The GOP package, called the “Lowering Education Costs and Debt Act,” consists of five bills that the senators say will address the root causes of the student debt issue such as the increasing price of college and students taking out loans they can’t afford.
“Unlike President Biden’s student loan schemes, this plan addresses the root causes of the student debt crisis. It puts downward pressure on tuition and empowers students to make the educational decisions that put them on track to academically and financially succeed,” he added.
Lowering people's ability to borrow doesn't really address the other problems which underlie high tuition costs - such as newer facilities costs, more administrative staff (both of which, IMO, heavily relate to the competition between schools to provide the most services to their students and court new student admissions), and decreases in federal and state funding coming from tax revenue which has led to much of the financial burden being passed onto individual students.
Plus, as @misguidedfunk mentioned, we already tell students their upfront cost of attendance - multiple times even before they decide to enroll or start classes - and they have to acknowledge it as part of receiving aid.
Ostensibly The Cleaners is about the outsourced workers that these companies use to determine whether photos and videos that have been shared online should be allowed to stay there. The film tracks a handful of people based in Manila that spend their days looking at terrorist videos, political propaganda, self-harm videos, and...
It isn't really unnecessary - as mentioned in the post, this is for the very explicit purpose of making Beehaw easier to moderate so that it can stay closer to its intended vision, and these two instances' explosive growth is what made moderating incoming traffic from them so difficult.
In any case, the goal is here is not necessarily continuous growth, to revolutionize social media, or to replace Reddit - it is to build an intentional community which users find nice and inviting to participate in. Besides, there are still other vectors external to Beehaw through which one might interact with this pocket of the Lemmyverse. Like you said, you'll still be able to interact from other places like infosec.pub.
While yes, there are a ton of users on those instances, it's more so the fact that we don't have adequate tools for moderating them and maintaining the kind of community Beehaw seeks to provide while remaining federated. It isn't an easy call to make, but Lemmy doesn't offer any kind of middle ground from the sysadmin's perspective.
It may feel anti-fediverse, but this is actually just a fact of federation: sometimes, there are reasons why you might want to cut off even the biggest instances. Of course, that may feel like Beehaw is becoming more siloed, but we still federate with large instances like kbin.social and a bunch of other smaller instances. We can still refederate in the future, but in the mean time, we stuck waiting for Lemmy to improve as a software - definitely going to need as many devs as we can to work on that problem.
I'll leave it to an admin to answer the latter two, but it's nothing wrong necessarily with open registration (that is, letting anyone sign up without an application, for anyone reading this). It's more so just instances getting to a point in size where they boil over, with bad actors starting up accounts on those instances to repeatedly harass/troll/etc. This, at the moment, is very easy to do - especially without email verification (I know that's a soft deterrence, but bear with me) or some other deterring measure.
It's hard for the admins of those instances as well, because there's not as much in the way of seeing outgoing participation from their users either and they can't see their users getting reported or blocked on other instances very easily. At the moment this is just one of two options that exists in Lemmy's software - the other one being doing nothing.
It's generally because of mods staying on top of it, haha, but from what I've gathered over the past few days from the other mods, doing so has been difficult. I've seen a lot of the content that's been deleted recently for being just downright toxic or spammy and a huge amount of it came from either of the two instances. Which is shitty, because I've also had lots of positive interactions from people from those places and I'm happy for all the cool people I saw who got to interact with Beehaw and experience our community. Hopefully, refederation will be possible in the near future.
You're more than welcome to maintain an account here on Beehaw while having a home on another instance, especially if you still want to interact with content from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. In the future, refederation is still possible, but the main thing we have to wait for is for Lemmy's software to get better.
Yes, it is bidirectional. Lemmy.world users will not see Beehaw.org communities and vice versa.
Unfortunately, there's not a middle ground within the software for us to remain federated on a more limited basis which would make moderating easier but still let users interact between the two, but hopefully with changes to Lemmy in the future, refederation will be possible.
I don't really see how it's antithetical, considering how one of the benefits of federated social media is being able to decide how that federated network is built and what nodes are included or excluded from that. A lot of federated software, Lemmy included, come with options for federating based on an include-list rather than an exclude-list, where your instance's federation can be even more handpicked.
Additionally, Beehaw doesn't have control over being shown on Lemmy's website - that's just something that happens. It really just isn't anywhere near the same as pulling up the ladder after climbing to the top - that would give a misleading character to this decision and the factors which motivated it.
It also isn't as black and white as the admins just making a, as you put it, "heavy-handed / sweeping admin action with pretty annoying consequences" - Lemmy quite literally does not have a middle ground, which is as I understand it what the admins, mods, and general community would have preferred. I respect anyone's decision to move instances or create alternate accounts in response, and I hope we can refederate with these instances in the future when Lemmy's software is more matured and allows more granular moderation, but for now, I feel like this is really the best/most anyone can do until then.
I think that replacing Reddit as a software and replacing Reddit with a different community/culture are two separate things. People may come to Beehaw seeking to use another link aggregation tool and have another place to build community, but the overall direction of Beehaw is not to provide a 1-to-1 replacement for Reddit's culture and community - though the software is of similar nature, the community doesn't necessarily have to be.
I came to Beehaw from Reddit as well during the most recent wave, and I didn't come here really expecting Beehaw to replace Reddit for anything more than the content format.
Again, it was a terrible idea to use a federated software if you wanted to have full control of who could and could not interact with your instance.
Most if not all federated software provides the tools to do this. Part of the point of federation is the ability to control which servers you do or do not receive interactions from, and it's a necessary means to limit access to your network by bad actors.
Very well put and very appreciated. Ultimately, it will just take some time. It's not like this decision is 100% final and irreversible - we as a community most likely will reevaluate this in the future - preferably, and most likely, when the tools have gotten better.
Definitely second that if people want to see content from certain instances that are blocked, making an alt account is pretty much the way to go.
I don't mean to nitpick, but in particular I don't think saying "on as good terms with any many instances as possible" is a proper characterization of the situation, as we're not on bad terms with these two instances per se - and AFAIK the discussions with the lemmy.world admin were not negative, but rather just a meeting of two communities with different goals and intentions.
In any case, if not a Lemmy instance, one may also try a Kbin instance as well. Especially since I believe kbin.social removed their DDoS protection and is now federating as usual.
This was actually my fear when it came to a federated Reddit, I was wondering what was stopping admins from defederating with any instance for any reason, and what would happen when they did. It seemed like communities would become centralised on a few instances, which seemed against the point of a federated internet.
I've mentioned this a lot in this comment thread, but this is not the first time this has happened in the Fediverse. It may seem dramatic, but it really is a normal thing - the flagship instances of Mastodon, for example, were/are defederated from quite a few other microblogging instances for the exact same reasons that we have defederated these two instances. Even though it reduced the flow of content into and out of the main instances, users still found their way, and were still invited, to join other instances, and it didn't really end up majorly fracturing the microblogging space. The difference in that situation however is that Mastodon (as well as other software) provides better moderation tools for limiting federation with other instances.
And about what the point of a federated internet is, which a lot of people have been invoking in this comment thread: federation is just a tool, a feature of the software. You could just as easily be on an instance which federates with absolutely nobody, or on a self-hosted instance which federates with every possible instance. The point of federation is that we, especially those who host these instances, have a choice about who/what to federate with and what kind of space to cultivate. The other emergent beauty of that is that, if users don't like how that is decided or what decisions are ultimately made or don't trust those who administer their instance, they can migrate, create alternate accounts, return to traditional corporate social media, etc.
All this to say, this decision, like any other decision, is fluid and isn't necessarily permanent. There is a possibility of refederation in the future, and more than anything what is needed right now is more developers volunteering to grow Lemmy - especially on problems like this, where we need more granular control over moderation in order to make better, more satisfying decisions. Defederation is not a light decision for instance admins, it sucks and more than anything Beehaw's admin has used it as a last resort - but it's important to understand, as per the post, that the middle ground between defederating and doing nothing just isn't there yet the way it is on Mastodon or other services.
I understand being frustrated and disappointed, but as the post says, there is a particular rationale being used to make this decision and it wasn't taken on a whim nor was it the first course of action. The most critical aspect of this decision was quite simply the limitations of Lemmy's admin/mod tools.
If this instance wanted to be closed off and heavily moderated it should have been clear at the start, a lot of people were relying on communities here and suddenly closing them off is going to harm Lemmy as a whole.
Beehaw has very clearly communicated its goals and guiding philosophies in the posts linked in Beehaw's main sidebar, which are just a few of several others. Likewise, its admins have thoroughly explained what motivates their choices with respect to this community, time and time again. It cannot have been more clear that Beehaw wanted to provide stronger moderation than what exists in other spaces in the Lemmyverse currently, although the 'closed off' part is debatable - it's two instances, which have the possibility of refederation in the future with changes to Lemmy's codebase.
Seeing everyone in the comments pointing fingers and calling us toxic evil trolls is also ironically very toxic.
Personally, I haven't seen many such comments at all (& they may have been removed/deleted), aside from some Beehaw users venting about running into some unsavory types from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. That isn't to generalize users from those instances as this can happen when instances grow large and their registration policies are lax (i.e., lacking verification steps/other security measures meant to deter those types). But looking at discussions with the mod team and at feedback from the community, it was clear that a lot of negative traffic was coming to Beehaw from there - in addition to all the positive interactions which came out of those two instances - and it just so happens that their size made it very difficult to moderate all those bad actors.
Most of the content on this instance wasn’t made by beehaw users.
Speaking candidly, we are not striving for sheer quantity of content or for a great mass of interactions here, and what proportion of our content is made by Beehaw users vs. not just isn't really a priority. The main goal of Beehaw is to provide an inviting, tightly bound community for discussion, especially one which is safe for marginalized people and nice people to participate in and where they can have the expectation that the space won't be overrun by jerks, and this decision was made in light of that purpose.
Like I understand it, but I still think this is an over-reaction. Lemmy.world has been good in banning spammers I’ve reported there in my experience.
This is not necessarily to judge lemmy.world's moderation alone, as Lemmy doesn't really assist you when it comes to reports/bans/removals regarding your users on other servers. You have to investigate that stuff manually, and that's also a bit like playing whackamole. Even for us, it's hard to moderate what Beehaw users do/say on other instances.
It may seem like an overreaction, but as has been said before, it's only because there's not a middle ground action you can take with Lemmy the way it is currently. Until that's addressed, it's either this or nothing. I know that the admins and other mods have stated as well that this decision is not one made lightly, and we consider it unfortunate in its consequences of separating us from these two instances which have also brought good users to Beehaw as well. The admins are just doing what they can to uphold Beehaw's unique philosophy.
Refederation remains, assuredly, on the table for when Lemmy improves as a piece of software and provides crucial, more granular tools to better manage the traffic we get from other instances.
That's generally the vibe I get, yes. A lot of people seem to think this decision is immutable, but no, as I understand it, we're really just waiting on the Reddit wave to die out and for Lemmy to have better tools.
Federation isn't going away, and we still federate with a lot of other Lemmy (and Kbin) instances. Really, we are just waiting on better, more nuanced tools from the Lemmy software, so we don't have to do things like this except as a last resort. Some of this decision was also motivated by the need to keep down the moderation workload, since our mods are all unpaid volunteers and what we were getting from these two instances - not all of it bad! - was a lot to keep up with.
People have the choice to filter and handle their own timelines and there’s local timeline already that can preserve the community mission.
This doesn't change the fact that, even if people can do that and we have a local timeline, we'd still have a moderation workload to get through - for the past few days, we were getting slammed on that front, and that is part of why this decision was made. It's not something that was taken lightly or done on a whim.
Splitting the community at this stage seems like a lazy decision - surely there has to be a better way to handle this especially with the amount of support people are throwing at the whole Lemmy thing.
There isn't - the way Lemmy's software is, the admins options are to (A) do nothing, or to (B) defederate. When that is fixed, when Lemmy has better tools for moderating and managing how federation works with Beehaw, that is, ideally we'll have a discussion about refederating then.
The explanation I saw (that stuck with me) emphasized decentralisation, which from my observations seemed to be something that most federated communities also valued.
Decentralization is something I value as well. But for me, what that really means in the context of federation, and what I'd really like to see happen with Lemmy is for users to move away from the larger instances and join some of the smaller instances, which would really fulfill that value. Federation isn't dependent on everyone being corralled together within a few of the largest instances anyway, which would also be a kind of centralization, and not every instance has to talk to every other instance, so to speak, to get value out of federating. I generally favor smaller instances with each choosing its own ecosystem.
not federating with anyone
That's not the plan or direction of Beehaw as an instance. We're not trying to cut everyone off, and the plan is to aim for refederation as soon as better tooling is available.
Yeah, that's been suggested before, but in general, the policy of the admins has been to err on the side of trusting other instances (as well as users and their communities), with defederation being an absolute last resort. Using a whitelist instead just doesn't really align with that, I don't think, but the suggestion and the desire to help are appreciated!
If you participate in any federated community, you and the content you create will always be subject to whatever form of moderation they have. Even on other instances, admins and mods will still be making calls about who gets to see it based on any particular criteria that is important to them, and on Lemmy, you'll be able to see the impact of their discretion in their instance's /modlog or /instances page. Regardless of that, you have every right to choose any instance which provides the kind of moderation that you want, or to self-host. In any case, I hope you find a community for you as everyone is deserving of.
On our part, Beehaw up til now has been very clear about its moderation policies and its community philosophy (some of which is linked in our sidebar) especially regarding how decisions get made about bans, removals, defederation, etc. and what kind of test things are put to, with a lot of major admin decisions being pinned discussions for everyone to participate in. Everyone is entitled and empowered to do with all this information what they wish.
This is why I still don’t believe that the fediverse is the right place for a site like Reddit. The advantage of Reddit, for better or for worse, was that an interest had its own community and everyone could gather in that community. But within the fediverse it would seem that gathering everyone into a single community for that interest would require centralising into a few instances.
I guess for me, this is where my attitude differs. I do like having a niche community with others, but it isn't so much of a priority for me for everyone with that interest to be accumulated there. The intentions of the space, its overall culture, and the quality of the interactions I have in it are the most important thing for me.
It's sad of course that Beehaw may not get some of the more niche communities that can exist on other instances for their lack of community-creation limits, but even still, there will always be options, and hopefully refederation will come in the near future - even though obviously the damage has been done, for lack of better phrasing.
I mean, at the very least, a temporary defederation will help to alleviate some of the overwhelming moderation queues across the board. As far as the 'chilling' effects, we've already seen some of that and we expect that discourse to continue, but there isn't much we can really do about that. Even prior to defederation, there were already people complaining about Beehaw and its moderation on other instances.
We are well aware that this influx of Reddit traffic will eventually slow down. Still, the user population across Lemmy has exponentially increased, and even with less new accounts coming from Reddit, it's still a lot of new users, new posts, and new content to sift through. It's also very unclear how many people from the Reddit wave will stick around. Regardless, we still need better, more granular moderation tools to handle the current situation as well as any similar circumstance which might arise in the future, and hopefully more developers will be willing to volunteer their time into fixing this important aspect of Lemmy as a software.
Senate Republicans introduce plan to tackle student loan debt (thehill.com)
The GOP package, called the “Lowering Education Costs and Debt Act,” consists of five bills that the senators say will address the root causes of the student debt issue such as the increasing price of college and students taking out loans they can’t afford.
The Cleaners is a riveting documentary about how social media might be ruining the world (www.theverge.com)
Ostensibly The Cleaners is about the outsourced workers that these companies use to determine whether photos and videos that have been shared online should be allowed to stay there. The film tracks a handful of people based in Manila that spend their days looking at terrorist videos, political propaganda, self-harm videos, and...
ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
hey folks, we'll be quick and to the point with this one:...