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.
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.
The explanation I saw (that stuck with me) emphasized decentralisation, which from my observations seemed to be something that most federated communities also valued. I also fail to see the point in using the federated software and not federating with anyone, but I suppose that is their prerogative.
And while I understand that this is a reversible measure, it does set a precedent, and one that I think sooner or later the community is going to have to discuss. Though I do appreciate the transparancy of the Beehaw admins in this regard. I also understand that such a drastic measure was necessitated by the mod tools lacking degrees of nuance.
But do not mistake my concerns for a desire to not be here, or to demand this is undone. I believe that the stance that the admins have taken here is ultimately the best decision they could have made for their vision of this community in the current circumstances. In fact I probably wouldn’t even be posting about this if I didn’t want Beehaw to succeed.
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.
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.
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.
Like I said, Beehaw feels more like an old forum than it does Reddit, and I think that is a good thing. My initial concerns came from the promotion of Lemmy as a replacement for Reddit, but I think the fact that I joined Beehaw instead of any other instance means that that’s not what I actually wanted. But I still think this is an important conversation to have, especially as we find our footing as a community.
I think my main concern now is about more niche communities that might not exist within Beehaw, and how defederation with their instances will affect the communities around those interests.
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 do think for the most part that the sorts of people that these actions would deter are probably not the sorts of people that would fit within this community. But also people may hear about it and not give the community a chance.
For me there are interests that are judged harshly, and I like having places where I could talk about those interests without judgement from those outside it. Not that I particularly care about what others think, but for instance I like professional wrestling, and I like being able to talk about wrestling with fellow fans without being bombarded by the “you know it’s fake” crowd. If Beehaw isn’t that place then it isn’t that place, but the one thing I liked about Reddit was the ability to connect with multiple communities from a single account. And while that’s theoretically possible with Lemmy, it only is so long as those communities are accessible from the same instance.