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’m feeling the same concerns. I agree with everything the admin said and why they did it, but at the same time the idea that some other person (instance administrators) can decide that I no longer have access to some of the communities I joined bothers me.

    It seems the only way to control what I have access to (via federation) is to run my own instance? That’s more work than I want to do.

    Looking into just putting everything into RSS feeds, but then I cannot contribute anything.

    Ugh!!!

    • It seems the only way to control what I have access to (via federation) is to run my own instance?

      Unfortunately, this is not a unique problem to Lemmy and Beehaw. I’ve been playing with the Fediverse for a long time and participating is generally more work than on a commercial solution, and yeah, the only things you can do are go out seeking an instance that matches exactly what you want for moderation (and it will take you a while to find it) or to run your own instance that’s run how you want (and there will be monetary and time costs).

      I’m suddenly wondering if I’m more okay with defederation than a lot of new redditfugees because I’ve been in this space for a long time and I know it continually happens, and it’s not anything to take personally, but instead just something you make adjustments around. Maybe you have two accounts, one for the freaky deaky shit and one for your blanket fort. Perhaps you just up and leave one instance to find another one. Possibly, you say to hell with it and host your own instance.

    • I was thinking the same thing. Should I just spin up my own private instance so I can federate as I please? I prefer Kbin’s interface and like the idea of microblog support to give access to the wider mastodon community but don’t want to jump into kbin.social as, while it’s currently running well it has no clear code of conduct and is very much a one-man show which makes it vulnerable technically, and increases the possibility of being defederated for similar reasons to lemmy.world. That all felt a bit hard but now that I’ve got the hang of things it took me 15 mins to transfer all of my subscriptions to a new account and I feel relatively safe in the small and well-managed instance from my home country, while still having access to everywhere I want to go.