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Wait, what? Beehaw is defederated? I still see lots of post from Beehaw on my feed.
The mods announced it today. There’s a giant pinned thread on Beehaw about it.
I tried making posts here on my Beehaw account and I could see them while logged into Beehaw but not when logged into Lemmy.world. Some of my older posts were no longer visible outside of my Beehaw account. Also some of my posts had comments from Beehaw people vanish all at once. My older posts from the Beehaw account are still visible, so I think some posts/comments remain visible if they happened before defederation.
I’m not sure which levers the mods there are pulling because the effects do seem inconsistent, and the mods seem in a bit of a frenzy trying to figure it out themselves.
Federation is a two-way connection. Beehaw shut off the incoming stream, essentially, so anyone commenting or posting on spaces from that instance will not be seen by users logged into Beehaw. However, the outgoing stream is still active so anything posted there that you subscribe to or visit from another instance can still be seen. Users on other instances can even comment in those threads, but users on Beehaw would not see those comments.
For me it helps to think of the instance you are logged into as the place you trust the most. Content from other sources can always come in, but you can choose to simply not see things you don’t want. This is a fundamental part of how the Fediverse works, for better or worse.
That’s interesting. What happens if a lemmy user replies to a beehaw user’s comment from a lemmy instance? Does the beehaw user just never see it?
Yeah, but small correction: Beehaw only defederated from two specific instances of Lemmy, not the entire system. If you were engaging with a Beehaw community from lemmy.one or other instances that Beehaw is still federated with, everyone sees everything on both sides.
Also, if the Beehaw user really wanted to engage with the lemmy.world or other defederated instances, nothing is stopping them form creating an account on that instance (or any other instance federated with the desired community) and commenting or posting from there.
The user need to be conscient of that. Otherwise its really unfair. If he doesn’t know the server he choose did that, he will be restrain without being aware of this.
And in an other hand, if I have to check why someone don’t respond to me (example), to be sure where this someone is, is federated, that would be really painful and discouraging. That can lead to a lot of misunderstood too.
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Cooool, I was wondering this. I had been curious if it was 1 party or 2 party federation; so someone can defederate, but it doesn’t “block” receipt of content, only the interaction with the blocked platform?
I believe that instances can independently choose whether to accept incoming or allow outgoing data, so there are multiple possible combinations.
Makes sense! Thanks!
There is a post explaining the details here: https://lemmy.world/post/149743
Ok I took a minute to read some of it. It’s just confusing to me, how is Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works for whatever reason is not like exactly like what Reddit is doing to third party apps? You want to federate with us? Sure, but you have to play by OUR rules.
Defederating in this situation means (to my very limited understanding). Users on lemmy.world can see posts from beehaw.org, they also can interact with the posts/comments. Those interactions just don’t show up on beehaw.org, so that they don’t have to moderate as much.
Reddit charging a metric ton of cash for their api is more or less if you would have to pay (the creator of lemmy) for each user if you decide to create your own instance (lemmy.world, beehaw.org and whatnot).
I think defederation works both ways, the posts you can see from lemmy.world are old copies, not being updated anymore.
You might be right, but I understand it so that beehive is still providing the true to everyone, just lemmy.world users can’t interact with the true version they will get an out of sync version with only their comments. But lurking should be still possible. Basically similar to a silent ban. You can still post but (almost) nobody can see it. (almost means only lemmy.world users)
Since it is out of sync .world users and sh.itjust.works users can also not interact on beehive posts since they both have their own out of sync copy.
Yes, I am miffed. With such a focus on community I’d have expected a discussion thread or poll for Beehaw members before making a nuclear action, not a thread posted after it was done. It was a very sudden action. I’m not thrilled that anybody against the idea over there is being painted as some kind of problematic person. It is giving me a bad vibe.
Also, nothing in the pinned post I saw mentioned talking with the Lemmy.world mods. It seems to me that attempting communication to come to a mutually agreed standard of behavior is something to be tried as an early measure. Just because there aren’t a lot of built in technical mode tools doesn’t take away talking.
The fact that Beehaw mods unilaterally decided this, without prior input from other communities or their own members really bugs me.
I was very optimistic for Beehaw but this is a worrying use of petty mod power.
I guess sh.itjust.doesntwork
You will see posts but you won’t be able to interact with any one outside of lemmy.world users. They can’t keep up with the number of users and have defederated from a huge number of instances.
My experience is that it’s more nuclear than that. On my Beehaw account I tried to post to a Lemmy.world community and it seemed to post, but when I logged into my Lemmy.world account that post wasn’t visible.
It appears a full severance.
I believe beehaw only degenerated from lemmy. If you’re on kbin you can still see both.
Only from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, not with others AFAIK. The anouncementpost can be found here https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Lol every time I read an announcement by these guys it feels off-putting. I thought I was a progressive but reading this and the comments makes me feel like I am the furthest thing from progressive if this is what they believe. Every time they mention a safe space, I wonder if they are trying to make safe spaces seem like a joke because that’s the vibe I’m getting. Safe spaces are for victims, not for trying to create a great wall of beehaw “ideals.”
I really don’t see it in such a negative way. Being able to control what you allow and don’t allow seems like the whole idea of a federated system in my perspective, including defederation with other instances.
Everything is also new to everybody and these are also just some volumteers sharing their servers and bandwidth to host a place for people to chill. Finding a way to moderate the huge influx of people sounds like a challenge and I can see why they would make this choice (and I believe it’s temporary for now as well). I see Beehaw currently more like a phpbb forum that has it’s own thing. So far I’m liking the different communities beehaw, lemmy.world and kbin bring, each in their own way.
I guess I’m frustrated with the communities that decided to chose beehaw really, some of the big subs announced they would now be moderating a replacement community on beehaw. It makes me want to shake them and ask why the fuck did they pick beehaw. If beehaw wants to become a great firewall, whatever it only makes me never want an account on there because I want to choose which instances to interact with, not the admins. But now I would have to find new communities to replace the ones taken away by beehaw admins. Any communities I have created can’t be interacted by beehaw users and I can’t interact with any communities on beehaw. I’ve already read a comment about a person from beehaw who now can’t continue to mod a community on lemmy.world. The nuke action was not appropriate imo. The beehaw admins also refuse to delegate, they only want 4 people to comb through every single post and comment. This is insane for 4 people to do.
I also don’t see this as a temporary measure, they want the lemmy devs to implement the exact mod tools they want otherwise they won’t unblock my instance. I find that unlikely to happen any time soon, if ever, due to how open source projects work. Might as well as have told everyone it is permanent and they don’t care instead of giving a bs reason. Why would I bother making an account on a different server at this point when that server can easily be the next one beehaw blocks? At what point does beehaw decide to just defederate because they can’t handle interacting with other instances? I have taken the news very poorly and have nothing but disdain for the admins there.
some of the big subs announced they would now be moderating a replacement community on beehaw
I thought beehaw didn’t allow their users to create communities.
lemmy.world, kbin and Twitter have been my new dopamine rotation routine atm.
Has Shoshon The Elegant vibes
This is amazing, thank you for sharing this.
lmao
This is honestly interesting to watch play out, because one of the neat things about federation is that it allows for effectively chains and knots of information - Beehaw is more censored/curated at the moment while Kbin is more connected than anything because it’s bridging Lemmy World and Beehaw.
So pardon my ignorance but if you’re on lemmy and beehaw defederated, you wouldn’t be able to see any beehaw content, right?
I’m genuinely still trying to figure it all out still.,
Any new content. We can still see and interact with the posts that were created and copied from when beehaw was federated with lemmy.world. Once they defederated, their server simply stopped interacting with lemmy.world.
Any posts you see from beehaw are just copies. You can still comment and vote, but the changes are only kept on lemmy.world’s instance.
Since lemmy.world is still allowing federation with beehaw, lemmy.world users can still see posts and comments from beehaw users, if those beehaw users were to post to the lemmy.world instance directly. The beehaw users wouldn’t see any interactions or replies, however.
It’s a street with a lane blocked off right now. Lemmy.world allows traffic from beehaw, but beehaw blocked traffic from lemmy.world. We can hear them and see them, but they can’t hear or see us.
That ending got a scary movie vibe. Doesn’t de-federating kind of take your community out from knowing what’s happening around the neighborhood?
I think from the perspective of beehaw, it’s more relieving rather than spooky. There’s nothing stopping someone from hopping over here to lemmy.world to make an account. It’s just that comments and posts from here don’t get copied over to beehaw, so it makes it less work to curate and moderate what’s showing up for beehaw-specific accounts.
I think so, but I;m not sure. Could also be the other way around. I’m still new to this as well.
Exactly. Am no longer using my lemmy.world account. I made a kbin one first, before I realised that Jerboa didn’t support it. So now I have three accounts.
Boom. I just installed jerboa a few minutes ago and am replying to you with it now.
I do like how it kinda/sorta looks like how I had Boost setup before.
If you want to see or interact with Kbin using Jerboa, you should be able to do that via your lemmy.world account as long as you have the same subscriptions set up in both instances.
Yes, I had that set up. I do get the Kbin magazines. But I wanted to sill access the beehaw posts. The FMHY instance is working for me.
Instructions were unclear I have like 5 new accounts and I’m forgetting where lol.
If you had created an account on a provider that wasn’t lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works you’d had access to everything but with just one account.
Even if you disagree with beehaw, it’s not a bad idea since it spreads the load of users across instances.
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Not quite any other instance, quite a few that they have blocked in total, you can see the full list towards the bottom of https://beehaw.org/instances
Those are just your average blocked mastodon instances.
Yeah people are still not understanding what happened. They also plan to refederate. I don’t blame them for blocking the flow until they can prevent unsavory content from making it on their instance. People have a right to control content hosted on their instance. If I ran an instance I wouldn’t want NSFW or political posts, anything that’s gonna cause drama as that is what I hated about reddit. There are plenty of instances where all that is allowed.
Same, moved to kbin.
I hedged my bets and created accounts on both Lemmy.world and kbin.social just in case one of them crashed completely or defederated from something I followed. I find the whole federation thing super interesting though, I’ve always worked IRL on different types of systems installation/integration so I think my brain is just naturally drawn to novel ways of doing stuff.
Yooo kbin user!
It gets more confusing when the instance you joined decides to unfederate and half of your subs stop working! Then you have to join a new instance and start over because subs nor usernames carry over.
Do you have a grasp of the fediverse now?
It sounds like you know enough to use the site properly :)
Heh, yup
As of now I have an account on lemmy.world and kbin.social
Same. LW/kbin gang.
Same to be honest lol, it’s been a bit to get used to
It was confusing at first
The confusion never went away. Beehaw defederated, so I understand that you would then have to create a specific Beehaw account in order to engage with Beehaw communities, but why would I want to as a Lemmy.world user, is what I’m confused about.
That’s not the most convenient though. You could have an account on any instance that’s not lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works and you’d be able to access both beehaw and Lemmyworld/shitjustworks
I got my account on lemm.ee and was wondering how the defederation affected me, good to know, thanks.
It doesn’t. Beehaw blocked LW and SIJW because of open sign ups and, what I assume, was people creating new accounts when their old one was banned.
If you’re not on any of those two instances or on beehaw, you’re not impacted.
Beehaw is sending a message, imho, that instances need take reasonable measures to ensure their users don’t repeatedly commit some sort of abuse.
This raises a question about the use case of user-only instances and community-only instances which might not be a bad idea.
Beehaw is sending a message, imho, that instances need take reasonable measures to ensure their users don’t repeatedly commit some sort of abuse.
Do mods even have this kind of power? Can they see what their users are posting on other instances?
For that matter, I don’t know if this is so much a statement being made by Beehaw about quality of users as it is a necessary step for their moderation style. I think Beehaw has very strict mdoeration policies and they’re just having a hard time keeping up with their own influx of users let alone LW and SIJW who have open registration.
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).
why not lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works?
My understanding from the announcement post was because those are two large instances with open registration, and they want to be able to better vet new users to make sure they’re not trolls
Good luck to them vetting the entire internet. Hope they’ll have fun in their little super duper exclusive club house.
Lol, they were the first instance I tried to sign up for since they are large and loud. They interrogate you in order to make an account. “Why do you want to make an account on Beehaw?” Um, because I’m addicted to link aggregators and tired of Reddit? Does it fucking matter?
It matters to them, so I guess you are not the type of user they want. It’s annoying, but if they want their server to be more exclusive, they can do that. It is the beauty and the pain of federation.
Safe space locks doors is how I read this whole thing.
Home instances stand strong 💪
I have like three now, because it wasn’t clear that that wasn’t required. I think I’m getting it more now, but it’s taking a bit to get there.
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I have no idea whats going on
It happens to the best of us
Yes, you have to create an account on every instance that exists and always use that account to interact with that instance.
If you keep a central account, one day you will anger the wrong person and they will blacklist you off the entire fediverse, losing all relationships and history to overcome ostracisation.
I even consider making a new account per instance per month. Maybe the process could be automated too.
When John Fed wants you off his verse, you are gone
You actually better off running your own instance that way you don’t have to worry about getting delisted but that’s not exactly easy.
Nope, still confusing
i need a tutorial
Reminds me of the good old days creating a different identity for each forum I signed up at.
On the internet, you can literally just be anyone you want.
Thanks for the advice, Margot!
You’re welcome. Now go watch Suicide Squad again.
Don’t be ridiculous. That movie is shite. I’m going to watch the suicide squad instead
I did it on Lemmy on purpose. I’m somefool on four instances, subbed to communities with different themes. Soon, I might head back to PhpBB.
And this is why you roll your own instance just for auth
At this point I’m considering it. I wonder how much it costs.
I did it, but my buddy has a server with extra resources that he doesn’t care if I use and I already owned domains.
Say $20/yr for domain, Lemmy needs around 150MB of RAM and almost no CPU. You could easily do that for $5/mo. Slice up the domain renewal, call it $8.
So far, there are upsides and downsides.
The upsides, I can federate with anyone I want and it’s unlikely that they’ll defederate with me because I’m one guy, and maybe a handful of friends if they want accounts. Two, I wanted something I could use as a blog anyway, so I made a mod only community on my instance where I can blog. I don’t care if people read it or not, it just seemed fun.
Downside, finding communities is relatively more laborious. I have to go to other instances and look at their communities, or all feeds, to find things to subscribe to at home. Which means for each one, I need to copy the link or name, go to my instance’s search, then go to the communities tab and subscribe. On a big instance, someone probably already searched for a lot of communities at least once, which is enough to index it. But on your own, you gotta do it yourself and it can get a little tedious.
Overall, I’m liking running my own though, so I plan to keep doing that.
Discoverability is one of the biggest weaknesses Lemmy has right now. It should be entirely fixable, though. A way to auto-index the list of communities on a given instance would be a great start.
Are you talking about getting a list for yourself, or doing it in a federated way? Because for an individual instance, you can go to Explore Communities -> All to view the most popular communities for that instance, or click the local tab for only communities that they host.
I found a lot of my communities (including this one!) through Lemmy Explorer which aggregates it a bit.
Doing it in a federated way.
Specifically, when you tell your instance about another one, it should at least register the existence of every community on the other instance. Right now indexing is community-by-community from what I hear and that sucks.
I can completely understand why that wouldn’t be, it would put a big strain on any server with a large community count.
I think the top 25-100 communities could be reasonable, though. This could also be accomplished with a bot either managed by an instance interested in pulling that data, or a user wanting to automate subscriptions a bit.
*I originally posted this with an example that I immediately realized was incorrect, so I corrected that.
Last I checked there were 10k communities and a few 100 instances total, which is tiny in computer terms. As it grows larger maybe it would be an issue, but really even millions of instance names properly compressed shouldn’t be onerous for a one-time download.
150 MB of RAM is a bit optimistic. However I agree that you should be okish with cheap 1GB 1vCPU VMs for a one user instance.
Maybe even host it on an old laptop you can use as a server.
The 150MB metric was based on the documentation estimate. I would say that remains correct for my solo instance. The only caveat would be that postegres adds, at current, about 200MB of usage on top of that. Nginx and postfix add just about nothing memory-wise.
This may bloat up over time, or if I had a bunch of users I’m certain it would, but we’re not really talking about hosting large communities in this case, so I’d say 512MB of RAM with no other software could probably do the trick as a bare minimum. For those hosting proper communities, 100% future proof and go bigger than that.
In my case I started with 4GB but had to double because there seems to be some memory creep / leak that gets reset when you reboot the server.
Of course, I’m hosting 50 active users and communities with over 200 subscribers.
Overall I would say that Lemmy is indeed lightweight.
I’ve got the domains already - I have a bad habit of buying domains that I never use. It’s really the server part that gets me nervous. I’m not good at that stuff yet, and it’s not really intuitive for me to learn. I know for Mastodon, they have some cloud based servers that they recommend, but Lemmy’s instructions are kinda lacking detail for a newbie like me - and at this time, there’s not really up-to-date YT videos showing you how to do it.
I know that being part of a server seems like a natural fit for someone like me who is totally lost with these things, but it’s kinda frustrating that most larger instances have a ton of rules. I think the one I’m on has rules about lewd content, which is fine, but I feel like one of my comments got blocked from submission when I wrote about how Reddit’s downfall will be similar to Tumblr’s due to their likely eventual banning of that type of content. Maybe some of the words I used were triggering the auto filter or something? But either way, I didn’t like that feeling of censorship.
There’s a guy working on a runs-out-of-the-box Kubernetes install.
Cool! I’ll probably go down that route then when it’s ready.
I didn’t mention the install process in my case, because the box I installed on already had Apache, which conflicted with nginx, and I couldn’t get an equivelant apache config working correctly. So in my case, it took extra steps where I migrated everything from apache to nginx on the box, and stopped using apache. But I did the install using ansible to connect from my PC to the server, and the install process itself wasn’t bad. Copy pasted the config files and made a few relevant changes like DB password, instance name, default admin credentials, and pointing to my existing SMTP mail service. For a personal instance, you could probably exclude that last step though. I already host email for my domain, so the effort to do the extra and make it work was miniscule.
After the config changes, I just put things where the lemmy-ansible repo asked, and ran it as directed. Aside from a few screwups on my part, which were mostly because I was trying to see if I could make Apache work, the install wasn’t too bad. Ansible did the heavy lifting, and if I was installing on a fresh server, I have little doubt it would have given me trouble at all.
If you ever decide to go through with trying, feel free to reach out to me. I’ll be happy to help as much as I can.
I’m using a $6 a month digital ocean droplet. Should be plenty of juice for me and my friends.
That looks neat! I’ll look into it. How does it work, do you run Docker in it? I really have no clue what I’m doing.
Im currently with contabo and got an vps for 6€ a month with 8 gb of ram and 200gb ssd. I’m quite happy with it
I hope this place gets better with time.
New here, does it mean my username propagated to other instances?
Yes, but you have to manually set up and switch instances; basically having multiple accounts for no reason other than having access to other servers.
And where is that bot that signs me up for all servers so I can save my name lol.