Hey Beeple, since there's a common trend on the topics on (de)federation, we made a post to clarify what this means.
You can see the conversation over here: https://beehaw.org/post/615042
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
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...
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.
Keep in mind the recent discussion was about 2 instances. There are about 300 instances on the Lemmy part of the Fediverse. The two instances that were de-federated were in the top 10 in terms of size so not exactly nothing though.
Just an fyi, defederation doesn't mean you as a user can't see any content from a given instance or vice versa. It's more like from the time of defederation, users on the other Lemmy can't be seen commenting or posting on your Lemmy. I believe there are other consequences too, but it's not as straightforward as a ban.
Defederation is a feature, not a bug. Lemmy was designed with the idea that instances could be more specific in thier content, so for your lemmy to defederate from a Ukraine war footage instance might not be a condemnation, so much as a curation decision.
Think of it like, an instance has the potential to be either a reddit alternative or a collection of related subreddits.
Or in this case, it is an ego driven crybaby fest because someone got jealous other instances got big.
https://beehaw.org/post/567170?scrollToComments=true
C'mon the thread is pretty clear and detailed as are the admin's responses in the thread explaining what happened, why it happened, why they unplugged, and why they wish they didnt have to.
Or in this case, it is an ego driven crybaby fest because someone got jealous other instances got big.
i don't see how this would logically follow—wouldn't our course of action if we wanted this to be something like opening registrations? we very much don't have a shortage of people clamoring to get in here—our backlog is 4,500—and if anything we're worried about too many people, not too few. we simply have no interest in growth at all costs, and we were... honestly pretty fine with being a 700-user instance before the big blowup here. certainly it'd have been less stressful, lol
I can see how it may appear that way, but we are hoping this is just a temporary state until mod and admin tools can catch up to the scale. Open signups and a flood of users in some of the big instances is not necessarily a problem by itself, but the moderation tools Lemmy has today are pretty rudimentary at the moment. This is certainly the case intra-instance, but is exacerbated once cross-instance moderation comes into play, especially when each instance has its own culture, rules, etc.
Yeah, that's how I took it too. Beehaw never pretended to be anything but a close knit community that prides itself on positive interactions. Defederating from larger instances made sense for them because they couldn't maintain that vibe given the current state of Lemmy. Hopefully, as these platforms mature, they can reconsider.
yeah, I think beehaw is in the right to decide this part of feature and it's up to the server admins. User can choose how they want to respond to that as well and I've seen different reaction as well.
If anyone wants to see just how hard it is to maintain lemmy in current state, just hop over to "All" and set the sorting to "New". For the record, during the past couple days, I already blocked 14 bot accounts and 9 community that used bots. I had to because other wise I can't discovery communities I might have interested in when browsing "All". And that's also after some work that was put in by the lemmy.ca admin.
And, if you don't want all the drama, you can always spin up your instance or join a less populated server.
How do you block instances yourself? I had anime bestiality porn popping up on "All" earlier, and would like to not have that as part of my normal browsing experience.
You can't block instance as a user, but you can either block the spam box account, or visit the instance and list all their current communities and then add all of them to your block list.
This is one of the user end feature that really should exist.(it's on the github issue list already.)
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.