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’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.
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
the standard of good-faith interactions on Beehaw will make a certain demographic stay
That demographic being people who think they’re better than others? There are nice people on lemmy.world too, you know. I’ve already seen you call people refugees in a kind of condescending manner. Practise what you preach mate… good luck with Beehaw.
Whenever I hear about such decisions, I fear we might end up with a “netsplit” like event in the Fediverse at one point.
This is that event. Lemmy, Beehaw, and Works represent ~50% of the active lemmy userbase right now… all of which are experiencing a service disruption. The network is functionally broken.
Sure, they’re allowed to do that. It’s their community. I haven’t seen any issues myself in lemmy.world, it’s been pretty welcoming to me so far.
I have to say, the sociology of this is kinda fascinating. It’s like we’re all part of different countries and the nationalism is already starting to crop up.
I think some instances have a stronger sense of “nationalism” than others. Beehaw is one of those. I think us over here on Kbin also have a strong Kbin bias lol. Not sure how yall Lemmy folk feel.
From what (admittedly little) I know about the fediverse I can’t see this being a good decision for Bee’s long term growth. I respect their stance but I simply think there isn’t enough content for small groups to sustain yet. Reddit thrives on a newsfeed style experience, if there’s nothing to scroll people won’t stay. The only reason I’m here is because I can scroll everything in all, which is how I found this post, for example.
I agree. The all new feed with federation is the only thing that has enough content for me as well. I could see users moving away from all the involved servers or maybe just beehaw. There are still a lot of instances that link with beehaw, lemmy.world and shitjustworks so you can see everything.
Worth noting though that if this causes a migration away from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works it’ll just lead to another instance growing to the size that beehaw.org seems ready to defederate from. It seems their primary issue is those instances not requiring any kind of moderation for signups and I would argue that’s one of the factors that creates larger instances.
It almost certainly is, since it’s a lot easier to create an account if you don’t have to justify why you want the account made, and you also don’t have to wait several hours for the moderators to approve your account.
You can just click a few times and go.
I mean, “long term growth” isn’t desirable. Growth isn’t sustainable. If they have a critical mass of community, then there is nothing that says they need to grow until they destroy themselves.
Long term growth is necessary to keep any online community alive. Not necessarily accelerating growth. But if a community has less members coming in than the ones who leave over time it will eventually die, no matter what platform it’s on.
Replacing membership wouldn’t be growth. Failing to replace membership would be negative growth.
Edit: Suffice to say that insufficient growth is NOT a problem any major instance is dealing with right now, and the reasons given for defederation are potentially transient situations
Growth doesn’t nessisarily mean your userbase is growing. It can also mean replacing users lost to attrition.
This kerfuffle is not only hurting Beehaw, but also Lemmy as a whole, and even Kbin. Before Kbin’s cloudflare stuff, my Fediverse news feed experience was fantastic. Being able to read, post, and comment from anywhere is a really neat feature, and I’ve since found that I can post to Lemmy communities from Mastodon. Now we’re back to splitting everything up again.
Hot take: I think Fediverse won’t truly take off until logins are decoupled from instances. Get rid of the unique logins per-server and it won’t matter where you go, how active a server is, or who has a grudge against you for whatever reason. You’ll lose access to a space, sure, but you won’t have to move to another server and create yet another account on someone else’s server with no guarantee that you can remove or export your data…
I wonder how separating logins from instances would work from a programming standpoint. People’s accounts need to be hosted on servers somewhere, so it raises some really interesting questions when the topic of defederation and drama like this comes up. For example, the Beehaw admins are running a server somewhere. If we decouple accounts from instances, then my assumption is that we’re randomly assigning accounts to servers. So that leads to the possibility of the Beehaw admins hosting an avowed fascist on their server by the design of Lemmy as a whole. I’m sure they would probably take issue with that. Beyond that, who has the control to ban spam/abusive/illegal accounts from the platform as a whole? If someone is going around posting child porn or something else illegal, surely we need to have a way to remove them from all of Lemmy. If it’s the server owner where the account was assigned then that raises some really weird questions about their control.
Another theoretical structure for this would be having two types of servers - user servers and community servers. Then users can still choose their server admin, but it would be divorced from any restrictions a community server puts up against other servers. But then what happens when an avowed fascist creates their own user server and won’t ban troubling accounts? Then that raises questions of whether a community can ban a user server, which kind of brings us back to square one…
We almost had decentralized logins with OpenID. I remember the push. It started seeing more widespread usage in the spaces I visited at the time, and even Google is/was an OpenID provider. Facebook and their “Login with Facebook” nonsense took things backwards when other vendors wanted to be a
data trackerlogin provider, also.With the ban evasion scenario you mentioned, having something like OpenID would give you an immutable ID number that can be used anywhere. Bans and blocks would go according to that ID, and evasion would require a new account. I think that would be a good middle ground for data privacy. It does make law enforcement’s job harder, though. Which does take us back to square one when it comes to removal of content, especially illegal content.
I am actually reaching the end of my knowledge on the subject in the following, so if anything after this is flat-out wrong with the technologies listed, I’d love some corrections.
If we go purely theoretical with existing tools, a blockchain would ideally assign those unique IDs. That’s a username and account creation date. GPG to sign each request (the second factor), and the entered password with the signature would decrypt an encrypted blob on IPFS with the requested information, similar to how Storj DCS stores data in encrypted buckets. Enter the wrong password, you get an empty bucket. Password recovery becomes an issue at that point, but one really should be using a password manager, passphrase, or hardware key these days, anyway.
Or use it as a feature and increase overall privacy by using a different password for each unique data blob shared with a service you’re authenticating with. It won’t matter, because your ID won’t change. For law enforcement, that does make things exponentially more difficult, maybe if you store the successful login attempts on the blockchain with the metadata that they claim to obtain from companies, it might work? There does have to be a balance between transparency and privacy.
Feels like a simple method would be a login provider that is related to the government. The gov have the best way to identify you and prove that you are who you are. That’s how you would get one unique ID that cannot be evaded by simply creating a new account.
Although, if you get banned from a community, there would be no way to get back in it because your gov id would be banned. Maybe the ban appeal could be more official instead of a letter to a random mod and hope you get an answer, hell, why not judiciarice the whole ban appeal thing so that you do have real recourse if you ever get banned for no good reason, a bit like when you get fired from a job.
Food for thought…
A blockchain does seem like overkill for that, though. Having a unique Username might be good enough, since you don’t really want to have multiple users with the same display name anyway. Otherwise, things might start getting a bit confusing, especially if they’re both in the same instance.
Although you end up having new issues with trying to sync up the user accounts across the list, and username conflicts, never mind a small server possibly having to keep up with a big list of users. Lemmy already has issues where the registration process will silently fail if the name you’re trying to register isn’t available, with no more indication than a throbber that just sits there and spins forever.
Maybe something like how Lemmy does communities? A user can first register from a server, but the account gets shuffled around if they join another community.
It won’t take off yet because it is still in it’s infancy.
Don’t expect this to be a full on Reddit replacement or Reddit like experience because Reddit has existed for 15 years or so.
Things will grow, mature and get better the more people use the platform.
Either that, or allow a really easy fediverse wide migration ability. What’s wrong with KBin and CloudFlare?
I want to clarify my position before going into the rest of this - I like Kbin the most because it feels much nicer as an end-user.
There’s nothing wrong with Kbin and Cloudflare. The Cloudflare issues prevented Kbin.social from federating properly with Lemmy instances, harming its potential growth and community reach. Due to those federation issues (which only got resolved last night on .social it seems), I’ve had to make 3 more accounts on 3 different servers (fedia, lemmy.ml, and blahaj) in order to get the experience that I had a few days prior with only this account and a kbin.social account. That’s 4 server operators that have my information in order to access two services, instead of just the one. I’m kind of done with that.
There’s likely going to be another reddit migration in two weeks when the bigger third party apps officially shut down, which means I’ll have to juggle websites again when shit starts breaking under load. These issues in my opinion, are a deal-breaker for many people, including myself. I’m tolerating it for the time being because I spent almost 15 years on reddit, and they deserve their Digg moment.
why lemmy.ml and blahaj? Aren’t they the same federation-wise?
undefined> why lemmy.ml and blahaj? Aren’t they the same federation-wise?
They are identical as far as I know. I went to blahaj first because it was smaller and the page loaded faster than .ml at the time of registration. There was a period that I couldn’t see anything from .ml on blahaj or Kbin but could from .world and couldn’t pull anything from .ml when searching so I registered there in case they defederated.
Also, you show up as “undefined” when I direct reply to your comment. Not sure if this is a bug.
undefined> Also, you show up as “undefined” when I direct reply to your comment. Not sure if this is a bug.
This always happens here as well, when I cite some text from a comment. Probably just one of the many bugs.
The closest thing to login being decouple is hosting your own instance.
A universal login system would be either:
An absolute nightmare of security
Or just a centralized service with extra steps.
The fix to the issue here is just implementing account migration.
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.
Yeah, they weren’t expecting the influx or better put they were unprepared for the obvious. If they just wanted to use the Lemmy code but be a more closed community, they should have stayed entirely unfederated from the start. This middle-of-the-road “we federate just with some instances” isn’t gonna cut it long term. You can’t have the cake and eat it too.
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.
I just signed up a new account after having started with Beehaw. I joined them because they were growing and seemed to have a good attitude about the whole thing.
This is pretty sad to see as, like you, I think this is going to hurt them in the long run. I could be wrong though. This whole thing is new territory.
I just deleted my beehaw account and I’m sticking with kbin.social for now.
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.
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
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.
This is going to happen a lot, I think, while things shake out. If Beehaw don’t trust Lemmy.world to ban toxic users, then defederating makes some sense. I think it’s probably self-harming, though, because it’ll lead to communities like Technology being replicated on other instances, and those are the big Beehaw draw.
You can always have multiple accounts on multiple instances. A pr0n alt was common on Reddit, and is the only way to get at adult material here. Maybe in the fediverse it’ll become common to have a safety alt, and a spicy alt too.
What kinds of mod tools do they want? I’m a developer and want to see lemmy thrive, and I’m willing to put my time and energy toward it. But I know virtually nothing about mod tools or what might be needed to manage federation.
Does anyone know of a growing list of requirements? Or is there a community discussing moderation tools?
