hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one:
we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.
we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).
an unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.
aside from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:
- these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
- the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
- our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
- and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for
as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:
There’s a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it’s not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can’t even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.
Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.
and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.
this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.
thanks for using our site folks.
The alternative it looks like for now is to subscribe to an instance thats both not blocked by beehaw and doesnt block lemmy.world
I think this is very disappointing, and exceptionally selfish, to split up some of the largest Lemmy communities while a mass Reddit exodus is ongoing. We should be sticking together and trying to grow the Fediverse as a whole, rather than trying to wall off any one single community at this point. That said, I hope this is the end of this approach, and that smaller instances, particularly ones that support a particular community won’t be pushed aside as well (hello from Lemmy Portugal).
As a temporary solution de-federation is a fine idea. Permanently, I fear you guys may be shooting yourself in the foot. I joined a few days ago after seeing you were federated with most of the larger instances, and you had a decent number of communities similar to subreddits. Again, I understand how you can see this as necessary to maintain a safe space, but it will most definitely be the death of Beehaw in the long run. I’ll probably swap to another instance for now.
That’s kinda sad, because it reinforces the clutter of decentralisation even more :(
This is really hard to process.
I came to beehaw because it seemed to very welcoming and the fediverse provided freedom which was excellent. It is difficult to process because now users on beehaw are being told “you can be open and welcoming as long as you don’t dare integrate your beehaw and lemmy world experience”. Hopefully the beehaw staff understand that ultimately, users desire freedom to choose how they want their online experience.
I can only see this hurting beehaw in the future and hopefully this is a short misstep and not a permanent decision. The only reason that beehaw has seen massive growth is because of the association with lemmy world and other popular instances. This fragmentation will only hurt Lemmy when Reddit was seen as a “one stop shop” for all posts.
Disappointing to see the largest lemmy instances fracturing so early. But this also confirms my decision to self host my own instance - to avoid this sort of thing.
I am not going to stand for this.
I didn’t come here into the fediverse to have instances dictate on their whim that I’ll not have access to something.
This goes completely against the idea of having an unified platform. You can of course do whatever you want, but I’ll not be part of a closed garden.
@alyaza I think the “solution” here is worse than the problem.
Just a heads up so you can try to plan ahead: on Reddit one of the tactics used by those with hateful agendas was to shut down progressive threads by purposely creating drama in that thread to overwhelm the moderators so that they had to lock the thread thus stopping all discussion. Sometimes they did this by being awful and dragging in well meaning users into fights, other times I they’d drop a few “I’m just asking questions” comments focussing on hot-button ideas that they knew would rile up arguments. It was very deliberate tactic and one that I don’t think moderators ever figured out how to deal with effectively, because short of babysitting the thread with their full attention from start to finish there was no way to prevent entire threads from devolving into attacks and arguments.
The crazy thing was how effectively one or two people with hateful agendas could derail an entire comment section of well meaning people and, by getting the thread locked, shut down the discussion and spread of progressive ideas.
I bring this up because Beehaw is perhaps uniquely vulnerable to this sort of ‘attack’, and you should expect to see it in the future. By joining other federated instances and using these tactics to stir up drama in Beehaw threads they can, by forcing your hand to defederalize, restrict the access of those other communities to the progressive ideals and ideas posted on Beehaw. The end result is isolating progressive ideas inside our walled garden, while users of the rest of the Lemmy instances start to only see more right-wing extremist views, normalizing them to otherwise everyday people.
I don’t have a solution to this. But it’s something to be aware of in discussions with the moderators of other instances, that a handful of people with this exact agenda can make their community look bad in order to restrict their users’ access to progressive ideas.
You are absolutely right both that this is an issue, and that it is difficult to fix. The divide keeps growing, and the more we separate our conversations the easier it is for both sides to convince us all that it’s the other party that is the problem.
I went back and was looking at the early days of Fark just to see how much things had changed. What struck me the most was how mixed the community was, sure there were extremists on both sides, but there was so much more discussion happening in the middle. So many more people realizing it’s the system that is the problem and neither party cares about the people.
They didn’t even have to divide us, we were all so willing to do it to ourselves as soon as we could. How do we combat this? How do we talk across the lines and have real discussions again?
As someone who’s moderated large and default communities on reddit, I’m well aware of the vast number of tactics available at hand by bad actors. We have always been a special target for trolls and we do not expect that to change - unfortunately a lot of this is hidden from users who aren’t familiar with what happens at scale or haven’t had to deal with these bad actors.
One of my partners was involved in taking down hate speech subs for years. Without revealing too much about them, through an unfortunate series of events their information got leaked to the public on an altright news site, and they’ve been harassed ever since. Every time they get a new job they have to sit down with management and tell them that they are going to receive calls from people who will tell them that they are a pedophile and a rapist and doing all sorts of inhumane things to children. There’s a group of people so dedicated to harassing my partner that they are doing this regularly.
I’m hoping it never gets that bad for myself (I’m honestly not sure how I avoided this kind of harassment on reddit, because I know this person and another well known individual who receives a lot of in person harassment) but I also know that by making stances like this it’s bound to happen once we reach a certain scale.
This would be ironic, given that Lemmy was made by communists.
Support – “Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.” from Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
You are being incredibly selfish and should revert this change immediately
respect your decision, and the transparency behind your thought processes. Beehaw’s stated values, and the culture that you have grown and maintained were what led me to choose it initially. I’ve enjoyed reading and interacting with the people and content here, and the extra thought and effort that goes into typical posts compared to other similar servers.
I hope you’re able to find people you can trust to share the administrative burden, that improved moderation tools are not far off, and that this decision will be earnestly reconsidered in the coming days/weeks as growth from the Reddit Exodus stabilizes.
I believe the Fedverse as a whole will be a poorer place for being defederated from Beehaw.
That said, based on this decision I’ve decided to migrate my primary account to a regional instance. I want to continue to participate in and interact with the Beehaw community, but I’d also like the freedom to explore the wider fediverse and find diverse communities for my niche interests and hobbies. I just hope bad actors from my, and other instances don’t cause further defederation and fragmentation.
Fuck this. Now is a time for that downvote button.
Thank you.
I know what it’s like to try to build up something good only to have trolls try to take it over. It’s nice to think that kindness and guidance can make everything shiny and happy, but the reality is that sometimes you just have to shut the door to bad actors and lock it behind them.
Some people have a need to try to ruin things for others. There’s no reason to give them a platform. Actions have consequences.
Yeah, I’m perfectly fine with this decision. And if I want to see content from and interact on those instances, I can (and have already) create accounts on those instances. No harm no foul.
Thanks for working so hard on this community. I’d like to echo so many here when I say I’d prefer a strong, helpful community vs a large low-effort post community. Do what you have to do to keep this instance healthy. Thanks again.
