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.
This decision was about users from other instances coming here and causing trouble, not beehaw users going elsewhere. The intent isn’t to keep users siloed in here. Unfortunately, lemmy currently only supports two modes of interaction between instances: either you federate, or you don’t. More technologically mature fediverse platforms like mastodon have more nuanced options, and hopefully we’ll get similar options in lemmy soon that will allow, e.g., beehaw users out onto these instances without letting everyone on those instances in here.
I know the intent isn’t to keep us siloed here, but unfortunately that’s the end result. Personally, I’d rather deal with trolls than defeat the whole purpose of the fediverse. If I wanted a small walled garden, I’d have gone to raddle.me or tildes. The mods absolutely have good intentions here, but it’s a bit smothering
Hm, sure the effect is as you describe (if you don’t go multi-account). However, I have experienced over and over again how only a few bad actors can totally ruin an otherwise safe and welcoming community. The only solution so far was always to restrict ourselves to fewer but trusted users. And this happened even in trans only spaces where other trans people were bigots themselves.
Maybe, as pointed out above, it is a difference in interest and priorities. If your priority is to see more content but with the drawback of more bigoted behavior, probably an account in the now de-federated instances is a good idea. However, as I understand it, the reason for many people to join here was specifically to create this protected space where we err rather on the safe site.
And btw I would love to see more queer and specifically trans spaces on Beehaw ;)
yeah to be clear: we don’t want this either! it sucks! but that’s how it is and we’re willing to ultimately bite that bullet and any potential consequences.
Is there a way for us to see all the instances you have defederated from? As a new user, it’s really confusing that I can still go to a community and post a comment there without knowing that we’re defederated from them and they will never see it.
If you scroll all the way to the bottom, there’s a link that says Instances; it’ll show you every instance Beehaw has blocked.
Oof, yeah, that doesn’t sound great.
Apparently users from instances that don’t disable downvotes have a similar confusion when they look at beehaw content, too, because their instances show them downvote buttons and counts (local to their instance I guess?) that don’t actually get applied on beehaw in any way.
I just fail to see how this solves anything, people can easily sign up here or another non-blocked instance to troll.
The two blocked instances in particular allow signup without application. To sign up here you need to show you are of good character. Sure, other instances’ applications aren’t as rigorous but due to waiting periods it will still discourage people from making spam/troll accounts and evade user bans.
One particular thing in the modlog I spotted was a username lgbtslayer from a now-defederated instance making a stupid and nasty post in the LGBTQ+ community on here. No self-respecting admin reviewing applications would allow a username with a clear meaning to be hurtful to others. Seems like the Beehaw admins are plugging this hole earlier rather than later before it becomes too much for the handful of them to handle.
It requires approval to sign up here and a lot of the other instances Beehaw is federated with, because of that filter it will drastically cut down on trolls and make moderation much easier for the small team here.
The beauty of the fediverse is that we can go make a lemmy.world account and enjoy all that content if we want. I have an account there already, and a kbin.social account because it’s temporarily defederated from just about everyone.