddit. It's lot more casual though.
I hope some update for lemmy comes out where at the very least there can be some type of RSS agnostic feed where I can set up multisubreddit equivalents to follow my communities and view posts regardless of whether I’m signed in or not, so the only decision I have to make when it comes to logging into an account is which one to use so I can interact with my community.
Something like this
lemmy/c/PatientGamers@sh.itjust.works+technology@beehaw.org+Futurama @lemmy.world+Android@lemmy.world+RetroGaming@lemmy.world+PC Gaming@lemmy.ca+Movies and TV Shows@lemmy.film/.rss
This is honestly the only major issue I have with the Fediverse. Most of my Reddit/social media posts are related to three or so niche interests. My first Mastodon account was on the central hub for one interest that later defederated with the central hub for another interest. Not being able to interact with 1/3rd of the people I want to interact with just defeats the whole point of joining these kinds of platforms. Moderators just carving out a chunk of the Fediverse for their users is just unacceptable.
I created my first account there but left for lemmy.world once I realised users couldn't create communities and all the communities were controlled by the same small group of admins.
Ok, that's the definition of a powertrip. And exactly what we want to avoid.
We sse it on some communities here btw, some mods owning 60 empty subs. I hope there is a reseting of subs ownership after a month of zero content and activity.
IMO this is a wholly negative development, the whole point of federation is for the instances to be connected and beehaw has effectively isolated themselves entirely :/
Yeah, I had signed up to beehaw and was subscribed to communities I wanted to follow then found my subscription feed had gotten useless since new content from the communities on like lemmy.world I had added no longer updated.
There needs to be some type of RSS agnostic feed where I can set up multisubreddit equivalents to follow my communities and view posts regardless of whether I’m signed in or not, so the only decision I have to make when it comes to logging into an account is which one to use so I can interact with my community.
Something like this
lemmy/c/PatientGamers@sh.itjust.works+technology@beehaw.org+Futurama @lemmy.world+Android@lemmy.world+RetroGaming@lemmy.world+PC Gaming@lemmy.ca+Movies and TV Shows@lemmy.film/.rss
But, this current situation where I have to like go to beehaw to see my community feed then go sh.itjust.works see my community feed is a hassle. I want to see it in one view ideally even if I have to switch accounts to interact. Instances are confusing enough but having subscription feeds just evaporating is the big con.
thats really not the point of federation. the point of federation is consent. beehaw doesnt consent to being federated with lemmy.world. it just makes sense.
Ultimately this is because beehaw allowed themselves to become one of the largest instances on the threadiverse with a minimal mod team. Any blame on the other instances/mod tools is deflection. This is poor management at it's core and is bad for the larger community. That said I would love to see more in the way of improved mod tools.
Honestly, this is disappointing, but not particularly surprising. It's a problem that's at least as old as Usenet, in terms of different communities not getting along. It's also not uncommon that people setting up instances are new, inexperienced with moderation, and sometimes even just let people register without any kind of verification because why not?
I think an important point is for admins / mods from various instances to try to get on the same page, in terms of policies. Building that common ground early, and establishing best practices, really helps mitigate a lot of the BS that can happen.
As far as I know the content is duplicated on each server federated, on demand by users requesting content. My guess is that the content will be frozen on the defederation date. Your server won't be able to read, or maybe read, but certainly not write to the other server, and the conversations there will happen without you.
sh.itjust.works user checking in, my experience seems to confirm that theory. I can still see content from beehaw that I'm subscribed to from before they defederated.
To be honest? I don't like the decision I wish there was a better way to handle this, this might make users not want to join the fediverse out of fear of losing contact with communities that they participate in.
Just make an extra account... I don't know about you, but I have a ton of reddit accounts, on reddit I already kept my participation separated and I used containers to quickly switch between them. It's fine, I wouldn't even notice a difference.
there is still enough serves that you can register that are not blocked by beehaw - or you can interact with mastodon/calckey software with lemmy and kbin. so easy.
I think for those looking for a reddit alternative what they want most is to be able to keep track of their communities they subscribed to without suddenly finding out that the instance they are signed onto defeded from an outside instance leading to the feed stopping from those communities.
I wonder if there is some type of RSS agnostic feed so I can set up multisubreddit equivalents to follow my communities and view posts regardless of whether I'm signed in or not, so the only decision I have to make when it comes to logging into an account is which one to use so I can interact with my community.
Something like this
lemmy/c/PatientGamers@sh.itjust.works+technology@beehaw.org+Futurama @lemmy.world+Android@lemmy.world+RetroGaming@lemmy.world+PC Gaming@lemmy.ca+Movies and TV Shows@lemmy.film/.rss
But, this current situation where I have to like go to beehaw to see my community feed then go sh.itjust.works see my community feed is a hassle. I want to see it in one view ideally even if I have to switch accounts to interact.
All this talk of defederation and blocklists makes me generally uneasy. I understand how it's 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 you'd written. This is worse than that because it's 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 someone's error only to get permanently banned from viewing any "leftist" 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 don't like when they don't even know what my thinking is.
I feel like widespread trigger happy banlists are the death of small instances, too. Maybe one small instance doesn't catch some newly registered asshole for a day or two but it's too late. The 16-hour a day lifestyle moderator on a massive instance who has gangstalking delusions over nebulous "trolls" 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 I've heard this story with small Mastodon instances is more than I care for.
A very good take on the pros and cons of this kind of thing.
Personally as someone with an account on Beehaw I don’t think I’ll mind mostly. I’ve been pretty happy with the communities they have already made and been quite impressed with content amounts.
Let’s 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.
I’d like to point out that most of the criticism I’ve seen has come from outside the community. I don’t feel like this will be a long term thing only. It’s really an attempt at trying to preserve the community brand and feeling for its members especially while things are still young.
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.
Add comment