Interesting bit of news for the threadiverse. All three of these are fairly large lemmy instances

  • Some of y’all getting angry need to look at yourself in the mirror. The whole point of federation was to allow communities to do things like this if they want.

    A lot of new people are going to see this mudslinging and rightfully turn around. Nobody is coming to Lemmy to see drama between instances.

    • I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it. The fact that federation has been the only discussion since the blackout is not good for the alternatives to reddit. My whole life is tech and if it’s this distracting to me I can’t imagine any remotely average user being interested. The fact that this was the perfect time to be part of an alternative but the whole experience has mostly just proven reddits “give it a week” response true.

      • I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.

        That was never going to happen, not even in the best possible case.

        Far left and far right are always going to split off. Do you want to be having discussions about race with neo nazis? I don’t. Let them go to their own dark corner of the internet.

      • I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.

        No. If an instance hosts toxic communities then your instance can choose to defederate from it. You don’t have to wait for the centralized authority to ban them. It’s about being able to choose your admins and form a web of “good” communities.

      • kbin is only live a month or so… of course there will be problems and missing moderation tools - it wont be much better for lemmy.

        There is no perfect time - some people will stay some will go back to reddit witout any change. thats a user thing not the fault of beehaw or the federation of servers.

    • I do think it’s fair to criticize the decision to try to be one of the largest instances while only having four moderators. They should have accepted a place as a midsize instance with midsize communities in order to maintain their moderation goals. Or they could have worked to get more moderators. Blaming the defederated instances and mod tools seem disingenuous at best. That said mod tools undoubtedly need improvement.

      • To be fair, they said the reason they were defederating from those two instances in particular is because most of their moderation involved people from them. They didn’t expand beehaw beyond what they could handle, the rest of lemmy expanded beyond what they could handle. If this really is just a temporary measure, which is also what they said, then I think it’s pretty reasonable.

        • That’s because they defederated from the two largest competing instances. I’m talking about the communities users not the instances. The issue is that beehaw has the largest and therefore defacto default communities. The timing is bad and will likely affect wider adoption. The biggest problem is that it is entirely foreseeable and solved by either accepting a smaller community (closing signups) or improving moderation capabilities (getting more moderators or investing in an alternative moderation system) before it meant splitting the threadiverse in half.

          • I’m not denying that it sucks, but if you’d told anybody this was going to happen a month ago they’d have just laughed at you. Of course they were unprepared. Everbody has more than they can deal with. Adding more mods isn’t as simple as picking some names out of a hat, and this isn’t a thing anyone was preparing for. There currently are no alternative moderation systems, everything is too new and until recently was all way to small for that to be important, and they just have more work then they can deal with trying to suddenly moderate all of the threadiverse.

            This was a bad option that sucked, but every option was a bad option that sucked. I’m more concerned with how they deal with things as they normalize over the coming weeks and months than I am with how they’re trying to put out the fires in the short term.

            •  spaduf   ( @spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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              But they chose a nonstandard moderation strategy that limited their ability to scale moderation with users. The default system is that communities are moderated independently of admins (not saying admins don’t form communities or that there’s no overlap between admins and mods) whereas on beehaw only the admins can create communities and therefore are the primary moderators.

              Now I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with the system they’ve chosen but the fact that it is nonstandard and in fact built into the core precept of beehaw means that this was easily foreseen.

      • The admins have always been clear that they’re not trying to replace Reddit, and I’m quite sure they were not trying to be one of the largest instances.

        If they weren’t trying to get large then how did that happen? Based on admin comments, beehaw was one of the more active instances when the first wave of migration happened; and a decent amount of the pre-first wave posts about lemmy I saw on Reddit were about how Beehaw was a good instance to join as it was defederated from lemmygrad.

        • I’m not saying this has anything to do with replacing reddit but it is bad for the larger threadiverse community. Notably there were several other instances that closed registration for the purposes of not growing quicker than they could handle long term (see lemmy.ml). Beehaw has most of the largest (and therefore defacto default) communities. Active steps to avoid that would have allowed them to maintain their moderation goals while growing in an organic and sustainable way that benefits the larger threadiverse community.

          • I was strictly replying to the part of your comment where you said they made a decision to try to be one of the largest instances – imo they did not make a explicit decision to try to be that, but rather the growth was a side effect of the circumstances around reddit users checking out the fediverse.

            Is closing registrations is better than having an application with questions that weed out low-effort users? IMO it’s probably a wash. beehaw has only banned one user from the local instance that I know of, so the application process seems to be working overall. The issue is that other instances are growing too quickly and needing to moderate those users, not their own.

            I do agree this isn’t great for the threadiverse and I wish it hadn’t come to this, both on a personal and community level. I was subbed to the knitting community on lemmy.world, it was the most active of those communities that I saw, and now I’m locked out. Idk if I want to move to an alt on a different instance, or self-host my own so that I’m fully in control of what I can see, or what. :S

            • No the issue is that four moderators for the whole instance was always unsustainable and allowing the communities to become the defacto defaults without growing the mod teams was a bad idea. This was easily foreseen and corrected. Blaming other instances is not at all fair.

              • you do not understand the problem. The growth was on every server of the fedivers - so moderationg users from different servers was to much work. how should they stop people from other servers? two options - block any individuell(which is to much work with so many open registration servers - they can just spamm new servers) or nuke the server where most of the trolls come from.

                • I DO understand the problem. They only have an issue with an influx of users because they are the largest (defacto default) communities. A position that was incompatible with their moderation system from the get go. Had they had more sustainably sized communities none of this would have been an issue.

    • exactly this; the whole point was so instances could pick and choose who they wanted to interact with

      I’d always heard that federation was good because if you get an instance infested with fascists, you (and everyone else who doesn’t want anything to do with them) can just cut that instance loose and let it drift away

      I guess others thought different?

      • Perhaps harsh but beehaw strikes me as the tumblr/progressive/sjw types that really wanna build their safe space. Which makes me wonder why they’re federating at all lol.

        I’m very glad that kbin seems to have a “let’s get all the content and speak freely” sorta vibe going on right now. hopefully things stay that way.

        • I got the same sense. Authoritarianism runs on both sides of the political spectrum.

          While their FAQ touted an emphasis on empathy, the heavy flowery language while also making a point to refuse to have written rules at all somehow gave me a feeling of double-speak. The idea is nice, but now you’re open to being banned because they felt like it, and you can’t even explain how you weren’t breaking the rules if no rules exist. Refusing to allow anyone but themselves to create communities backs up the authoritarian streak. Not interested. I assume if they don’t, I’ll eventually be banned there anyway. I really like debate and I really dislike dictatorships.

          At least if one of the largest instances out there goes full Korea, it will leave other instances a chance to be noticed in their wake. It sounds salty, but I’m still getting used to what federation means for a platform and when we were still initially federating my entire feed was utterly nothing but beehaw. I am salty. I want as much variety as I can get.

          • Yup. Taking a look at their ethos/manifesto stuff it instantly became clear to me what sort of place beehaw is, and it’s not one I’m super fond of, so I doubt I’ll ever make an account there.

            Yeah beehaw is pretty big at least from my perspective. I see three big communities: lemmy, kbin, and beehaw. and beehaw is easily the odd one out with their weird manifesto stuff lol. Which is why when they said they were defederating from lemmy, it kinda struck me as “oh kbin is next then” lol. but each of the three kinda have a different vibe to me, so maybe kbin is tolerable to beehaw while lemmy isn’t?

            • I haven’t had much experience with lemmy at all, in order to guess, and I’ve seen conflicting things about them. Lemmy was already bigger and it feels like it got a lot more publicity than kbin, so they bore the brunt of the exodus. It’s possible they didn’t get as lucky as we did in who that constituted. The devs’ weird CCP bent overshadowing some other instances’ reportedly great admins just makes it even more of a confusing mess culture-wise.

              I’d like to think we can abide by such stringent rules implications as “be nice.” But their stated reasoning is that there’s just too much content to ever hope to moderate by themselves, which…they really should have seen coming on a platform whose intent is to federate, ngl. Doesn’t matter if your homebase is young. You need underlings for this once it gets beyond a couple hundred people.

              Which is why I’m leaning on the side of beehaw eventually deciding there’s no choice but to defed way more than this until and unless they can afford help. With four admin-mods alone against the mercy of the entire fediverse, their hopes of upholding the mission statement will eventually be laughable any other way.

              Not that I think we’re nearly as bad as other places out there. I think we’ve got a surprisingly great atmosphere going and I hope to god it stays. But those are their two options, and kbin users seem to have an admirably civil tendency both to shitpost and to question and hear out differing viewpoints in a way I’m not sure beehaw will appreciate.

              • Yup. I completely agree. I understand why beehaw defederated from lemmy because lemmy kinda seems… unhinged, in comparison to beehaw’s carefully crafted community.

                Whereas kbin I think you’re right, tend to be happy to civilly hear each other out. whereas I feel like beehaw isn’t really interested in that. Though I think of kbin users respect beehaw’s way of doing things while we’re in their space, they might not have issues with us.

                granted, the response I got was “we don’t even think about you” so maybe kbin is too small to really be noticeable to them lol.

                • Unhinged. You’ve found the perfect word for it. They come off to me like what happens in study hall when the instructor has to leave.

                  granted, the response I got was “we don’t even think about you” so maybe kbin is too small to really be noticeable to them lol.

                  Goodness, my pride, lmao. I think I’m quite content not to be such a giant enough instance I get thought of. Hundreds of comfier, smaller places over Reddit Deux any day. I agree, the people here seem on the whole cognizant enough to keep themselves in check, rather than…whatever reddit was. That would be one behavior I am thrilled to see die, and hopefully federating with more chaotic instances won’t kick it up again. I’m concerned it may.

          • I’m fairly new to kbin but we do have mod tools here, and people have used them to moderate their community. So far I haven’t seen any issues with spam or what I’d say is trolling (though beehaw may think different). As for whether the mod tools are “good” I guess is one’s opinion. I find they’re enough to moderate the small communities I started here on kbin, though I have to imagine much larger (100k-1m) communities might struggle with the tools available. kbin is very new and still under development. so we’ll see.

            • Yeah. I would also imagine that a place like Beehaw is going to attract bad actors and trolls who want to wreck the place at the expense of Beehaw users, who specifically joined in order to have a community of nice people to hang out with.

              • the vibe here on kbin is I think very similar to what you might find on more serious subreddits or on something like hacker news. we’re interested in content, discussion, etc. but there’s not really overt trolling. I rarely see “shitposting” and other stuff as well. If you think “nerds who wanna talk about stuff and share news/content” you’ve got the right gist. I don’t really think anyone I’ve seen here would go out of there way to cause problems. but kbin does have open signups (not invite).

                idk what the mindset is for lemmy, beehaw, and the rest of the fediverse, but I think due to the long downtime for federation here on kbin there’s this vibe of “we have kbin stuff, and then we have stuff from those other guys” It’s to the point where someone quickly made a script to be able to easily see where someone is posting from.

                In that regard, it’s always very obvious to me when I’m among beehaw users and in beehaw communities. same for when I’m in lemmy spaces, or kbin spaces. whereas I think lemmy users may not know or care about that distinction. Though this might just be my own musing and others aren’t thinking like that haha.

          • Not to the degree what I’m used to. It’s very minimal. It’ll probably take a year or two before it’s fully there, is my expectation.

            It’s not an easy thing to make and it doesn’t have the highest priority generally. Reddit didn’t even have automoderator for years.

        • Perhaps harsh but beehaw strikes me as the tumblr/progressive/sjw types that really wanna build their safe space

          They literally said they want that instance to be their safe-space, so you are absolutely correct.
          Still it’s surprising how quickly a block-happy instance appeared, I was expecting it but not only days into this reddit-wave.

  •  Syo   ( @Syo@kbin.social ) 
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    I guess. That is the whole point right? If you like how a instance is run, you join them. And if any beehaw users don’t like this direction it’s taking, they can always make another account on Lemmy.

    Fediverse allows for great potential of redundant, diverse, and flexible meta content consumption, but we the users are bearing some of that growing pain right now as this all grows and things get shuffled on the fly.

  • All this talk of defederation and blocklists makes me generally uneasy. I understand how it’s easy to fall into. Nobody wants political extremists and criminals and bad actors and stuff on their instance, so it makes sense you might want to ban trollfactory dot xyz, nazihq dot us, and/or uncompromisingmarxist dot boats, or whatever.

    But I think the stupidest shit I saw on reddit were the subreddits that would ban you for even posting on an ideologically competing subreddit, with no consideration for the message you’d written. This is worse than that because it’s the opposite, and includes even reading the content.

    Imagine if when you went to post on /r/RestaurantOwners, and its AutoMod had the power to then immediately ban you from even looking at /r/antiwork and /r/WorkReform. Imagine posting to /r/conservative to correct someone’s error only to get permanently banned from viewing any “leftist” subs ever again. This is the vibe I get from this and as much as I want to avoid creating nodules of extremism and hatred, I want less to have people grabbing my head, taping my mouth, and averting my eyes from things they don’t like when they don’t even know what my thinking is.

    I feel like widespread trigger happy banlists are the death of small instances, too. Maybe one small instance doesn’t catch some newly registered asshole for a day or two but it’s too late. The 16-hour a day lifestyle moderator on a massive instance who has gangstalking delusions over nebulous “trolls” has already blacklisted all 150 of your users permanently and listed your domain for defederation as officially owned by the Nazi party in a massive register shared by the top 100 largest instances. The number of times I’ve heard this story with small Mastodon instances is more than I care for.

    • A very good take on the pros and cons of this kind of thing.

      Personally as someone with an account on Beehaw I don’t think I’ll mind mostly. I’ve been pretty happy with the communities they have already made and been quite impressed with content amounts.

      Let’s be honest, this federated forum/link-aggregator is in its infancy. Rexxit brought it into the lime light and just kind of put a magnifying glass on these sorts of growing pains.

      I’d like to point out that most of the criticism I’ve seen has come from outside the community. I don’t feel like this will be a long term thing only. It’s really an attempt at trying to preserve the community brand and feeling for its members especially while things are still young.

    • The admins at Beehaw have been explicit that this choice is not about locking their users in but about keeping bad actors out. But all of this is new, so the tools to accomplish that are crude for now.

    • Certainly so. From a sort of… sociological point I’m wondering what the impacts are of major instances growing independent of each other. I feel like I can already feel it with kbin and lemmy both growing separately during the blackout. I’m wondering if the trend for major instances is going to be where each one has their own unique culture or if they will eventually homogenize.

      Only real concern here, although I didn’t participate during the mastodon surge last year, I heard that defederation became a bit of an issue with how common there. Granted, I feel like the impact is probably less here with the fact that you are interacting with topics rather than people.

      • I’m personally hoping for a unique culture, especially since we currently have quite a good one. Going solo is just going solo – it’s sad and kinda dumb, since it defeats the entire point of the fediverse, but if they’re ok hanging out on a closed forum it’s not like those haven’t existed for decades.

        I hadn’t thought something like Mastodon would be able to defederate. Thinking about it, that would be far more disastrous for a platform aimed at following individuals to be able to do. The stress induced from having to choose an instance knowing they block other instances and being unable to even tell if that’s a bad thing or not until you investigate each and every one anyway. Having to look up what your favorite people are on, if you’re on Mastodon, so you can get news without leaving any of them out. What a mess.

        • Lemmy specifically hasn’t implemented less harsh measures yet. This is a stop-gap action to cut off a trolling problem at its source. The beehaw admins say they will reevaluate when less drastic tools are available, e.g. allow beehaw users to interact with lemmy.world but not the other way around.

          I’m not sure I 100% agree, personally, but beehaw’s ethos is “be(e) nice” and if trolls are trolling, it can make it very hard for some people to open up and contribute. So I see where it’s coming from.

  • The sad reality is that during the reddit blackout, people were pushing lemmy (specifically Beehaw) as the reddit replacement because yay decentralized, federated, fun!

    For a lot of those reddit refugees the effort they put into making content and trying to make Beehaw their home is gone now.

    They’re not going to want to start all over at a new instance and rebuild yet again.

    They’re just going to go back to reddit

    • Exactly. I’ve been trying to rebuild my account on lemmy.world but it’s disenheartening and honestly makes me want to not bother. The answer isnt defederating, the answer is find some mods.

      • This defed thing and finding my feed now not updating from communities I joined on lemmy.world and now having to explore other instances that seem unlikely to defed from lemmy.world and vice versa makes it apparent it’s not a substitute for a reddit subscription feed yet with the risk of sudden cut off.

        Aside from lemmy I had been using squabble and even with like only 14,000 users it felt very active because creation of communities and posting was so much simpler. There I’ve gotten more of a subscription feed experience that feels bit more reddit. It’s lot more casual though.

        I hope some update for lemmy comes out where at the very least there can be some type of RSS agnostic feed where I can set up multisubreddit equivalents to follow my communities and view posts regardless of whether I’m signed in or not, so the only decision I have to make when it comes to logging into an account is which one to use so I can interact with my community.

        Something like this

        lemmy/c/PatientGamers@sh.itjust.works+technology@beehaw.org+Futurama @lemmy.world+Android@lemmy.world+RetroGaming@lemmy.world+PC Gaming@lemmy.ca+Movies and TV Shows@lemmy.film/.rss

    • I feel like the concept of “decentralisation” is good for the consuming users and people who want to discuss an interesting topic/subject, but not really for OC/content craetors… They just want their work to be as exposed to as many people as possible (exposure -> more clients -> bigger brand/value -> profit???), and defederalisating goes against that principle.

    • I think the issue is that everyone’s so focused on seeing Lemmy as a “notReddit” that they outright get pissed when it doesn’t work the way they think it should (like Reddit except the parts they think are bad)

      Lemmy (and kbin, and other similar platforms) and Reddit have the same niche, but they’re not the same thing

    • No one on beehaw can create communities except the admins, with the promise that they will personally split the ones they have into more distinct topics as it becomes necessary. As such, that also makes them automatically the mods. It’s one of the reasons I decided against it, as well as… * gestures to headline. *

      I was quite curious what removing the downvote button would do to foster actual discussion, since its use is frowned upon in my one remaining reddit kebble sub, and everyone who remains each week is shockingly cordial with one another. Pity to see beehaw crashing and burning so fast like this.

      • Is it crashing and burning if it aligns with their explicitly stated goals? Seems like they’re sticking to their guns and having a well moderated community by doing this. Some people will want that, some won’t. But if we want this federation thing to work, we can’t start whining about instances making choices about what their users interact with. If anything I’m glad this is happening early so that people can see how the federation stuff will play out and get used to the idea.

        • Having thought it over, I think the only two ways this can go are that beehaw defederates with almost everyone who isn’t a carbon copy of themselves in order to lighten the load, or they put more admins/mods in control (is this possible? I assume it is). Nothing else is going to stem interaction between y’all’s instance and every person and post on the fediverse that breaks the rules. What they wanted to do is admirable, but really doesn’t scale well with the amount of interaction being seen now.

          Temporary measures while they expand their abilities would be the much more expected way for this to go. If instead their solution is to just defederate everything all the time forever because people not signed up for beehaw didn’t sign up for beehaw’s rules, they might as well have built a wordpress forum for way less money than they’re spending. There’s going to be too much.

          • I’m a bit confused by your comment. They say in their post that they will reevaluate when Lemmy’s mod tools improve. More granular control over federation could help too. It’s a temporary measure.

            It’s not like they’re taking extreme action because they want to cause schisms. “They will defederate with everyone” only seems to apply if every other huge instance also has high numbers of trolls. Maybe not so unlikely, but mod tools on Lemmy will hopefully improve by then. Note: you sign up for beehaw’s rules when you choose to interact on beehaw, not when you sign up to beehaw. The issue they are dealing with here is that they have had to disproportionately moderate users interacting on beehaw coming from those instances.

            And at the end of the day, if beehaw becomes too isolated, it takes like 5 clicks to open a different instance in my browser and sign up there instead.

  • Ultimately this is because beehaw allowed themselves to become one of the largest instances on the threadiverse with only FOUR mods. Any blame on the other instances/mod tools is deflection. This is poor management at it’s core and is bad for the larger community. That said I would love to see more in the way of improved mod tools.

  • To be honest? I don’t like the decision I wish there was a better way to handle this, this might make users not want to join the fediverse out of fear of losing contact with communities that they participate in.

      • I think for those looking for a reddit alternative what they want most is to be able to keep track of their communities they subscribed to without suddenly finding out that the instance they are signed onto defeded from an outside instance leading to the feed stopping from those communities.

        I wonder if there is some type of RSS agnostic feed so I can set up multisubreddit equivalents to follow my communities and view posts regardless of whether I’m signed in or not, so the only decision I have to make when it comes to logging into an account is which one to use so I can interact with my community.

        Something like this

        lemmy/c/PatientGamers@sh.itjust.works+technology@beehaw.org+Futurama @lemmy.world+Android@lemmy.world+RetroGaming@lemmy.world+PC Gaming@lemmy.ca+Movies and TV Shows@lemmy.film/.rss

        But, this current situation where I have to like go to beehaw to see my community feed then go sh.itjust.works see my community feed is a hassle. I want to see it in one view ideally even if I have to switch accounts to interact.

        • there is still enough serves that you can register that are not blocked by beehaw - or you can interact with mastodon/calckey software with lemmy and kbin. so easy.

  • This is honestly the only major issue I have with the Fediverse. Most of my Reddit/social media posts are related to three or so niche interests. My first Mastodon account was on the central hub for one interest that later defederated with the central hub for another interest. Not being able to interact with 1/3rd of the people I want to interact with just defeats the whole point of joining these kinds of platforms. Moderators just carving out a chunk of the Fediverse for their users is just unacceptable.

  • I don’t get the issue here.

    This is common in de-centralized social media.

    Federation allows the admins of a server to decide what kind of servers they want to federate with, but also to defederate from others.

    It’s only two servers that were creating problems with all the trolling and intolerant comments that came from there. Beehaw didn’t isolate itself/blocked everyone else in the fediverse.