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.

  •  nivenkos   ( @nivenkos@lemmy.ml ) 
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    111 year ago

    They can - but the issue is if the other instances don’t help ban them too then it can become a lot of work literally whackamole.

    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.

    We really need more tools for the UI experience (starting with fixing the refreshing home page and post switching bugs!) - like to allow communities and instances to completely block image posts and comments, to auto-moderate URLs, detect users posting repeat content, etc. but de-federating like this is not the answer IMO.

    • 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.

      • Would it be easier if you could create a whitelist rather than a blacklist for a given instance? As in inviting people in like you do when creating an instance in beehaw rather than having to ban accounts once they have proven to misbehave.

        • 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!

          • I would have thought that a whitelist would be a better solution, because at least then your users can see posts and comments from the other instances when interacting with communities outside of beehaw. As it is now you can’t see comments from those instances even on communities that aren’t part of those instances. A whitelist would also let users on beehaw join communities on lemmy.world instead of needing a separate account.

            I should point out that I don’t know for certain if this is a feature that has been added yet, whitelists might not be supported at all for communities though I think they are.

            Is it that you guys don’t want to interact with those instances and their users at all? If so then this decision makes sense to me especially if they have done something very harmful.

            Edit: are you like a mod or something here?

      • I am new to this but I think the problem here is that since anyone can quickly create an account on lemmy.world the trolls can just create a new account every time they are blocked. Beehaw has some kind if process or interview for taking on new users that these two other instances don’t. My home instance dosen’t have this process either so it might be defederated eventually.