ou might have seen that we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. I think there’s some necessary context to understand what this means to the users on this instance.
How federation works
The way federation works is that the community on beehaw.org is an organization of posts, and you’re subscribed to it despite your account being on lemmy.world. Now someone posts on that community (created on beehaw.org), on which server is that post hosted?
It’s hosted on both! It’s hosted on any instance that has a subscriber. It’s also hosted on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, etc. Every instance that has a subscriber is going to have a copy of this post. That’s why if you host your own instance, you’ll often get a ton of text data just in your own server.
And the copies all stay in sync with each other using ActivityPub. So you’re reading the post that’s host on lemmy.world, and someone with an account on beehaw.org is reading the same post on beehaw.org, and the posts are kept in sync via ActivityPub. Whenever someone posts to that community or comments on a post, that data is shared to all the versions across the fediverse, and these versions are kept in sync. So up until 5 hours ago, they were the same post!
“True”-ness
A key concept that will matter in the next section is the idea of a “true” version. Effectively, one version of these posts is the “true” version, that every other community reflects. The “true” version is the one hosted on the instance that hosts the community. So the “true” version of a beehaw.org community post is the one actually hosted on beehaw.org. We have a copy, but ours is only a copy. If you post to our copy, it updates the “true” version on beehaw.org, and then all the other instances look to the “true” version on beehaw to update themselves.
The same goes for communities hosted on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Defederation affects how information is shared between instances. If you keep track of where the “true” version is hosted, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on.
How defederation works
Now take that example post from earlier, the one on beehaw.org. The “true” version of the post is on beehaw.org but the post is still hosted on both instances (again, it has a copy hosted on all instances). Let’s say someone with an account on beehaw.org comments on that post. That comment is going to be sent to every version of that post via ActivityPub, as the “true” version has been updated. That is, every version EXCEPT lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. So users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won’t get that comment, because we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. If we write a comment, it will only be visible from accounts on lemmy.world, because we posted to a copy, but our copy is now out of sync with the “true” version. So we can appear to interact with the post, but those interactions are ONLY visible by other lemmy.world accounts, since our comments aren’t send to other versions. As the “true” version is hosted on beehaw, and we no longer get beehaw updates due to defederation, we will not see comments from ANY other community on those posts (including from other defederated instances like sh.itjust.works).
The same goes for posting to beehaw communities. We can still do that. However, the “true” version of those communities are the ones on beehaw, so our posts will not be shared to other instances via ActivityPub. And all of this is true for Beehaw users with our communities. Beehaw users can continue to see and interact with Lemmy.world communities, but those interactions are only visible to other Beehaw users, since the “true” versions of the Lemmy.world communities (the ones sent to/synced with every other instance) is the Lemmy.world one.
Communities on other instances, for example lemmy.ml, are unaffected by this. Lemmy.world and beehaw.org users will still be able to interact with those communities, but posts/comments from lemmy.world users won’t be visible to beehaw.org users, as defederation prevents our posts/comments from being sent to the version of these posts hosted on beehaw.org. However, as the “true” version is the one on the third instance, we can still see everything from beehaw.org users. So we see a more filled in version than the beehaw users.
Why can I still see posts/comments from beehaw users?
Until they defederated us, posts/comments were being sent to lemmy.world, so we can see everything from before defederation. After defederation, we are no longer receiving or sending updates. So there are now multiple versions of those posts.
Why can I still interact with beehaw communities?
This won’t ever stop. You’ll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won’t see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities.
Those communities will quickly suck for us, as we’re only talking to other lemmy.world users. Your posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. I highly recommend just unsubscribing from those communities, since they’re pretty pointless for us to be in right now.
Why do I still see comments from beehaw users on lemmy.world communities?
Again, comments from before defederation were still sent to us. After defederation, it will no longer be possible for beehaw users to interact with the “true” version of lemmy.world communities. Their posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. They also aren’t getting updates from any other lemmy, as the “true” version of those communities is on our instance.
Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?
That’s because the “true” version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn’t defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.
The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.
This seems like it’s worse for beehaw users than for us?
Yes. In my opinion, this is an extraordinarily dumb act by the beehaw instance owners. It’s worse for beehaw users than for us, and will likely result in many beehaw users leaving that instance. They said in their post that this is a nuke, but I don’t think they fully assessed the blast area. Based on their post, I don’t think they fully understand what defederation does.
I can understand wanting to have a well-moderated community.
What I don’t understand is how they expect to do that with a moderation team of just 4 people.
I guess now people will just leave Beehaw, its communities that were popular here will be replaced by others in the Fediverse and life will go on. The Fediverse is built to be resilient to such changes.
The crazy part is that they want to be able to view and comment on other instances’ posts but not vice versa.
Like why should other instances agree to that?
Hopefully beehaw dies off quickly.
Yeah, the level of entitlement is insane.
Hopefully beehaw dies off quickly.
I don’t get why you hope for this? Isn’t the point of fediverse to have lot of different instances for different people?
Beehaw will continue existing as it chooses to exist, with or without lemmy.world. Isn’t that a good thing? That’s decentralization. That’s what we want more of.
It’s a really shitty thing to do a growing platform. For the 3rd largest server to defederate a week into the platform growing is going to go a long way to convincing folks this platform isn’t viable. Honestly this may be it for me.
The Beehaw admins are really in love with their ideals but I can’t help but feel like they have effectively kneecapped a new platform.
I think your points about frustration are valid, particularly at this time when there’s a lot of reddit refugees. That said, it’s Beehaw’s choice what they’re willing to put up with. I think defederation with entire instances is a very extreme response to their issues, but ultimately it’s their choice.
I think with the admins’ mentality over there, they will probably end up with a very large defederation block list. For that reason, it is probably for the best if Lemmy’s most active communities were NOT hosted there. People should put the energy into building up other communities so the platform more broadly isn’t reliant on extremely moderated instances like Beehaw.
Major communities should be on instances that welcome a wide range of views that are also willing to have a robust and diverse admin team to handle issues, imo. That would be the healthiest solution overall. Beehaw choosing to defederate now is a blessing in disguise; it’s an early statement proving that instance is an unsuitable host for any community looking to be home to a broad-reaching and diverse member base.
This is a roadblock for sure, but this platform does work. I feel like the fediverse is perfect for Reddit. As soon as chat moves from beehaw we’ll be rolling again!
This is a roadblock for sure, but this platform does work. I feel like the fediverse is perfect for Reddit. As soon as chat moves from beehaw we’ll be rolling again!
I disagree. It’s like a poorly implemented private subreddit. People didn’t complain that that was possible before and I don’t see why they should now.
It’s quite literally free-loading off other instances though.
Not just in the content sense, but also the actual monetary cost of the image hosting, etc.
How much cost are you to lemmy.world? Are you planning to track it and pay for it?
How much cost is it to lemmy.world to federate with another instance? Are they going to keep track of it and send out invoices?
This free-loading complaint rings hollow.
On that note, is there a donations thing somewhere for lemmy.world? Would like the donate to the community so the servers can keep on scaling
Check the sidebar at https://lemmy.world/
Thanks :)
A little yeah, but even then their posts can still be seen by everyone. But I got the impression that wasn’t at all the point anyway. It was to keep control over comments and content, not to not shift monetary costs, though I suppose that will be an unintended side effect.
The crazy part is that they want to be able to view and comment on other instances’ posts but not vice versa
Where did you get this idea from? They won’t be able to interact with other instances from Beehaw. They clearly don’t want to based on this action.
Read their comments - https://beehaw.org/comment/262284
Site (instance)-wide limiting is exactly that.
That doesn’t seem accurate.
In that scenario, if a Beehaw account “follows” an account on a limited server, they would be able to interact as normal.
Oh I completely agree, there’s nothing wrong with wanting well-moderated communities. But their way of going about doing it makes absolutely no sense.
I don’t think you’re technically wrong, but I think with the reddit migration it’s overall damaging to the concept of a fediverse to have a large instance defederate with two huge instances.
There are people who are just getting settled only to find out they now have to use two accounts to access the content they needed one for yesterday.
Yeah, the solution is just to leave beehaw though. It takes a few minutes to make a new account on another instance. If they really want to access the beehaw stuff they could join an instance that is still federated with them, that way they could see the beehaw posts and the lemmy.world posts.
It’s probably best just to abandon beehaw entirely though and use alternative communities in the Fediverse.
People really shouldn’t see that as a bug, it’s a feature. Reddit does something you don’t like? Too bad. One instance in the fediverse does something you don’t like? It’s incredibly easy to leave. Maybe some day you’ll be able to transfer accounts to other instances, that’d be neat.
I made a new account yesterday. The beehaw node was a choice but I did not take it. I won’t be making two accounts to access “all of this content” and this little bit over here.
I’m not sure what would change my mind but it would need to be very enticing.
They are fine with being a small community. They aren’t interested in growth for growth’s sake. They existed for 18 months with around 200 members and were content with that continuing indefinitely. They aren’t against growth, they simply don’t value it highly.
And yet they still have the largest communities by an order of magnitude.
Probably because people that aren’t being loud here also don’t value growth for growth’s sake.
The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users. And beehaw didn’t have confidence in the moderation of shit just works and lemmy.world and couldn’t keep up with banning them on their side. Thats why they defederated.
The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users.
It’s correct what you say, but the idea bugs me the more I understand it.
It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance. These other users can have nothing in common with the causing users, or might have even opposed them in their wrongdoings.
There is also a level between users and instances; communities. Maybe the problem was with one specific community, yet all other communities who happen to live on the same instance feel the same consequences.
Defederating individual communities would feel better for me, but ultimately I think a problem caused by individuals should be solved with these individuals, not with groups which are more or less meaningfully associated with those individuals.
The problem is that we don’t just have individuals but anonymous individuals. Even if you block, ban and defederate users if they can just turn around and put a +1 on the end of their Gmail account and go on spamming, and posting unwanted content. You have to act against the people enabling this.
There is a reason why some moderation tools aren’t available yet but a application system is. The fediverse is not supposed to be a group of unaccountable anonymous individuals. It’s supposed supposed to be an actual market place of ideas with bars where if your customers shit on the tables all the time the local health department will shut you down.
Unfortunately Lemmy doesn’t have that kind of fine tuned control yet
undefined> It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance.
That’s why I always thought that the ideal scenario for federated web is to have instances that are either single-user or are down to friends-of-friends level of members (say, under 100 users per instance), so that there can be social accountability and if you have a bad actor on your instance, then it’s easy to kick them out and preserve your reputation. Bad actors will concentrate on their own instances and they can be defederated without collateral damage.
So, if Beehaw’s registration model is invite-only (that’s what I gather from this thread), then I think they probably have the right approach to federation; they are vouching for their users and they are responsible for making sure that they won’t be damaging communities across the federation.
It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance.
As I understand the problem from their side is that to get an account on Beehaw, you have to go through an approval process. If a user there starts violating their policies, they can be banned and it’s harder and slower to make a new account to get around the van because of the approval process. But getting an account on the other two instances is automatic and instantaneous. If a person from this instance starts violating Beehaw policies in a post there, and Beehaw mods ban them, they can make a new account here and be back there causing trouble in seconds, which is apparently what some people did.
The moderation tools are apparently pretty coarse right now, so they could essentially ignore it or defederate from us, and they chose the latter.
People out to specifically troll beehaw will just keep going to other instances until beehaw completely blocks itself off from the entire fediverse.
I don’t think the solution here is to defederate, but just to get more moderators (and better mod tools).
I’m fairly new here, how many of the instances have an open sign-up policy?
I’m any case, I agree that more mods and better tools would be more helpful. They also mentioned the better tools, saying they might reverse when they get some.
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Beehaw has the largest communities by an order of magnitude and without a coordinated effort that is probably not going to change. The losers here are absolutely lemmy.world and sh.it
This makes perfect sense.
Yeah having 4 mods for something this large isn’t realistic, though I also understand they have problems with the moderation tools. Hopefully they can find more mods and lemmy can get better tools. I think once that happens they are considering refederation.
As much as it seems like a bone headed decision I can understand why they made it and that they probably didn’t have much choice given the resources theu have. I suggested to them that they should consider a whitelist/invite only system of users from certain instances instead. I haven’t heard back from the mods on that but another user has already tried to shoot me down.
Edit: I have been told a whitelist isn’t currently supported by Lemmy.
It won’t. There will be likely lots of cases of mod abuse that ends up pushing users away. Moderation requires a healthy balance, not an extreme of either side. Lots of Reddit subs had similar issues, but they at least benefited from the overall growth of the platform itself to fill the previous slots with new users.
I saw on one of their post that they now have 36 mods
I guess that’s an improvement. I mean their users seem to like the set-up. I just don’t like not being able to create communities and having such a small group of users in control.
It just seems ripe for abuse like we saw in Reddit.
But that’s the wonder of the Fediverse, each user can pick their instance.
A lot of people are missing the point of their defederation, which is a lack of proper moderation team and tools for the sudden scale they are exposed to as one of the most popular place of discussion with the rexxit with them harboring some of the most active communities around.
Their issue is mainly bad actors, trolls and harassers coming from those big instances and overwhelming them.
Defederation is the big-nuke symptom of a wider fediverse problem, a lack of moderation tools and readiness for scale, that I also saw happen a lot on Mastodon. I followed the infosec instance and they basically ended up having to defederate the biggest mastodon instances for a few days at a time when stuff like spam and cryptobro DMs ran rampant. I’ve received many of those so I can tell you that it’s pretty real.
Construing their decision as a desire to fracture the community is missing the actual reason they’ve tried to articulate. It’s a temporary stopgap for the 4 admins who just weren’t expecting the sort of volume and associated misbehaving problems they are suddenly getting.
Overall, Lemmy is getting through a pretty intense “shit just got real” moment. Please bear with it, people are working really hard at solving this from what I can see.
It seems like Beehaw want to create a closed community they can moderate. That kind of makes sense for their aims but they will need to defederate from more and more services to maintain that over time.
It seems a bit of a kneejerk in reaction to the influx of new users but essentially it means they’ll not be part of the fediverse, and they risk creating an echochamber. It’s rather the opposite of their stated aim of creating a diverse community, and will probably stymie their growth going forward.
Huh, that didn’t take long. Lemmy doesn’t have legs if this is the start of things (community fragmentation).
There was a thread yesterday in kbin meta where there was overwhelming support for banning magazines (communities) which users didn’t like. One user gave an example of kbin.social/m/antiwoke. It had two milquetoast submissions and nothing even remotely against any rules. I suggested they simply block the magazine and move on with their lives. I was heavily downvoted.
I fear that a large portion of the Lemmy community actually desires censorship. Now we see these same communities which desire censorship censoring each other. It’s like a safe space arms race. I just want an instance where users welcome discussion - even when they don’t agree with the person on the other side. I really don’t think that is too much to ask for, even in 2023.
Let’s not waste our breath pretending a place called “antiwoke” is anything but a racist right wing cesspool. There’s literally no other purpose it could serve.
And of course you have censorship on the internet. You need to censor, literally every platform out there that has existed for a reasonable amount of time on the internet has to censor even if it’s just to comply with local laws.
In other words, if you don’t censor you open up your doors to hosting child porn, it’s that simple. So I hope people can see that censorship is a necessary evil and not some binary choice you can make.
So the question is what you censor, not if you censor. And of course there will be things that people straight up don’t want. You don’t have to be accepting of everything. In fact it’s actively detrimental to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I’m not gonna blame anyone if they want to kick out communities like “antiwoke” because it’s quite clear what’s gonna come out of them.
Perhaps we should wait until they actually do something unforgivably evil before we ban them. Pre-emptively banning anyone who disagrees with us is, IMHO, not what I want. As above, it does appear to be popular though.
I’m sorry, but there is no need or benefit to be found in tolerance for the intolerant. Nobody has to give them a platform. Nobody should. And if you seriously believe a community called “antiwoke” has anything positive or useful to bring to the table, I have a very nice bridge looking to get rid of.
Yeah, believe it or not, I don’t support banning people just because I disagree with them. You might be surprised how many of us there are.
Believe it or not, ne neither!
But this is also not something I have said. This is a strawman argument you created, consciously or not.
What I actually said was that we shouldn’t provide a platform to the intolerant. Because they will seek to undermine and destroy our tolerance. There’s a bit more nuance in my argument than “ban people just because they disagree with me”. You kinda missed that.
But this is also not something I have said. This is a strawman argument you created, consciously or not.
That’s literally what you wrote. It’s your entire premise:
Nobody has to give them a platform. Nobody should.
You don’t like the name of the magazine and you want it banned, even though it hasn’t broken any rules. You just don’t like what the name implies.
You sound like you are in a cult.
There’s nothing wrong with an instance curating which communities they allow. If people want those communities they can create them on another instance. The thing about the Fediverse is that there’s no one person/organization that decides what kinds of content are allowed, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be a free-for-all.
The thing about the Fediverse is that there’s no one person/organization that decides what kinds of content are allowed, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be a free-for-all.
Well that’s just it: there is. Whoever owns the instance can decide for everyone subscribed to that instance what they may and may not interact with. This is why I think transparency is so important; so users can subscribe to instances which align with their moderation preferences.
Well that’s just it: there is. Whoever owns the instance can decide for everyone subscribed to that instance what they may and may not interact with.
For one instance. Do I need to explain to you the difference between a single instance and an entire platform?
And nice piece of goalpost-moving with your claim that this is all about “transparency.” Nothing in your original post even alludes to that.
Do I need to explain to you the difference between a single instance and an entire platform?
I think you need to re-read my comment. I made the distinction clear:
Whoever owns the instance can decide for everyone subscribed to that instance what they may and may not interact with.
I’m also not sure how I’ve moved goalposts. Do I need a 300 page disclaimer attached to all my posts describing things that I like and dislike? I think it’s pretty reasonable to support transparency. Why would you push back on that?
I also support users blocking the communities/magazines they wish to, as long as the community isn’t doing anything specifically illegal.
I came to lemmy to have some personal autonomy over my social media, I strongly dislike the types of toxic rhetoric that the above mention community push and my response would be to personally block them and move on.
There is merit to lawful freedom of speech, despite the abuse that we will naturally see in it’s use. At some point our internet use will have to be understood as the same as the physical public.
The great thing that the fediverse can bring is that we can both have that freedom and personally block out the aggressors in a way that we couldn’t in the physical public world.
The fediverse was designed for censorship that is what they want
Community fragmentation (hatred even) is a problem on reddit too, yet reddit as a whole lived pretty well regardless.
The same will happen here, when there are a lot of people some drama is bound to happen, a few communities will cut themselves out from the rest of the world, but it’s ok, the rest will thrive nonetheless.
I think fragmentation is more susceptible on Lemmy due to the instance design, i.e. there are unlimited instances on Lemmy, each with multiple communities (“subreddits”), but only one instance on Reddit. So there could be 100 c/gaming on Lemmy, but only one r/gaming on Reddit.
It could just be the subreddits I’m subscribed to, but I don’t have any fragmentation on there. The most fragmentation I have is something like r/games (discussion) and r/gaming (pictures), so they serve different purposes.
Maybe we are just seeing teething issues on Lemmy right now though, but seeing something like this is disappointing (spoken from someone who is on neither instance).
EDIT: spelling
but only one r/gaming on Reddit
That’s not quite true, there is r/gaming but also r/pcgaming and other similar subs created because people didn’t like mods on r/gaming or other reasons, there are many cases of reddit subs of the same thing “multiplied” because of mods “power-trips”, that’s why they made the multi-reddit feature on reddit, so each user can combine multiple of the same on a single feed.
Think of instances as subreddits and you’ll se what’s happening is not dissimilar to what happens on reddit.
Reddit as a platform thrives regardless, Lemmy will be perfectly fine as well.
Lemmy is even better, because if mods of a sub go crazy, people will simply create a new sub, while if admins go crazy (like they’re doing with the API), noone can do anything about it, here on Lemmy you have solutions to both.
instances aren’t like subreddits in this example though. if i don’t care about drama, i can subscribe to both r/tumblr and r/curatedtumblr and have them both appear in my feed. i can’t do that with instances without creating two accounts, and browsing both separately
Yea, it’s going to be a problem if a lot of large instances start defederizing from each other. People aren’t going to want to have 4 different accounts to interact with communities they were contributing to before they defederized. Sure you can have 2 gaming communities but if you are on lemmy.world and like beehaws gaming community more you are now stuck with just the one on lemmy.world unless you make a beehaw account.
I think a lot of this gets solved if Lemmy would allow us to migrate our account to another instance (I believe Mastodon has this feature). If you find yourself on an instance that has been defederated or is defederating and you don’t like it, migrate to another one. Admins will realize that pressing the nuke button will make their instance suffer the same fate as reddit 😋
Yea, it’s going to be a problem if a lot of large instances start defederizing from each other. People aren’t going to want to have 4 different accounts to interact with communities they were contributing to before they defederized.
So instances with the policy to not defederate anybody (or other, clear and rather strictly open policies) become more attractive. Eventually, people who value open access will live on instances catered to that need.
The need for moving due to defederation or the need to have multiple accounts is only a thing during a transitional phase, I suppose.
The whole point of federation is that you can browse all federated instances using one account and one homeserver.
That’s true, but they still serve different purposes, i.e. r/pcgaming is specific. Using that example, it’s not like we have r/gaming2 which serves the exact same purpose as r/gaming, and has a similar size user base.
I think things will settle as you say, but this isn’t a good start when the user base is exploding. I’m only just getting my head around it all and I’m a fairly tech minded person for someone who doesn’t work in the field. Something like this is just going to put a lot of people off, which is a shame.
Reddit has (or at least had, I haven’t been keeping up) r/truegaming and r/games, both of which splintered off from r/gaming because they didn’t like how the former was being run. Having communities on different instances would basically be the same, except they wouldn’t have to come up with a new name.
We do have r/gaming2 it’s just not called r/gaming2 but something else (this is an example), it doesn’t happen often but it does happen on reddit.
I understand your concerns, they’re pretty valid, all this new stuff is already confusing enough as it is, adding drama to it doesn’t help at all, there is indeed the risk of putting people off, I just hope that most won’t care about the drama and give themselves time to see what’s happening is not actually a big deal for us (it is a big problem for beehaw users tho).
Using that example, it’s not like we have r/gaming2 which serves the exact same purpose as r/gaming, and has a similar size user base.
Actually there is a r/gaming2, it’s called r/games
There are also generalized gaming subreddits with a slightly different purpose like r/truegaming or r/patientgamers which aren’t about specific games or types of games, but want to focus on a different community of people.
I really hope we will get some kind of “Community federation” in the future, where two or more communities can merge and the same content will be shown in all of them.
I posted about it elsewhere in the thread but there’s an active discussion about implementing something like multireddits, that could be the solution. On the whole, though, I think fragmentation is kind of the point of federation and probably a good thing, given that we have a way of browsing through all of the communities without having to go through each individually. It means no one person can really decide that “actually, fuck games, /c/gaming is a bong smoking community now” cause then we just go to the gaming community on another instance. Perhaps a multireddit you can subscribe to that will automatically subscribe you to all the communities without having to update?
Thanks for posting the link, cool that there’s already discussion around this topic!
But this is (to most people and those exiling Reddit) the beginning of the fediverse and something new. To start fragmenting so early isn’t a great look. Can mods ban people on these instances? Still learning how all this works.
Hey I am just going to throw this out into the ether, I have been on the lemmy instances longer than beehaw, and I have yet to find an instance whos admin team I would trust less with their stated reasoning. I would not trust their stated reasoning and if I had to guess they are trying to get Lemmy.world to change something to come into line with them. if you ask me you have dodged a bullet. I hope lemmy.world stands strong
On the bright side, at least I have drama content to read. Maybe this thing can replace reddit… lol
I came up with a list of examples to explain this, but I can’t see to add them to the post. I’m having a really hard time posting today. So here they are in a comment. I think this helps show exactly what’s going on.
Examples
If this still doesn’t make sense, then try the following examples. I hope being able to see defederation in action makes this a little more clear.
Beehaw Communities
We’re going to use gaming@beehaw.org as an example of what happens to beehaw communities
Here are three links:
- https://beehaw.org/c/gaming/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
- https://lemmy.world/c/gaming@beehaw.org/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
- https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming@beehaw.org/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
The first link is the beehaw gaming community as hosted on beehaw. All of these are sorted by new, because it makes it very obvious when defederation went into effect. You can see that there are several new posts.
The second link is the beehaw gaming community as hosted on lemmy.world. You can see that all the posts before defederation (5 hours ago at time of writing) are the same as the beehaw one. But now, none of new posts are visible. We no longer get updates from the “true” version on beehaw. There are some new posts there, but all are posted by lemmy.world users. And the posts from lemmy.world users are not visible on beehaw.
The final link is to the beehaw gaming community as hosted on lemmy.ml. This is identical to the beehaw.org community, as the “true” version is on beehaw.org, the one that gets updated on other communities is the “true” version.
Lemmy.world communities
We’ll use the lemmyworld base community as an example:
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https://beehaw.org/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
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https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
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https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
The first post is the version of this community as hosted on beehaw.org. You can see from 5 hours ago, there are no more posts. That’s because they no longer receive the “true” version of this community. Someone on there could still post, but then it would only be visible to other people on beehaw.org.
The second shows it as hosted on lemmy.world. We can see all the posts. The last link shows it as hosted on lemmy.ml, and we can see it’s the same as the lemmy.world version. The “true” version is on lemmy.world, so lemmy.ml keeps up with the updated version.
Third instance communities
Finally, we have the example of communities that are on instances that have not been defederated by beehaw.org.
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https://beehaw.org/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
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https://lemmy.world/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
We can see all three of these versions look pretty similar. That’s because for the most part they are. We are identical with lemmy.ml, as lemmy.ml hosts the “true” version, and we get all updates from the “true” version. Beehaw.org will not get posts/comments from us, so beehaw actually doesn’t have the most “true” version of this community.
Comment example
I found this one really entertaining:
This is the same post hosted on three different instances. Since the community is on lemmy.ml, the “true” version of this post is the lemmy.ml one.
It was posted by a beehaw.org user AFTER defederation, but it’s still visible to lemmy.world users, since the community it was posted to is lemmy.ml, not beehaw.org. We can comment on it, and those comments are sent to the “true” version on lemmy.ml (and then shared to the wider fediverse). However, comments from lemmy.world are NOT sent to the version of this post on beehaw.org.
When I found this example, there were only two comments on this post, both from lemmy.world users. So the poster did not get an initial response because of defederation.
This makes it super confusing as to whether or not someone will actually be able to interact with your post/comment. You’d have to constantly check the user you are replying to is not @beehaw.org
Perhaps lemmy.world should defederate from beehaw.org? That would solve this UX problem?
We really shouldn’t. That wouldn’t actually solve any issues. It just means that the versions of posts we’re looking at on other instances aren’t “true”.
Beehaw is defederating incorrectly. The best thing to do is to abandon them (considering the size of lemmy.world, that’s what’s likely to happen). It should not be common practice to retaliate with more defederation.
Beehaw is defederating incorrectly. The best thing to do is to abandon them (considering the size of lemmy.world, that’s what’s likely to happen). It should not be common practice to retaliate with more defederation.
Could you expand your thinking here? What is defederating correctly mean to you? What does abandoning them look like vs retaliating with defederation?
Just think how fun it will be with people telling you to “read the thread” when you can even see it and dont know it exists.
All I needed to know form this is that I can block and unsubscribe from all beehaw communities and look for new ones hosted on other instances. If I ever want to see beehaw stuff I will create an account there. For now, I am happy I am part of lemmy.world as I am not a fan of heavy moderation. As long as there is a way of downvoting, I have absolut trust in the community to regulate itself.
In fact, this is a big problem for me in beehaw. They took away the power for the community to self-regulate by removing downvoting and instead want a centrally moderated and controlled “safe space”. Which is fine for some I guess but definitely not for me. If I see trolls, bigots, etc. I just downvote and move on. Some people get affected way more about it than others I guess.
This is what I did… I have an account on beehaw, but I had to unsubscribe to communities like Futurama@lemmy.world on my beehaw account because it is now unfederated… and I opened an account on lemmy.world and now subscribe to Futurama here.
But this means I have 2 accounts now, one on beehaw for general browsing and all communities from lemmy.ml or lemmy.ca etc, and an account on LW for a couple of communities…
I understand federation, but in a way it’s not without problem.
I’m fine with not being able to vote or comment, but not being able to see new posts is mega stupid. Now I have to go make a new account on a new instance that’s federated if I don’t want to miss anything. Ugh
**Thank you **for the excellent and detailed explanation in both post and this comment! This helped me so much to better understand how lemmy works and what the implications can be. It is especially useful and interesting to see it demonstrated on a current example, although that’s a sad circumstance.
I have only one last question. What happens if they ever decide to re-federate? How will these desynced threads merge? Will votes merge? Will users know content is merged or will that be another cause for confusion?
Post saved, great resource. :)
Looks pretty dumb to me, but hey if they want a walled community they have the right to have it.
It doesn’t align with me and it makes me super happy of being here instead of there.
Thanks a lot for the explanation and also your other example comment, super useful!
As for me, I’ll simply unjoin their communities and find the same somewhere else, I feel a bit sad tho for open users there that will have to create a new account somewhere else.
What they want is moderation. Unlike microblogging where you post to your followers, I think that running a public debate platform like Lemmy without controlling who enters is a horrible idea. That’s why they posted a statement with the clarification that this defederation need not be permanent.
public debate platform like Lemmy without controlling who enters is a horrible idea
Reddit is a public debate platform (even before Lemmy) and they don’t control who enters in any way, is that really a horrible idea as you say?
is that really a horrible idea as you say
This is not a question of fact, but of opinion. And yes: I’ve never been significantly active on Reddit, all the notifications I get there are spam porn accounts that follow me in.
To me, open signups seem wrong for a volunteer moderated service.
open signups seem wrong for a volunteer moderated service
You have a right to your own opinions of course but “a volunteer moderated service” is exactly what reddit is, unlike facebook or other similar platforms, reddit mods are not employees, they’re users like everyone else, volunteering to do the mod job, for free.
That’s fine, I disagree but you can join beehaw if that’s what’s best for you. I just feel this creates unnecessary tribalism.
I’m not on beehaw, I’ve never been - and I’m almost fine, where I am 😉 🍁
I mean, Reddit very much controls who enters. Not so explicitly as to have a survey or something, but they very much have mechanisms against bots and people who try to circumvent bans for example.
Yes but that’s not the same as controlling who enters, not in this context.
Beehaw has a very strict application form, you have to write a lot on it and they decide if accepting you or not based on what you write, that’s controlling who enters. Reddit doesn’t do that.
Lemmy.world has nothing like that either, it does have a captcha in which you write, but only as bot control as I understand it, it’s not that they refuse you only because they don’t like what you wrote. I guess sh.itjust.works is similar.
Beehaw feels like it wants to be the Lemmy version of Tildes. And just like Tildes, its desire to choke its own growth rather than risk having to actively moderate is antithetical to the idea of a social media platform.
If what they want is a club, well, they’ll get a club. But they won’t get an active platform.
What they don’t seem to understand is that those undesirable people weren’t typically undesirable in every single thing they said or did on Reddit. The ugly truth of that platform is you probably got lots of upvotes and replied to people you had no idea were alt right trolls or whatever. They likely upvotes many things posted by “shitty” people without knowing it.
The difference is reddit isn’t curating based on beliefs and character. That’s what Beehaw does. It is trying to screen the social aspect of social media rather than actively moderate it.
They want a club, not a social media site.
Removed by mod
But Reddit has open registration.
We don’t need no “moderation”, we don’t need no thought control.
We don’t need no “moderation”, we don’t need no thought control.
If you don’t want it, that’s absolutely fine - you just have to respect that others don’t share that opinion and cut the line since it’s hard to find a shared Fediverse of opposite ideas. Unmoderated instances have always been seperated in Fediverse-microblogging and I really don’t see why history shouldn’t repeat in this case.
Who is talking about Reddit?
Are you aware this is a different place?
They have a right to build a walled community, but lemmy is a strange choice to do it. By connecting to a network known not to handle such disruptions well, (the OP is proof that it doesn’t) and then disconnecting from it, seems like a small FU.
Well, they’re not actually disconnecting from the network, just from some communities. Deferation should be indeed only be used as a last resort but I think it’s a good feature to have.
I’ve got to say I’m really frustrated with this. Beehaw ignored or denied my registration so I joined here, spent time curating a feed and now I guess I lose out on a substantial amount of that?
Which server is going to cut off my stuff next?
Profoundly frustrating and discouraging. I don’t know what server to recommend to people so that they can get the most content.
This should be pinned IMO, it was confusing to see the announcement but still see the posts.
Hopefully we can re-create good Gaming and Technology communities here.
Not even a week on here and there’s already fragmenting drama. Yikes.
Beehaw instance owners:
Someone needs to make a regularly updated map of which instances are federated with which other instances.
Edit: Ok, apparently there’s one here but there’s over 600 instances and trying to show the connections between all of them destroys your browser.
I appreciate the thorough explanation. But why did they defederate from us?
They chose to defederate from large instances with open registration. They believe it’s allowing users to troll them.
IMO, this is kinda dumb. As any instance with open registration would be able to do what they want to prevent. Also, anyone can create their own instance and do this, they don’t even need a server. It’s just a bad idea.
So now we’ve gone from mods making bad decisions from a single subreddit, to mods doing it to entire instances.
You’d think federating with larger communities would be a good thing, so there’s more content and communication and Lemmy doesn’t die and everyone goes back to Reddit.
There’s a positive here:
Everyone can just leave beehaw. I already saw a few comments from users that left beehaw after the admins there made poor decisions. Unlike reddit where if the admins make horrible decisions you can’t really leave, here the admins are bound similarly to how moderators were on reddit.
If the mods fuck up too much, people just create their own sub. Seattle had like 4 different subs due to moderator bullshit. Beehaw will probably not survive, and that’s ok. But lemmy as a whole will be perfectly fine!
I totally left beehaw once I saw the post. I didn’t want to be stuck only seeing what I was told I could.
You also get much more freedom too. You can create communities.
I just did this. Beehaw acting stupid? Ok now I’m on lemmy.world. Just had to subscribe to the communities I like (a task that will later become trivial I’m sure). Only took a few minutes and I can move on with my day. Back reddit when the admins act stupid everything’s fucked. I like it here
Barely a week in and we all get an awesome example of why decentralisation is a good thing
Welcome!
Some instance owners indeed do not understand the difference between running an instance and and running a community inside one. And those bad decisions are amplified by the inability to port your account to another instance easily.
We might end up with very few gargantuan instances, especially as soon as financial thresholds hit. Still an improvement over reddit overall, but I expect some things like that happening regularly.
Somebody claimed 4 moderator’s for the entirety of beehaw which is hilariously low. They should have chosen a defederated instance from the get go then. But perhaps they will open up in the future.
inability to port your account to another instance easily.
I hope they’ll implement such a feature ASAP, if I’m not mistaken, devs are already having a discussion about that.
To play devil’s advocate for a minute, they’re main points was that moderation actions right now are disproportionately focused on users coming from here and sh.itjust.works, and that the suite of available mod tools is not robust enough for them to handle such a high volume.
I don’t think defederation was the right idea, personally but I don’t think it was the wrong one from their point of view either. They’re trying to intentionally cultivate a culture over there rather than to moderate over an evolving one, and at the moment its too much work for them with the high volume of users. They don’t appear to have any ill-will against this instance as a whole or you. We can disagree with the decision but still respect it as their choice to make.
In the future if their internal culture solidifies I imagine they can refederate with us here; by that time we might have established our own communities to rival the high quality ones over there (gaming and technology) I can see already that lemmyworld is growing pretty well and has a load of communities that are start to thrive!
They’re trying to intentionally cultivate a culture over there rather than to moderate over an evolving one, and at the moment its too much work for them with the high volume of users.
Sure, but the way they went about doing it was the wrong way to do it.
They’ve effectively locked their users into ONLY accessing their walled garden.
I think what they wanted to do was block lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works users from posting in their communities, which would be possible with a pretty simple bot. Instead, they’re largely preventing their own users from accessing other communities, which based on their post was not their intention. And because of those effects, it’s likely going to result in their users leaving for instances with more access.
I think what they wanted to do was block lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works users from posting in their communities, which would be possible with a pretty simple bot.
But they don’t have that bot. It doesn’t exist. Why do you assume that they can make this bot?
Yeah that’s a really good point I hadn’t considered; it would have been smarter to have a bot to block users, at least until such a time as there’s service level tools for tiered federation, so for example to allow read-only federation. That might be useful to allow content to propagate but restrict access for posting to local or wrute-allowed federated instances. I’m not sure if that is something that Lemmy as a whole wants to implement, I haven’t dug into the ethos too deeply yet.
There’s actually discussion about how a multireddit-like system would work so those on federated instances can choose to have beehaw or not or other tech/gaming communities all in one place.
That’s really interesting! Thanks for sharing the link. This federation idea is really interesting to me. It’s something I discussed a lot with friends several years ago; how to implement a social network where your data and content is in your own hands, we never came up with a clean solution for it but Lemmy is a fantastic step in the right direction and makes me really excited to see how it will evolve.
They believe it’s allowing users to troll them.
What’s stopping trolls from creating new instances just to troll them?
Doesn’t their decision actually “invite” trolls to do so?
Yep. It’s almost like they didn’t fully understand what they were doing…
They probably panicked under the “load”, decisions taken while you’re panicking are never well-thought out, even if intentions are good.
Nothing, and I think their only tool is to ban the new instances as the come online unless they switch their federation method from blacklisting to whitelisting other instances. Their whole ethos invites trolls, which is probably a factor in why users from open registration instances had been causing problems with hate speech and sketchy porn on their instance. I don’t think this specific action is going to change that dynamic, people who don’t like what they are trying to do are inevitably going to poke at them and try to cause trouble regardless.
Trolling them is despicable, not matter their decisions.
I like to think a few bad apples are doing that, and the majority of people here are mature enough not to.
I’m pretty sure it’s a really small group of miserable assholes and everyone else is awesome. I think until Lemmy has better tools to deal with them this kind of shitty situation is an inevitable consequence; a few bad apples spoils the whole bunch.
It takes a lot more work to spin up an instance than it does an account.
You’d be surprised by the length some trolls are willing to go just to troll.
Never heard back in regards to my registration approval, which was nothing but polite. Kinda shows for me where they’re at if they pull something like this. Current beehaw users should think long and hard about whether they really want to support this.
unfortunately lemmy doesn’t allow you to send a message to users you decline. Also maybe they approved you but it landed in your spam folder?
I just want to add that I have another anecdote of this (not getting a response) happening to my partner. Don’t know if it’s a technical issue or they’re overburdened.
Pretty pointless, then.
Another question: how can I tell which communities I joined are from that instance? I tried to unjoin but I can’t see anything that tells me which instance they are.
If you look in your subscribed communities, any community that is followed by “@beehaw.org” is from beehaw. If it has no “@” sign it’s here on lemmy.world. Otherwise, you can see exactly which instance hosts it.
My subscribed communities don’t have the @whatever, just the name of the community. Maybe it’s because of the app? Idk.
Which app are you using? On Jerboa, communities from outside instances have the @ but communities from your home instance don’t.
That would be native kbin magazines then.
Edit: Sorry, Lemmy instances in this case. At least I assume they display it the same way if it is a native community.
Handily enough they just changed all their community icons so if you see ones in the list that have a little yellow hexagon icon, that’s probably a Beehaw one.
Are you on an app or something? On the site it should say @beehaw.org or whatever at the end of the community name
Yes, I’m on jerboa. I’ll try the browser version. Cheers.
Mlem on iOS doesn’t show @instance information either
I don’t remember there being open registration here. I signed up and had to wait a few days to get approved. Lemmy World has been nothing but great so far.
I don’t remember there being open registration here. I signed up and had to wait a few days to get approved. Lemmy World has been great so far.
tldr: not enough mod/admin power to handle all the activity
Because they want only 4 people to have absolute power managing every single community and registration.
Surprise Sherlock, it isn’t doable!
And then they have the audacity to demand the ability to comment and view other instances’ posts without giving those instances the same right to their content.
4 people is such a ridiculous number for strongly policed communities. Heck, it would not be viable for a 4chan style one probably.
Beehaw sounds like a really toxic, Professor Umbridge-type place.
