This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
Some of y'all getting angry need to look at yourself in the mirror. The whole point of federation was to allow communities to do things like this if they want.
A lot of new people are going to see this mudslinging and rightfully turn around. Nobody is coming to Lemmy to see drama between instances.
I do think it's fair to criticize the decision to try to be one of the largest instances while only having four moderators. They should have accepted a place as a midsize instance with midsize communities in order to maintain their moderation goals. Or they could have worked to get more moderators. Blaming the defederated instances and mod tools seem disingenuous at best. That said mod tools undoubtedly need improvement.
To be fair, they said the reason they were defederating from those two instances in particular is because most of their moderation involved people from them. They didn't expand beehaw beyond what they could handle, the rest of lemmy expanded beyond what they could handle. If this really is just a temporary measure, which is also what they said, then I think it's pretty reasonable.
That's because they defederated from the two largest competing instances. I'm talking about the communities users not the instances. The issue is that beehaw has the largest and therefore defacto default communities. The timing is bad and will likely affect wider adoption. The biggest problem is that it is entirely foreseeable and solved by either accepting a smaller community (closing signups) or improving moderation capabilities (getting more moderators or investing in an alternative moderation system) before it meant splitting the threadiverse in half.
I'm not denying that it sucks, but if you'd told anybody this was going to happen a month ago they'd have just laughed at you. Of course they were unprepared. Everbody has more than they can deal with. Adding more mods isn't as simple as picking some names out of a hat, and this isn't a thing anyone was preparing for. There currently are no alternative moderation systems, everything is too new and until recently was all way to small for that to be important, and they just have more work then they can deal with trying to suddenly moderate all of the threadiverse.
This was a bad option that sucked, but every option was a bad option that sucked. I'm more concerned with how they deal with things as they normalize over the coming weeks and months than I am with how they're trying to put out the fires in the short term.
But they chose a nonstandard moderation strategy that limited their ability to scale moderation with users. The default system is that communities are moderated independently of admins (not saying admins don't form communities or that there's no overlap between admins and mods) whereas on beehaw only the admins can create communities and therefore are the primary moderators.
Now I'm not saying that there's anything inherently wrong with the system they've chosen but the fact that it is nonstandard and in fact built into the core precept of beehaw means that this was easily foreseen.
Easily forseen if you knew that lemmy was suddenly going to have a hundred times as many users in the space of a couple weeks. That was the thing no one was prepared for though.
The admins have always been clear that they’re not trying to replace Reddit, and I’m quite sure they were not trying to be one of the largest instances.
If they weren’t trying to get large then how did that happen? Based on admin comments, beehaw was one of the more active instances when the first wave of migration happened; and a decent amount of the pre-first wave posts about lemmy I saw on Reddit were about how Beehaw was a good instance to join as it was defederated from lemmygrad.
I'm not saying this has anything to do with replacing reddit but it is bad for the larger threadiverse community. Notably there were several other instances that closed registration for the purposes of not growing quicker than they could handle long term (see lemmy.ml). Beehaw has most of the largest (and therefore defacto default) communities. Active steps to avoid that would have allowed them to maintain their moderation goals while growing in an organic and sustainable way that benefits the larger threadiverse community.
I was strictly replying to the part of your comment where you said they made a decision to try to be one of the largest instances – imo they did not make a explicit decision to try to be that, but rather the growth was a side effect of the circumstances around reddit users checking out the fediverse.
Is closing registrations is better than having an application with questions that weed out low-effort users? IMO it’s probably a wash. beehaw has only banned one user from the local instance that I know of, so the application process seems to be working overall. The issue is that other instances are growing too quickly and needing to moderate those users, not their own.
I do agree this isn’t great for the threadiverse and I wish it hadn’t come to this, both on a personal and community level. I was subbed to the knitting community on lemmy.world, it was the most active of those communities that I saw, and now I’m locked out. Idk if I want to move to an alt on a different instance, or self-host my own so that I’m fully in control of what I can see, or what. :S
No the issue is that four moderators for the whole instance was always unsustainable and allowing the communities to become the defacto defaults without growing the mod teams was a bad idea. This was easily foreseen and corrected. Blaming other instances is not at all fair.
you do not understand the problem. The growth was on every server of the fedivers - so moderationg users from different servers was to much work. how should they stop people from other servers? two options - block any individuell(which is to much work with so many open registration servers - they can just spamm new servers) or nuke the server where most of the trolls come from.
I DO understand the problem. They only have an issue with an influx of users because they are the largest (defacto default) communities. A position that was incompatible with their moderation system from the get go. Had they had more sustainably sized communities none of this would have been an issue.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it. The fact that federation has been the only discussion since the blackout is not good for the alternatives to reddit. My whole life is tech and if it's this distracting to me I can't imagine any remotely average user being interested. The fact that this was the perfect time to be part of an alternative but the whole experience has mostly just proven reddits "give it a week" response true.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.
No. If an instance hosts toxic communities then your instance can choose to defederate from it. You don't have to wait for the centralized authority to ban them. It's about being able to choose your admins and form a web of "good" communities.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.
That was never going to happen, not even in the best possible case.
Far left and far right are always going to split off. Do you want to be having discussions about race with neo nazis? I don't. Let them go to their own dark corner of the internet.
I think this is a fair choice for Beehaw to make, but I am frustrated that now I have less content to read. I wish we had better community discovery tools.
Sounds like they really need more mods over there
Honestly, this is disappointing, but not particularly surprising. It's a problem that's at least as old as Usenet, in terms of different communities not getting along. It's also not uncommon that people setting up instances are new, inexperienced with moderation, and sometimes even just let people register without any kind of verification because why not?
I think an important point is for admins / mods from various instances to try to get on the same page, in terms of policies. Building that common ground early, and establishing best practices, really helps mitigate a lot of the BS that can happen.
That’s fair, buuuuut why are the admins moderating comments? Why shouldn’t the moderators mod their communities and report problematic users to admins so those users can be blocked.
No one on beehaw can create communities except the admins, with the promise that they will personally split the ones they have into more distinct topics as it becomes necessary. As such, that also makes them automatically the mods. It's one of the reasons I decided against it, as well as.... * gestures to headline. *
I was quite curious what removing the downvote button would do to foster actual discussion, since its use is frowned upon in my one remaining reddit kebble sub, and everyone who remains each week is shockingly cordial with one another. Pity to see beehaw crashing and burning so fast like this.
Is it crashing and burning if it aligns with their explicitly stated goals? Seems like they're sticking to their guns and having a well moderated community by doing this. Some people will want that, some won't. But if we want this federation thing to work, we can't start whining about instances making choices about what their users interact with. If anything I'm glad this is happening early so that people can see how the federation stuff will play out and get used to the idea.
The admins are probably modding the communities because they probably created them but the proper solution should be to find mods, not just defederate
It’s not a permanent defederation, and it’s only with those two instances. There are still hundreds of other instances that they are still federated with.
This simply solidifies my opinion that I've had all along that Beehaw is a trash instance full of sensitive censor-happy ninnies and I hope they all resolve the issues they are having to eventually be finally free from trolls and assholes in their humble & beautiful walled-garden paradise echo chamber. All the best for them.
Isn't the whole point of the fediverse that you get to create and craft your experience for your community? There's a really good reason defederating is a feature. I don't get it, Beehaw decides to use the features of federation so now we: firstly become tribalistic (them vs us), and secondly decide to get angry? Like it or not, this is what you signed up for when you wanted federation.
I don't see the point of getting angry like this, and really don't see how this negativity being conducive to a thriving community. Some new people are going to explore fediverse, see tribalistic mudslinging among instances, and say "not for me."
I'd say respect their decision and move on, if it's not for you it's not for you.
Yeah, they're saying "look, we only have four mods, have a highly targeted type of community we are trying to build, and have had to disproportionately moderate users from these instances" which seems reasonable on it's face.
That's kind of the beauty of Lemmy/Kbin right? You can spin up an instance with whatever rules you want. I think people are reacting to the fact that during the Reddit exodus Beehaw kind of looked like a "default" general instance, including me.
But that's a misreading on our part, not them going back on that.
Its both a value add and a negative. For those more focused on their own community (Like beehaw) it's an obvious positive. But for many users, losing access to certain communities on your own instance of choice is going to be a negative. I personally don't blame Beehaw for favoring the former. I think improved moderation tools and more granular federation would at least make the move less of a blow to users.
Absolutely. It’s disappointing that this person read a post made by the Beehaw admins that was written with nuance and grace, and then decided to respond with vitriol. That’s exactly the kind of attitude that is so prolific on Reddit, and I am happy to leave it behind. Thank you for your reasoned reply.
OP, I encourage you in the future to choose grace.
Yeah I don't feel quite as harshly but as soon as I saw they didn't allow downvotes I knew their philosophy wasn't for me. Too bad about losing their gaming group though.
I kinda expected that after seeing them purge some threads made by lemmy users. I have to imagine we kbin users are gonna get cut next lmao.
Good riddance. I like the no-downvote style but overzealous mods just create their own pillow fort of the same 5 users regurgitating the same shit over and over.
Perhaps harsh but beehaw strikes me as the tumblr/progressive/sjw types that really wanna build their safe space. Which makes me wonder why they're federating at all lol.
I'm very glad that kbin seems to have a "let's get all the content and speak freely" sorta vibe going on right now. hopefully things stay that way.
I got the same sense. Authoritarianism runs on both sides of the political spectrum.
While their FAQ touted an emphasis on empathy, the heavy flowery language while also making a point to refuse to have written rules at all somehow gave me a feeling of double-speak. The idea is nice, but now you're open to being banned because they felt like it, and you can't even explain how you weren't breaking the rules if no rules exist. Refusing to allow anyone but themselves to create communities backs up the authoritarian streak. Not interested. I assume if they don't, I'll eventually be banned there anyway. I really like debate and I really dislike dictatorships.
At least if one of the largest instances out there goes full Korea, it will leave other instances a chance to be noticed in their wake. It sounds salty, but I'm still getting used to what federation means for a platform and when we were still initially federating my entire feed was utterly nothing but beehaw. I am salty. I want as much variety as I can get.
Yup. Taking a look at their ethos/manifesto stuff it instantly became clear to me what sort of place beehaw is, and it's not one I'm super fond of, so I doubt I'll ever make an account there.
Yeah beehaw is pretty big at least from my perspective. I see three big communities: lemmy, kbin, and beehaw. and beehaw is easily the odd one out with their weird manifesto stuff lol. Which is why when they said they were defederating from lemmy, it kinda struck me as "oh kbin is next then" lol. but each of the three kinda have a different vibe to me, so maybe kbin is tolerable to beehaw while lemmy isn't?
I haven't had much experience with lemmy at all, in order to guess, and I've seen conflicting things about them. Lemmy was already bigger and it feels like it got a lot more publicity than kbin, so they bore the brunt of the exodus. It's possible they didn't get as lucky as we did in who that constituted. The devs' weird CCP bent overshadowing some other instances' reportedly great admins just makes it even more of a confusing mess culture-wise.
I'd like to think we can abide by such stringent ~~rules~~ implications as "be nice." But their stated reasoning is that there's just too much content to ever hope to moderate by themselves, which.....they really should have seen coming on a platform whose intent is to federate, ngl. Doesn't matter if your homebase is young. You need underlings for this once it gets beyond a couple hundred people.
Which is why I'm leaning on the side of beehaw eventually deciding there's no choice but to defed way more than this until and unless they can afford help. With four admin-mods alone against the mercy of the entire fediverse, their hopes of upholding the mission statement will eventually be laughable any other way.
Not that I think we're nearly as bad as other places out there. I think we've got a surprisingly great atmosphere going and I hope to god it stays. But those are their two options, and kbin users seem to have an admirably civil tendency both to shitpost and to question and hear out differing viewpoints in a way I'm not sure beehaw will appreciate.
Yup. I completely agree. I understand why beehaw defederated from lemmy because lemmy kinda seems... unhinged, in comparison to beehaw's carefully crafted community.
Whereas kbin I think you're right, tend to be happy to civilly hear each other out. whereas I feel like beehaw isn't really interested in that. Though I think of kbin users respect beehaw's way of doing things while we're in their space, they might not have issues with us.
granted, the response I got was "we don't even think about you" so maybe kbin is too small to really be noticeable to them lol.
Unhinged. You've found the perfect word for it. They come off to me like what happens in study hall when the instructor has to leave.
granted, the response I got was "we don't even think about you" so maybe kbin is too small to really be noticeable to them lol.
Goodness, my pride, lmao. I think I'm quite content not to be such a giant enough instance I get thought of. Hundreds of comfier, smaller places over Reddit Deux any day. I agree, the people here seem on the whole cognizant enough to keep themselves in check, rather than...whatever reddit was. That would be one behavior I am thrilled to see die, and hopefully federating with more chaotic instances won't kick it up again. I'm concerned it may.
Can I get a ELI5 or a source or something?
If you make an account on beehaw you cant see anything from lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. Same in the opposite direction.
And what happens if users from lemmy.world were already following beehaw communities?
As far as I know the content is duplicated on each server federated, on demand by users requesting content. My guess is that the content will be frozen on the defederation date. Your server won't be able to read, or maybe read, but certainly not write to the other server, and the conversations there will happen without you.
sh.itjust.works user checking in, my experience seems to confirm that theory. I can still see content from beehaw that I'm subscribed to from before they defederated.
I'll upvote myself then.