Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
It’s important to note that the admins of beehaw are not happy about this solution, either. And they hope to refederate once they have better tools and enough mods / admins to deal with it.
They point wasn’t to shadowban, that was a side effect. The point was to protect their member–who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance–from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that. Nobody’s happy with the situation, but it’s the best they could do under the circumstances with the resources they have.
I also don’t think it’s wrong for instances to have their own strong rules and preferences. This is one of the GOOD things about the Fediverse. The software features and how people use lemmy will catch up eventually.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
That’s true for just the duplication problem, but the defederation / shadow banning issue is not one that reddit has and is pretty confusing and poor user experience for new users coming in.
This isn’t reddit 2.0. It’s a different platform with different mechanics that hasn’t had over a decade to mature.
Change is hard. People need to learn to adapt.
Right, but even non-reddit users would be confused by it. When everyone advertises lemmy as seamlessly integrating with all the different instances, it doesn’t matter what instance your account is on, this definitely is not that.
The idea behind federation is, that individuals host their own instance and connect (federate) with others individual’s instances.
But that’s not easy for less tech savvy people.
Expectation management… people need to stop pitching this on Reddit as the new Reddit then.
But… It is essentially identical in design to Reddit apart from the decentralised concept.
Which is a massive change that tbh I’m still not sold on.
Federation seems to cause more problems than it solves and it’s created so many fractured communities that it’s impossible to get involved in niche ones anymore.
The` point was to protect their member–who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance–from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that``
They are making community policy around a single person?
I am not following.
With that being said, they can do as they please and other can do what they want. That’s the beautity of the protocol.
However, people shoudnt be surpised when others take the ball and play else where.
Looking forward to seeing how this works out.
That was just a typo. Beehaw has advertised itself as being a largely positive, safe online space. People who sign up for it would generally be considered to want that same ethos.
It’s not ideal at the moment but until the moderation tools improve it’s the best way forward if they want to stick to their ethos. I enjoy Beehaw and the admin do seem like they want to refererate when it’s possible to.
I’m on both Beehaw and Lemmy.world so I between the two I can interact with everything I would want to see.
If you don’t want to color with your opinion, use a different word than shadowban. They didn’t do this with malice as the connotations of that word would imply.
Defederation is always malicious. Imagine your email getting silently lost, because gmail defederated from aol.
The network has started to implode sooner than I expected. This was an interesting week and a half…
I’m guessing you have no idea that the mods of world and shitjustwork talked with the mods at behaw, and they all agreed it was the right thing to do at the time. You obviously don’t know the situation, or understand that the fediverse is not supposed to work like a centralized platform.
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What fediverse? We’re finding ourselves on an island. Seeing other islands far away, while not being sure if they can hear us or not.
I’m trying to stay positive, but I’m seeing people making the same predictable mistakes over again. To start the fediverse going, we need to do ONE thing. Federate. I knew a bunch of people would appear, and do exactly the oposite, ruining the whole thing for everyone, but I had no idea it would happen even before we got any serious traction.
There are tons of great, mature software projects aimed at smaller, closely moderated communities. PHPBB, SMF, Discourse, various *chan clones… yet, they chose a new, experimental software, who’s only strong feature was the ability to connect communities together. Just to turn it off.
In the last 5 years I’ve tried Twister, Secure Scuttlebut, Mastodon, Matrix, Nostr, even the protocols not using the internet as a physical layer at all, like disaster.radio, Meshtastic, rnode.
I just want a place to gather news and read some shitposts, without the constant bug hunting and drama.
What are you talking about? The apps all allow multi login. So why is this an issue?
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Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
I signed up through sh.itjust.works - was this a bad idea? Only opened my account 2 days ago so learning the ropes.
Nothing is stopping you to register on multiple and see how each one feels, then stick to the one you like most. Instances with application process tend to have a bit more curated user bases and that’s reflected in conversations where they participate. You could try lemmy.world, Beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, or any other instance.
I’m entitled to leave to another instance. One of the main things to look at when choosing an instance is who they are federated/defederated with. I would never join BeeHaw Lemmy.world, or Sh.itjust.works because of their feud. I’d rather join a third party instance and have access to all the content on all three.
It’s not a feud, lol. Admins from all of them say they talked it out and they plan to re-federate in the future. Beehaw wants to be a heavily moderated instance, and lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works were growing faster than Beehaw’s moderation ability.
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Until the instance you choose to set up on ends up in a feud with any, or all of those instances.
The whole fediverse experiment is going to end up with a number of small, highly segregated communities, and even more political polarization. I guess if you want to live in an echo chamber, a federated environment is the best way to go about it.
I don’t think so, Lemmy is just going through growing pains. Those instances are already talking about refederating.
Disclaimer: pretty new to Lemmy a federation (older than this account though).
From what I gather, defederation is supposed to be a function of this whole system, but intended to cut off whole instances that refuse to moderate or are active cesspools. In saying that, I don’t understand Beehaw cutting off two of the other biggest instances. I know they have a weird mentality over there of no downvotes and saw some odd conversations condemning someone’s political views while admitting to not know the person at all (dafuq?).
It seems to me it would make more sense to block a single community rather than the whole instance.
Maybe they want a walled garden, but as new people come in and want as much content as possible to show that this is a better venue than Reddit, to me they give off the wrong message.
Am I mistaken somehow? Anyone able to enlighten me?
I recommend reading Beehaw’s statement: https://beehaw.org/comment/263590
As it is just text on a screen, I think there are more and less generous ways to read the post. But I think a lack of scalable mod tools (to combat an internet-sized influx of “bad actors”) is a reasonable (and hopefully temporary) rationale for defederation.
Having read this, I get what they’re going for, but also question the venue a bit.
With Lemmy being about federation, it sounds like they want to have a de federated mini Lemmy to themselves where they can decide who is allowed in or not. Not that that is a bad thing, if there’s a demand for it, but I think it’s different than what every other instance is about and maybe would be better as something like a Discord server (or FOSS alternative).
Again just my 2c, I just know I’m looking for a better quality alternative to Reddit, and an isolated instance isn’t my cup of tea.
Choice is the point of federation.
I disagree, they definitely don’t want their own mini Lemmy. They want a safe space they are happy with, and defederation the only way they can do that with Lemmy’s current mod tools.
Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works make up about 20% of the acitve users in the threadiverse (source). That is a lot, and it sucks, but it’s far off from making beehaw an isolated instance.
Imo for now new users should be discouraged from joining Beehaw, lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works, since all the content can be seen from other instances anyways.
“Safe space” for who?
They want a political echochamber.
When your life and right to exist as who you are is political, it’s nice to not have to deal with “debates” over that.
Beehaw is pretty explicitly a safe space for queer people and other members of minority groups, and their allies or just anyone who can take the time not to be bigoted or “Just Ask Questions”. They don’t exactly hide this fact ;p
They are much more proactive about it than other places, sometimes too much for my personal tastes (though I think about making an account there for when I don’t feel up for dealing with shit >.<) even if I respect what they are doing.
I don’t agree at all. The fact of the matter is I can’t even talk about my lived experiences being nonbinary in beehaw so to call it a safe space for minorities is blatantly false.
This is the “I have a black friend” of online communities.
From what I see, you said you said something about your ex “”“pushing”“” their daughter “into” LGBTQ. Which is stupid. 99.999% of the time this a bad faith argument from trolls and even if not you cant make someone queer just as much as you can’t make someone straight or cis. Queer people are exposed to intense social pressure to be cishet and yet we are still not. You can feel pressure into hiding or self-repressing or self-denying, but that’s a different thing >.<
Also, you can be bigoted while bieng a part of a minority group.
I think a thing to note is that their community was here and well established well before rexxit. Rexxit put a lot of stress on many instances and their moderation ability, so it makes perfect sense that they might prioritize protecting their established community from abuse over being connected to every instance that intends to be a reddit alternative. There are plenty of instances they remain federated to that share their more careful moderation.
I expect that some time in the future they may reconnect with some more popular instances, as rexxit slows down and modding tools improve.
The nice thing about federation is you can choose to join more or less connected instances depending on what type of moderation you are looking for.
It’s important to remember that federation is just a feature in the end. As an instance administrator, you’re absolutely free to choose who to federate with.
I don’t see anyone giving Hexbear any shit for not federating with anybody.
People are just salty because they have some of the largest communities.
But they’re rightfully salty if Beehaw defederating themselves deprives this platform of a big chunk of content and users, especially during this month
That’s the thing. If someone defederates with you, and you wand a community on that instance. Then you are free to make the lost community in your instance. And if re-federation happens, both community can co exist without problems.
Also you can make an account on the instance that defederated. So you still can view the community you want.
Eh, I have accounts on both instances. I’ve appreciated the active moderation on some Beehaw communities - I’d rather discuss LGBTQ issues on Beehaw than other instances, for example. But I also like to see more content elsewhere, so I’ve got my Lemmy.world account too. It’s pretty easy to account hop when using an app. It’s reminds me of being a member of multiple hobbyist forums, in a way.
I’d rather discuss LGBTQ issues on Beehaw
Sooo… I’m nonbinary… and I got banned from beehaw for talking about my ex pushing their daughter into LGBTQ.
So who gets to decide what issues are acceptable to talk about?
Seems like the system is working just fine!
I can’t speak to your personal experience in getting banned, but judging from your short comment history so far I wouldn’t want you on my instance, either.
Yet here we are communicating 👋
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Being able to create spaces according to your needs without having your hand forced by anyone is kind of the point of the Fediverse. Beehaw can cultivate a community that fits what they want, just like Lemmy.world. That’s what it’s for.
There’s nothing stopping you from registering on Beehaw if you want to post there and contribute to that community. But without being able to detach themselves from instances that have open registration, there’s no way to even slow trolls down. Banning would be meaningless, because you can register as many accounts as you could want.
The point of the Fediverse is decentralization and choice where the default options have been a bland toxic mess.
Personally, I enjoy both the more cultivated environment of Beehaw and the bigger community feeling of Lemmy.world, so I registered with both Beehaw and Lemmy.blahaj.zone so that i can post and read whatever.
It’s not about what’s better, it’s about choice.
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Well then you better block this one too, because Lemmy.world defederated from the tanky instances. In fact, most instances did.
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Yeah, before all the new Reddit refugees the biggest instance was Lemmygrad, which was run and used exclusively by tankies. It gave Lemmy a bad wrap unfortunately.
Obviously with all the new users that’s changed, with instances like Lemmy.World quickly surpassing it. Now I’m not even sure if Lemmygrad is in the top 5. But my point is that most big instances have defederated from Lemmygrad, lemmy.world included.
Is there a page where we can see which instances are ban-crazy and which ones actually federate and communicate?
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The Beehaw instance has defederated from the Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works instances. Each instance is responsible for sending updates to other instances. Defederation means that no outgoing updates are sent and no incoming updates are honored.
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Also - fwiw - they are likely to refederate in the future. I subscribe to beehaw communities, cuz we can still see them, just can’t talk to them.
For instances that are mostly for discussion, its pretty pointless to stay subscribed.
Unless you’re ok lurking and just reading. I used to rarely contribute to ask reddit, but I would read a ton of those threads
I guess we will just have to take their word on that refederation thing
They’ve already been talking to the admins of those instances, they did it because there weren’t better options like in Mastodon, remember that Lemmy is still Alpha software
As a member of Beehaw I haven’t seen any reason not to trust them so far. They’ve been transparent about why it was done and they’ve spoken with other instance admins.
Think we have to be conscious that this is all still at an early stage and generally it’s wise to give people the benefit of the doubt at first. I get the cynicism but this isn’t a privatised space- people across lemmy have been constructive and open so far, so maybe give them a chance?
Both teams of admins have been openly posting about the discissions they’ve had with each other too. There isnt any hostility or underlying motives behind the situation at all. They are genuinely open and honest about things and definitely looking to refederate once it makes sense again to do so.
It might seem like there is some drama here but there really isn’t any at all.
Nice. Its been just 2 days for me using lemmy and im already banned for no reason in an entire server that i do not use just because im in another server. I whana say reddit moment but im getting mixed info into their reasoning. Some say its because they cant mod that much people and just defederated temporarilly while they fix stuff and others say their a radical echochamber that doesnt tolerate any slight deviants. So i dont know what to believe. If any of ya m8s could enligthen me some more that’l be sweet. Thank you.
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Im sorry m8, i dont whana be an ass but… i dont understeand what you are trying to say in this part:" Until users are happy at 1984 instance (beehaw is even worst) that’s okay," what did you mean?
Q
@[email protected] , you should add a link to the announcement which explains why Beehaw defederated since this looks to be the top question many are asking.
Those are good points. Time to find a different instance. My account is not precious. Supporting a sustainable growth is.
The slowness of Lemmy.world to defederate from the fascists, and now this makes me feel I can find a better home. A home that is a better partner to the fediverse.
I will be curious to learn what works best for you.
Probably a smaller server. I need to do some more research. Lemmy.world one of the highlighted big servers when I joined during one of the waves from Reddit. I am sure there are plenty better smaller /mid-size server LD, I could join instead.
tldr; too hard to mod. That’s pretty dumb, but the cool thing with the fedi is you can just not care and swap instances.
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Well this didn’t take long to start spiraling
Well this didn’t take long to start spiraling
Why?
At the time LW and SJW had few barriers to signing up, so they had a higher rate of spam coming in and the beehaw team said they couldn’t keep up with moderating it. No idea if this is still the case, but they remain federated.
Oh no, are we calling shitjustworks SJW now??
I thought about that while typing it but I thought it was kinda funny so decided to leave it haha
I wonder if that was intentional on the instance owner’s part?
We need to replace dumb acronyms with better ones, anyway.
Maybe SHJUWO or SHIJUWO
SJW is a wild abbreviation
Anyone knows why this happened ? Hope admins dont ruin Lemmy for everyone.
Just a heads up, we love our admins around here, they are great. Beehaw defederated from people because they were afraid of being able to mod everything with the influx of users with limited mod tools available. They will likely refederate eventually. For now I unsubbed from all beehaw communities and dont miss anything. The cool thing is if you do end up on an instance with admins you don’t like, there are like 10,000 other instances you can go to.
But the admins here are usually pretty transparent with everything going on. They are just some dude with a server in their closet. Not some cooperation that are making decisions with profit in mind. They are doing it for the community.
When there was an influx of users during the Reddit blackout, they said that they were getting lots of trolls and they couldn’t keep up with the moderation. Lemmy.world and Sh.itjust.works had the most traffic and were letting people sign up without vetting so the Beehaw admins decided to defederate those communities.
Making it harder for people to sign up and interact with each other, during the most important week of the platform’s existence, I hope they didn’t take that lightly
