People don't dislike defederation because they misunderstand it. They dislike it because it's a bad user experience. It sucks to effectively get banned from a bunch of major communities through no fault of your own. It's a flawed system. I don't know what a good solution would be, but it's definitely an issue.

I guess one solution is to encourage users to join servers that are as small as possible, to reduce the chance of getting blocked. But that approach comes with its own set of downsides too.

This is a bad take because you used the most extreme example of why defederation is a practical necessity to justify a significantly less serious issue. I personally would want the bar to be much higher for this kind of thing.

I also don't "misunderstand" anything here. I just strongly disagree with the decision. What's next, beehaw gets upset that other instances allow downvoting?

As we are seeing the same issues with Lemmy and Mastodon I'm starting to think there is something fundamentally wrong with ActivityPub.

Because instances pull content from others they have a responsibility in the content, so instances with different rules can't really work together.

If on the other hand we had a lighter integration between instances, like for example RSS to consume from multiple instances and only having federation for identity management (like OpenID or OAuth) I feel like we could avoid a lot of drama.

It’s unfortunate that a handful of replies here are demonstrating exactly why the Beehaw community leaders felt they had to make this choice. 😞

If Lemmy instances are like web forums, federation basically gives us a “Sign in with your [home instance] account” option. (That’s not technically accurate at all, I’m only talking about the user experience.) It reduces user friction and helps people participate more widely. They just stopped allowing that from certain instances because they think adding a bit of friction back in will be healthier for the Beehaw communities. If you’re on one of the defederated instances, you aren’t banned. Yeah, it’s inconvenient for you, but you just need a different sign-in (at least for the time being).

It will take more time to establish norms. Other instances will certainly defederate and folks will become more accustomed to what that defederation means.

Instances are very vulnerable right now. There's not much ability to trust or predict how the owners of your instance will behave, because there isn't a long history of past behavior to look back on, so understandably some users will be frustrated by the lack of stability.

I do see one huge issue with how people are being instructed to join lemmy, which is that most resources tell people it doesn't matter which instance they join. That becomes fundamentally untrue with defederation.

I completely understand the reason for the current workflow. However, IMO that makes Lemmy almost unusable. I already have a programming and a gaming community that I can't use Jerboa on. That's pretty bad.

For example, lemmy.world are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities.

Are they, though? I’ve read a lot about it, and everyone over there seems to more or less understand it, kind of just shrug about it now, and have moved on. Lemmy world sees it’s bigger than beehaw now, has tons of its own content, still has access everywhere else and will be fine.

So for newcomers to the fediverse (also, hi!), mastodon has gone through debates and events too. People my differ on this, but I think the whole phenomenon is just a part of the fediverse and that it's fundamentally a good thing.

Where it causes drama or friction, I think it is essentially a different kind of friction compared to what happens on big-social platforms. And while it can have its problems or be mishandled, the problems, IMO, reflect real-life social dynamics more, and are therefore healthier than being subject to and at the whims of big-corporate overlords with many more interests other than true cultural and human engagement and interaction. Sometimes, people and whole groups of people just don't want to know each other. Free-speech and political discourse ideals aren't the catch all analysis here. This isn't the news papers or an academic journal, it's social media.

Bubbles are problematic but so are firehoses and incessantly unpleasant social interactions ... grouping and excluding is what we do ... it helps to match our finite minds and lives to the magnitudes of reality.

Beyond this, I think many are just not accustomed to real-life human dynamics playing a more structural role in their major social media life. There's an adjustment that needs to happen. And this goes both ways, for those against and those in defence of defederation actions, where attacks on defederation may miss the point and defenders may not see that there are sometimes better ways to manage problems.

Many of the attacks of defederation are along the lines of "this will stifle growth". I get it, and I've said the same myself elsewhere. But, one, not long ago no one thought any of this would "grow" and yet here we are, so maybe save the prognostications and try more substantial and constructive critiques. And, two, much of the above about transitioning to different modes of online socialising necessitates friction, where the fediverse is not simply your substitute for big-social waiting for the special moment you decide big corporations have crossed your line, rather, it's a different system, problems and all. Now, by all means, critique the fediverse (I sure do), but, I would recommend doing so with some of the above as part of your frame of reference.

For my money, the biggest problem right now is account mobility. Your account is stuck and limited to an instance. Mastodon has migrations but it's really just importing your settings and followers to a new account on a new instance rather than truly moving your account to a new host. This is baked into the current structure of the fediverse. Instances are first-class citizens, users are second-class. It is truly accurate, though somewhat pejorative, to use "feudal-verse" instead, because that is actually what it really is.

In terms of defederation, the problem this causes is that you can find yourself at odds with the federation policies of your instance and want to leave, which is obviously a PITA. More deeply, it's hard to know the federation policies of an instance before you join, or how they'll respond to some situations, so events like beehaw can be a little "shocking", and sometimes hurtful, because you find yourself labelled by your instance when you in reality have little alignment it, at least on the matter at hand.

Thing is, belonging to an instance or a community of some sort, finding a "home" of sorts with a group of other people, is probably a good thing, in line with my comments about healthier and more "in real life" dynamics. The issue is that instances and us being forced to join them is somewhat arbitrary, and once you end up having multiple accounts, just a PITA and ultimately bad UX.

What the fediverse really needs, IMO, is both grouping/community mechanisms and for our accounts and their hosting to be decoupled from these groups/communities.

Lemmy/kbin and the threadiverse as a whole do well in this regard by having sub-reddit/forum like structures. Mastodon and the microblogs struggle as they are quite bad at communities (as the BIPOC communities found out it seems). But, as it stands, the threadiverse still couples community hosting with account hosting, and so we have the beehaw defederation issue (which I should say is interesting to see as communities or reddit-like structures haven't been popular on the fediverse until now-ish).

Technologically, my suspicion is that this whole fediverse thing goes to another level once a coherent protocol provides for optional independence between account hosting and community hosting and, arguably, independence between the prior two and platform format. We have "self-hosting", but at the moment it's a bit of a hack, still binds you to platforms and hardly provided as a convenient service (check out Spacehost, an upcoming service for this: https://spacehost.one/).

I wonder about self-hosting scales and suspect it's awfully inefficient, and so, technologically, I suspect some hybridisation of the architecture is required, where the whole web2.0 idea of user->server->platform just melts away.

In reality, the only real innovation of the fediverse is to parallelise the "server" part user->server->platform so that a single user on a single platform can be achieved with horizontal scale and a distributed work load.

user->server->platform
    \-server-/
    \-server-/

This has the effect of FOSS social media being a thing (here we are and it's awesome TBH), but isn't really revolutionary from a user perspective. Once multiple platforms communicate over the same protocol, it starts to get revolutionary, but that's only started as anyone who's tried to mix mastodon and lemmy can attest to.

To me the whole situation is a "they bit off more than they could chew" kind of thing so you pull the nuclear option.. Honestly I'm avoiding subscribing to any beehaw communities because I won't be able to see any posts made from one of the most populous instances, hence diminishing their value. As a general user I would avoid signing up for beehaw as well for the same reasons, which to be fair is what beehaw probably wants given their lack of resources.

know very little about the programming but it feels like there would be some sort of SSO multi-instance user account syncing solution.

Make an account on one instance, say Lemmy.World, and from that account request access to the other instances that you would like to join. Your account would get cloned and synced to the other instances that you get accepted to and posts/comments in that instance would be stored on that instance account as a secondary instance.

Posts could be cloned to all federated clone accounts or you could designate a secondary backup acount in case the primary server goes down. Maybe there could be a limit of instances you join like 3-5 cloned accounts to reduce duplication of data and maybe only clone messages, not media or something unless specifically requested. It would also allow for folks to continue posting and browsing even if their primary instance is overloaded or down which would improve the end user experience.

Again I only have an approximate idea how this works so this may all be dumb...

Defederating lemmy.world is a temporary measure as better mod tools are made. It isn’t worth handwringing over. Defederation should not be the norm for dealing with a few trolls, or objectionable communities.