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Defederation?
(lemmy.one)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Technology
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It's not that Lemmy is defederating, it's that Beehaw is choosing to block sh.itjust.works and Lemmy.world, which means those two are no longer able to federate to Beehaw, and vice-versa. So to that end, they're defederating. Beehaw will keep federating content to other instances (like how I read this from FMHY, and am commenting from FMHY, which you can read).
Hopefully that helps
Not vice-versa, oddly enough. I don't know if this is the norm for the fediverse, but on Lemmy, instance blocking goes one-way. So users on those instances can federate with Beehaw and see communities, posts, and comments, and even post their own stuff, but users on Beehaw won't see it.
Edit: Ah, correction, this only applies to things on instances that are still federated to the defederated instances. The two instances defederated from Beehaw will no longer get any updates directly from Beehaw, but will still see Beehaw users' comments on posts on other instances.
They have a cached copy of the content from before defederation. It's a bit weird, but they can still comment and make posts in the zombie community, but the posts go nowhere. Only users from their own instance can see them, every federated instance sees the 'true' Beehaw content.
why though? From what I've seen there are a few bad actors over there but not the whole place. As an instance owner myself I have only defederated a couple instances, the pretty obvious ones, the ones where "Okay if you signed up for that you knew what you were getting into".
Why did the defederate a whole instance of people, do they not want to grow? They've also been having growing pains, wouldn't they want people to federate with other clients?
Because both those instances have open signups, so trolls troll Beehaw, get their accounts blocked, immediately create new accounts, then continue to troll Beehaw (and by troll I mean post unsavoury stuff that explicitly goes against Beehaws Safe Space goal)
Still, de-federating is a big hammer that's usually reserved for the extremist instances like you've found, so de-federating 2 mainstream general instances is an extreme move.
It's a very bad user experience for users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, especially since Beehaw has hosted many of popular Communities. So I can't help but think it's bad for the Lemmy migration as a whole to splinter users from Communities, even if it's good for Beehaw to protect their own users (which is explicitly what they set out to do, and well within their right)
Hopefully this is a one-time hiccup due to rapid expansion and lacking moderation tools, and not a sign of things to come. Beehaw did state in the announcement what it's a temporary measure until better mod tools come along, I just hope more technical reasons to de-federate don't keep coming up.
I also can't help but wonder if enabling downvotes on the instance would reduce the modding requirements drastically. Isn't downvoting undesirable posts to oblivion essentially crowdsourcing moderation?
This is really what I worry about now. One of the top complaints from redditors was that "I'm afraid to choose an instance and then have them defederate from other ones I care about" I don't think defederating whole instances is the right choice, personally. I do agree we need better mod tools to mod away groups of bad actors, but I don't see anything wrong with perma bans either.
Unfortunately there really are only hammers at the moment. You can't just defederate a community, but even if you could that wouldn't help here.
It's not that the two instances were hosting objectionable content, it was that they had a slew of users come to Beehaw to try and disrupt the community, and continue to do things like ban evasion.
It's because the moderation policies of those instances are very lenient. Beehaw wanted to curb that sort of crowd from potentially making a mess out of their own.
Although Beehaw is discussing with the other instances about reuniting potentially...