this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023

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What’s the deal with lemmy.world and beehaw? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I don’t get what the problem is? Anyone can elaborate.

Edit: Thank you all for shedding more light on this topic. I’ve never really used flatpak but I do understand it better now!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All of these services are very new. Exactly what people want out of them — including what the people operating instances want out of them — is still being worked out.

This is not a commercial production service that you have a contract with. It's an experimental system run by volunteers who don't all have the same ideas in mind. People aren't just working out the kinks — the process of discovering what this is all really for is still ongoing.

Expect friction. Expect weirdness. Expect rapid growth and, therefore, rapid change.

Also, expect people to fuss when they get surprised they can't do something they want to. That's also normal.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To clarify a minor point, beehaw isn't new. It was established in Feb 2022, and it's been thriving with a relatively small community up until this months crazy growth. They're not so much finding their feet as trying to maintain an existing communities safety in the face of rapid growth.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Seems they're just discovering what being "federated" actually means.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not at all. They've been one of the largest instances on lemmy for over a year, and they federated widely during that time. The issue is that lemmy is still a relatively immature platform in terms of moderation features. The workload on their moderators to sustain federation and community safety with rudimentary moderation tools whilst the threadiverse population increases in size over 1000 fold is incredibly high.

So until moderation tools improve, their options are

Give up their safety focus. We can assume that's not going to happen
Find more admins, which is easier said than done, because at this point in time, one of the lacking moderation features is the ability to add instance moderators. Right now, the only instance elevated role is admin. You have to be able to trust the new admin with the keys to everything.
Defederate with instances that threaten their high value on community safety

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My point is, there wasn't really all that much content on other instances that would have posed a problem from a federation perspective before Lemmy blew up due to the reddit stuff. They largely were used to being in their own bubble with limited outside influence due to the obscurity of the Lemmy platform broadly.

I respect their desire to form the community how they see fit. That's the beauty of the fediverse after all. I think it'll be confusing for new users though who aren't used to federation, both from those outside the instance and those who only created an account there because it hosted several large communities without really thinking about the implications of what the admins desire for their instance.

The answer is to create communities that mirror their biggest on more general purpose instances. A lot of contributors to Beehaw's communities who weren't on their instance probably feel a little miffed that they were helping pump content onto the Lemmy platform broadly, and now they've been defederated. Kinda sucks, but a good lesson for choosing your instance and the instance of communities you choose to contribute content to and help build, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Everything you've said here though is very different to your previous comment about them not understanding federation.

This reply is closer to the truth. They understand it quite fine, but have different priorities, and those priorities probably weren't clear to a lot of their new members

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's the other way around: new people and instances are learning that federation also means that other servers don't want to federate with you, and that that's okay. This is different from the usual 'freeze peach' stuff, this is just communities saying 'we don't want to hear you'.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The short version is that beehaw was struggling with the (currently) limited toolset available to moderate user content, and they saw a heap of users posting things they don't allow on their instance were coming from the two other big instances, so it was more effective for them to defederate to try and stem the tide.

I imagine regeneration will occur in future when the lemmyverse stabilises a little, and when better mod tools are available

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Beehaw is meant to be a safe space, mitigating toxicity, while other instances, by having registration open to all without moderation, causes that.

By being federated, they can interact with one another. Beehaw defederated them in order to avoid that. The main argument being that the modding tools right now aren't good enough to help them do it any other way.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lemmy.world has had a handful of back to back queerphobic trolls spamming hate across multiple groups and instances.

They would get banned and come right back.

The reason they were able to do that is because of the open signups on lemmy.world.

Beehaw is an instance that takes protecting their members as their highest goal. They value it significantly more than wide federation.

And so they blocked lemmy.world, as it was a source of bigotry towards their members, and there were no other moderation tools available to them to resolve the issue.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

New to all this, does that mean lemmy.world accounts can no longer even see any beehive content?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep. Though it's not intended to be a permanent change as I understand it

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hopefully, as these federations mature, community/magazine moderators get greater ability to moderate content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

And these sorts of defederations may also serve as a "hey, do something about this" smack to the defederated instances. Provided that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works don't actually want to have trolls like that among their users they could implement mechanisms to make it harder for them to sign up.

If someone wants to deliberately run a 4chan-like free-for-all instance, that's fine, but I expect nobody's going to want to federate with it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

beehaw.org blocked lemmy.world. which works like you'd expect blocking someone would work. they can't interact with each other, can't participate in each other's communities, etc.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So why do I still see posts from them in my subscribed feed?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lemmy.world still "has" content from beehaw before the block happened. you can still see it and interact with it, but anything you do on beehaw communities that you have copies of won't get synced to beehaw, and thus can't be seen by anyone else on the fediverse.

you shouldn't be getting new posts from beehaw at all, other than comments inside of non-beehaw communities (such as in a kbin magazine where a beehaw user comments).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I get a lot of new still from beehaw

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

yeah that's definitely odd. I wonder if lemmy.world is getting the content from a different federated instance?

can you post in the thread? and if so, can beehaw users respond to you? I wonder what's up...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well that's annoying, I was enjoying a lot of beehaw content and they never approved my registration application.

Anyone know of the next biggest instance that federates with them?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

kbin.social is pretty nice, though not nearly as big. I have an account there and it's enjoyable. The UI is better in some aspects, worse in others.

You can also see the instances beehaw federates with and choose your own here:

https://beehaw.org/instances

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting that in that list are sites like skinheads.uk

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's because it's a punk music site. I can't say what type of people they are because I don't fit their server (into specific punk types, from UK, Australia or NZ, among others), so I'm not even gonna try to join. For the most part, punk skinheads are alright. I've know quite a few in my life and they weren't racist a bit. Not to say there aren't racist skinheads, but from my experience the majority are not racist and anti-fascist. I've even been to a couple of punk shows and the crowd was wild but there weren't any assholes as I saw, but again, that's only my experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the info. I was just scrolling through all the server names and that caught my eye. I was also amazed at the sheer number of servers listed. Some of these federated servers must have only a handful of users (if not just 1).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's understandable racist skinheads ruin it for everyone. Dead Kennedys even wrong a song for them, nazi punks fuck off.

https://youtu.be/-MkRuV0aCcI (lyrics are in the yt video description)

As for the servers, there are quite a few that are personal servers for themselves, friends and/or family, or specific hobbies. It's one of my favorite things about the fediverse. Anyone can create an instance for whatever they choose. It's great.

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