I find this news disconcerting coming from such a large instance so early on. Many of the criticisms of Lemmy I’ve been fighting against on Reddit have had to do with defederation and the possibility of getting cut off from your favorite communities on your main account. I handwaved that away as being extremely unlikely save for the exception of NSFW or extreme political content. But this news has taken me quite by surprise. Perhaps I should have seen it coming given the community Beehaw is trying to foster.
This really makes me wonder what will happen to instances that make this decision. Will their communities diminish in favor of the more accessible ones? Will this decision hurt Beehaw in the long run? What does this mean for the Fediverse in the near future when fighting against its detractors has been such an uphill battle?
Thoughts?
I think the mods have expressed that this was more of a decision driven by the lack of efficient modding tools as of the moment. Of course, also taking into consideration that they really do want to stay true to their ethos in the first place. I personally feel better interacting within Beehaw because the community is headed in a healthier direction as opposed to just being another reddit dupe/reddit refugee camp
That’s valid. The news worries me in terms of Lemmy’s growth and success, but simultaneously it’s exactly what the Fediverse was designed for. Communities are able to determine what their boundaries are. I guess my issue is that Beehaw had the largest communities for many different topics and now they’ve cut the second largest instance off from those communities. In the long run what that means is that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works are probably going to recreate those communities themselves. Since those are going to end up invariably being larger communities, it means beehaw’s versions of those communities are probably going to empty out and become ghost towns comparatively.
Possibly and that’s the beauty of it. People will stay for different reasons and it seems that the standard of good-faith interactions on Beehaw will make a certain demographic stay. It’s not so difficult to exist in two different instances anyway especially because those two that you mentioned have open registration. We’ll just have to see how it goes moving forward
Whenever I hear about such decisions, I fear we might end up with a “netsplit” like event in the Fediverse at one point.
I’ve read the post: my take on it is that there’s not enough moderation tools, and the only one that really works against servers with open registration is defederation.
Don’t the admins create all the communities there? So, instead of spreading the moderation role it’s concentrated amongst the 4 admin? Seems like they just bit off more than they could chew.
yeah that’ll never work. Even with reddit… the idea is that you build an instance for people to build communities. You set instance wide rules and the mods of said communities have to adhear to and enforce them or they lose their community.
Everyone running an instance is going to have to adopt this methodology or they’ll be overwhelmed in 2 seconds flat. The internet is big and with lemmy getting popularity it’s not going to get eaiser from here. Even with tools, 4 people can’t moderate a ton of communities.
Does this mean that I need to run my own Lemmy to federate from all the sources I’m interested in, if I want content from beehaw and lemmy.world and a.n.other.example.org if they are not federated together?
If I do create my own, do I have to persuade those servers to accept my federation?
So much I don’t understand. Wait… I think I get it: if lemmy.ca federates with all these places, I see it all and can interact with it? Are the federated/defederated lists openly available somewhere?
Yes! If you look at the bottom of any instance, there’s an “Instances” button that will show you which instances are allowed/blocked. You shouldn’t need to create your own server if you can find an instance federated to all the ones you’d like. Defederation seems to be the exception to the rule, though beehaw.org has a larger blocked list than I’ve seen on other instances. In their defense, some of the sites they’ve blocked look pretty horrible…
As for making your own instance, I’m afraid I don’t know what the process is to federate with other instances…
That is so cool, thank you! I would never have thought to click on any of those links
Wow. Just Wow. So much information. These two tools tell me more about an instance than the ‘blurb’.
Any idea if kbin has something similar? There is a link to the Modlog, but I can’t seem to find a link to an overview of the instances it federates with.
I tried digging around for you, but I didn’t have too much luck. I see their moderation log, but the most promising thing I could find for an instance list is:
Statistics -> General -> Below the statistic listing the total number of posts, there’s a triangle Fediverse symbol on the left side of the screen. Clicking on that drops down an empty menu titled “Instances”. I suspect that that’s where you’d find the list if it were there. Perhaps Kbin hasn’t implemented it yet.
I initially registered there, thinking it would be a more moderate instance compared to Lemmy and their controversial admins. Never ended up hearing back in regards to an approval or even disapproval. Ended up on kbin since then. This will be worse for beehaw than Lemmy or other instances that stay federated, because now users there have to really think if that’s truly what they were looking for, especially if they came from Reddit.
Yep as someone who also has an account on Beehaw, it was never trying to become a Reddit replacement, the admins there have made dozens of posts in Chat describing their goals and aspirations of their instance. I liken it to more of a cozy corner of the internet.
That won’t work if users sign up for multiple new accounts on pages with open-signups in order to troll and post hateful messages on their instance.
Never ended up hearing back in regards to an approval or even disapproval.
You may have been approved and never notified. The process for that is rough.
Kinda glad I chose a lower key instance in terms of ideology and size (lemmy.ca). But it would be nice to have a single log in associated with the full fediverse.
You can do this already though (unless I’m misunderstanding you). I’m on one account (this one) and I’m subbed to communities on multiple different instances. It’s my single log in associated with as much of the fediverse as Lemmy can access.
Nah, I’m referring to one account (think like FB login or Google log in, but not awful) that accesses all the Lemmy instances without being on any particular instance. This means that users are independent of instances but still access the fediverse. Then instances block individual users if needed, users block instances if needed, but instances are still decentralized and owned by smaller groups than giant companies like Reddit, preventing a company from monopolizing things. It also removes the whole account migration thing. Could be as simple as one mega instance that hosts only accounts and all other instances host content.
It also removes the confusion. Right now I’m kat on lemmy.ca, but there could be kat@ any other instance and you’d never really know unless you memorized my instance handle.
An interesting idea. I just wonder because the whole thing about Lemmy is decentralization and if I understand your idea, it would sort of be a centralization which sorta goes against the whole thing?
Yeah. Who gets to run this thing, and how do we stop them from being evil?
As it is, I expect an instance will become like a passport. Some passports are better than others because they’re seen as less risky. Users will be incentivised to get on the most exclusive instances that will have them, basically.
Wild concepts but I agree with you. I think that’s how things will go.
I mean it would still be decentralized in most ways that matter. Nobody would own the hosting of instances except the small groups or individuals that do, so if a surpressive party ever tried to control the narrative on a large instance with multiple communities, users could just focus on other instances that aren’t like that. Likewise, it would greatly simplify the moderation needs of other instances (in some ways) - instances would focus on blocking harmful users, but they wouldn’t have to worry about potentially replicating content from harmful instances. Sign up is also simplified, preventing the “where do I go” confusion.
It could also marry the different fediverse hangouts in different ways. Think about YouTube - they have a place for the main feed, they have a place for shorts, and those two places don’t even really give the same vibe. A good fediverse app could have different views between Mastodon, Lemmy, Tumblr (they’re either federated or plan to be), etc but one account that has a single access point for all of those. Sliding between the views gives you something like Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, etc. Instead of 12 handles, YouTubers give 1.
There are pitfalls - who owns the big account instance? What if the owners of it somehow abuse their power over the community, can we create another account instance and link it up, good as new? How hard is it to screen individual users from the perspective of an individual instance owner or group? Do we want to have our activity linked across multiple different places on the internet - after all, Mastodon is more real identity meaning, but Lemmy is more anonymous like Reddit. Who funds the mega instance? Is there incentive to pay for smaller instances if they don’t hold your account as well? Will the big instances just… Own all the data eventually anyway (this could happen even without one login)?
I think the only way it could work is from some strange non profit Wikipedia type setup where it’s completely FOSS and nobody can ever have ownership to monetize or exploit the user base. Thing is, I’m not a tech person at all. I see shit like Linux as an absolute miracle and completely fail to understand how that even works (people collaborating on a project that’s totally free in most cases). I’m just kinda shooting the breeze and trying to think of how things could work possibly, but these ideas are probably bad for reasons I didn’t even realize.
I think the main issue we run into with the concept of a user account server is that banning needs to be an ability that someone somewhere has. If someone starts posting some highly illegal content we need a way to ban them. But then invariably giving someone that power is exactly what centralization is. Separating that one user server into multiple leads to other awkward outcomes as I posted elsewhere in this thread. Namely, you end up back where we started where certain instances ban certain user servers that are known to host problematic people.
Yeah, I guess it would put the pressure on instances to individually ban someone from participating in certain communities, but we’d have no real way to fully ban a person who is posting illegal things. But that’s kinda true if someone makes their own instance now and begins posting illegal stuff - I assume other instances have to ban that person anyway.
Even with a centralized user server, you could set it up so that no content is actually hosted there, and banning could still happen on the instance level, exactly as it is right now.
I know this is an unpopular move for many Fediverse users including Beehaw. I support this move by the Beehaw admins because they are overworked enough managing the site, they don’t have the energy to be constantly chasing trolls spamming accounts posting harmful posts and messages onto their community.
They have a stated ethos, and they should do whatever necessary to be able to keep up with the growing user base. Of course it will stunt their growth but between pursuing growth and keeping the vibe on that instance, they choose the vibe and I respect that decision.
Does anyone know if the admins at Beehaw tried discussing the problem with their counterparts at the other instances? (I’d search the comments to that post for an answer, but I don’t think there’s a good way to do that yet.)
One more reason to start a personal instance I suppose.
Update: I received this answer from the Beehaw admin.
Generally they would and it seems those users have been banned already from their home instance also.
There was a couple of incidents that I think prompted this, users with bigoted names from one of the open-signup servers putting up stupid troll posts on Beehaw’s Feminism and LGBTQ+ pages. Banning said user would probably just cause them to create a new account and continue trolling so they probably wanted to curb that problem from the source rather than having to remove and ban reactively every time, especially bc they are a small team.
About open registration: we had a debate about that too, but actually decided closed registration didn’t make that much sense because anyone can just go register on another instance and participate in our communities, so what was the point of gatekeeping registrations?
And ultimately that’s a very broad problem with the fediverse. Yes, you can curate your own local community all you want, but if you accept content and comments from the other parts of the fediverse, it’s actually a bigger moderation problem than something centralized. And there’s a liability problem: even if you police your own communities well, someone could subscribe to something unsavory across the web and you’re technically “hosting” it.
Federation isn’t easy to get right. Ultimately it makes moderation less scalable, not more, because every little instance has to moderate the whole fediverse.
It’s interesting to me how this will play out. Personally I think it will hurt beehaw more than the other instances. The issue today on Lemmy is that communities are too small. I’m trying to kickstart a few and I imagine any community that is on beehaw today will now have a split community on one of the two unfederated instances.
imo it’s one of those tough situations that comes with the mix of federated instances and this style of forums. Mastodon had similar issues back in the day, with some instances defederating from .social, but usually not quite as high profile as this, and most users felt less of an effect. for me, Beehaw’s more walled garden lead me to choose another instance, and I pretty quickly decided to create a couple accounts on different instances to prepare for these issues
more than anything, l hope moderation tools improve to the extent that these issues can be avoided more