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?
Hello, I’m the guy that made that post. I was wanting to just make a short post explaining things, but it turned into an essay it seems. So, uh, enjoy.
Honestly, that edit was mostly just an emotional response. It’s… Just so much drama, tbh. I just want the whole “Lemmyverse” to prosper or whatever, but it feels like everything is fracturing and falling apart. I feel like I shouldn’t have to make multiple separate accounts on different servers (although that was the norm in the old forum days, and it might end up being a culture thing here).
Feels like there’s going to be two separate “cliques” almost; those lucky enough to get into an invite/approval server, and those that couldn’t/didn’t. And each of those “cliques” will form their own communities and not really talk to each other. There’d be Gaming@beehaw.org and Gaming@lemmy.ml or whatever, and they’d just never talk.
Compounding this is that defederation is implemented really badly. Like, super badly. I don’t think anyone actually understands how it works and what implications it has for users. There’s no interface for when things you post get blackholed. I only found out about it when I posted a comment, went to the original instance and thought it weird that the comment wasn’t there.
If defederation like this continues, especially without standardized blocklists, we’d get into a situation where people would send messages and then them not be received by the other end. Communities would fracture into local “forks” which are only visible to a single instance. Even worse, it would not even be clear that this is happening, or how it works.
I do think @Crashdoom should have posted an announcement about defederating sh.itjust.works. Especially since it is one of the “OG” instances that were spun up at the start of the migration. Ideally with the motivations behind it and why lemmy.world (which has similar issues) was not defederated.
However, I want to make it clear that I don’t disagree with their decision. I can see open signups being a problem, and… Honestly the fact that a thread that the troll made is still there (even though the user is banned) doesn’t reflect well with how the admin’s polices mesh well with other instances. I sympathize that this situation… Honestly sucks for everyone involved. There are a lot of arseholes online. Thanks to all the mods that largely keep them away from us.
The admin of sh.itjust.works made a thread about the defederation here as well, they seem pretty chill about wanting to work things out: https://sh.itjust.works/post/129725
Legitimately, I think all of this will cause people to leave Lemmy en-masse because it “doesn’t work”. Combined with the janky UI, federation being confusing in general, the political issues with lemmy.ml and lemmygrad dot ml (which I’ve not seen any evidence that they’re owned by the same person, but eh), it doesn’t look good for Lemmy. I was optimistic that maybe it might have had the momentum to be a serious competitor to Reddit but honestly… I don’t think it’s production ready yet. Maybe next time Reddit does something unpopular, if it still exists, but I think this migration is ultimately doomed to fall to this drama.
I get that Pawbs and Beehaw don’t want to be a “new Reddit”, and instead focus on high quality, heavily moderated communities (like /r/AskHistorians. Never used it, but from what I’ve heard it seems to be the vibe they are going for?), but I was hoping there’d be a world in which they could co-exist with the heavily focused communities which are being mass created on lemmy.world and friends.
Regarding “limited” access… I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m not really sure how it would work? Mastodon is a mostly one-on-one situation. You follow and interact with one person at a time, whereas with Lemmy you interact with a number of people at once. There’s a number of technical issues that need answering here which I may go into in a follow up post, since I’ve rambled on enough already.
I intend to use my beehaw account to continue interacting with pawbs; you can’t get away from me that easily!
Edit: Does editing a post cause it to be resent?
Hey! Fancy meeting you here! I would have tagged you, but with defederation your SJW account would never see it :p. I really appreciate the thoughtful post and share a lot of your sentiments.
I personally think that lemmy will probably be okay even with its struggles because it is topic-based and not people-based. We don’t need everyone over here to have a good time, unlike social networks where you’re eternally waiting for your friends to come join you. As long as we have critical mass, we can talk about many topics to great effect. Some communities only work if we have literally everyone over here, but for general discussion and news, I’m not running out of content to read even with a small fraction of reddit’s userbase.
I am hopeful we can stay here while problems get fixed, instead of being forced back to reddit to wait forever for “the year of lemmy” to happen.