Heya, with recent news of beehaw.org defederating from a few instances, I noticed that we also recently defederated from sh.itjust.works. I’m not in-tune with whether they deserve it or not, but I have noticed that it does have some impacts on our users.
I happened to see this post from a fellow furry, expressing frustration with picking the ‘wrong’ server. They can also no longer see pawb.social posts/communities.
I also recently posted my little heart script over there because they had a general scripts community, and I’ve only just noticed that the edits/updates I’ve been doing on that post are not actually going anywhere - it’s similar to being shadowbanned. The pawb.social version of that post gets updated as normal, but we never sync that version to their server (and subsequently no other server ever gets the updated version). This makes sense now that I know we’re defederated, but nowhere in the UI does it indicate that I’m just shouting into the void. As a side effect, I’m no longer able to keep tabs on that scripting community for tool updates.
- Pawb version: https://pawb.social/post/43513
- sh.itjust.works version: https://sh.itjust.works/post/89693
I suspect that this is a big problem right now because people are migrating and joining servers at random, and they don’t know that the server they’re joining has bad admins. Communities are rapidly getting created, growing, then getting shadowbanned by half the lemmyverse.
I’m not petitioning for anything to change at pawb.social at the moment, and I’m sure that there were good reasons to defederate sh.itjust.works, but it does make me a bit wary that eventually I too might feel like I picked the ‘wrong’ server if a defederation culture becomes common in the lemmyverse. It’s not something I thought I had to think about when making an account. I really doubt anyone reputable will ever defederate us, so it’s really just a matter of who we choose to defederate.
Thoughts?
At the moment, I’m fully in support of retaining the defed from shitjustworks, simply because they have an open registration policy and as such, are completely filled to the brim with trolls and other bad actors using their space to harass other people. Right now what’s happening is folks are able to make an account on shitjustworks and lemmy.world, go troll other instances to their heart’s content, get banned, and then spin up a new account in seconds to do it again.
Lemmy’s mod tools aren’t very robust at the moment, so defederating from a place that isn’t ensuring they have a handle on their own community is the best tool instances have to protect their own community. If either of those places get themselves together properly, I assume there should be no problem refederating with them.
That makes sense. For some reason I didn’t consider that people were actively churning and trolling with accounts, I just thought there were bad apples that their admins weren’t handling. If they ever fix their problem, I’m glad to know that refederation is a possibility. I suppose everyone needs to have restricted signups at least until we get better mod tools then.
It does seem a bit problematic to just deferdate any instance with an open registration policy, because such instances are naturally going to grow faster than ones with more user vetting, and as such taking a blanket position to not federate with them seems like it would be effectively cutting oneself off from most of the network, in the long run. At the same time though, I get why they might pose a trolling risk, because Lemmy doesn’t have the same means to deal with ban evasion and because any given instance is going to be run by small team that has limited time. Feels like a situation with no good options at the moment.
Yeah, admins and mods just need more robust tools to identify and remove ban evaders, escalate issues with troublemakers to their home instance admin, as well as create litmus tests for community participation (i.e. your account must be X days old if from a federated instance to post here) to make it less attractive to relentlessly spam and troll.