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.

  • chris.
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    1 year ago

    Can someone explain like I’m 5 for the new folks here what this means in terms of the user experience?

    lemmy.world & sh.itjust.works are two huge (well, compared to many other lemmy instances) communities, so this effectively means being cut off from part of the lemmy fediverse.

    What are the restrictions around viewing and commenting on posts?

    the servers won’t be allowed to federate with us anymore. federation is the term for when an instance downloads posts, comments, profiles, upvotes, etc from another. this change means we simply won’t see posts & comments from those instances at all.

    Does this impact, for example, beehaw to lemmy.world the same way as lemmy.world to beehaw?

    not sure, but if i had to guess i’d say probably not, unless they also defederate. i’ll log into my lemmy.world backup account & test.

    EDIT: seems to affect them just the same actually, i can’t see any new posts or comments. i thought it’d only block them from posting but seems like it’s a total severance.

    What mod tools would beehaw need to remain federated?

    the admins & mods here can answer this much better than me, but from the post it seems like it’s more a problem of size & numbers than something a mod tool can solve.

    • @realChem@beehaw.org
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      221 year ago

      Defederation completely cuts the ties between instances, so no connection in either direction: lemmy.world users can’t see or post here (which is why this was done), and beehaw users can’t see or post there. The latter is less than ideal, but it’s the only lever of control lemmy has at this point for inter-instance relations. Hopefully things will change as better tooling / more granular controls are implemented.

      • chris.
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        1 year ago

        yep, thanks for letting me know. just saw & edited my comment right as you posted lol. i thought it’d just block posts/comments from their end, didn’t realize it’d be everything

    • Wigglet
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      161 year ago

      I think the mods want kind of a one way gate so since beehaw has more restrictions, beehaw users could venture out unhindered but the lemmy world users wouldn’t be able to post or comment here unrestricted. I dont know what will be possible but it would be nice to have some sort of whitelist where posters from other instances could be white listed. With no entry requirements, the two instances removed are really easy for trolls to create as many accounts as they would like to harass.

      • @GhostMagician@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        One way gate with at least an approval process would be good, since if someone can put in an application to make an account on beehaw then why can’t the same thing be offered the users from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works without them having to make a beehaw account one the tools are in place?

        And why even block them off from seeing content and vice versa. You don’t even have to be logged in to see what is on beehaw, so why suddenly so restrictive from non lurkers. I really want a subscription feed that is reliable like reddit was and not so vulnerable to the defederation when it comes to at least having my subscribed feed populated with new content.

        • @delmain@beehaw.org
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          31 year ago

          Technically they still can view anything on beehaw in read-only mode by just going directly to beehaw, the same way a completely logged-out user does, that’s not blocked.

          What’s blocked is just their ability to go to their own logged-in dashboard and click “all” and see beehaw posts

    • Qaad
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      51 year ago

      the servers won’t be allowed to federate with us anymore. federation is the term for when an instance downloads posts, comments, profiles, upvotes, etc from another.

      Dude this is the most succinct explanation of federation I’ve seen in the last few days of exploring federation and the fediverse. I wish more people would start out by explaining what it’s doing instead of just repeating what it means. Thank you so much!