We need a c/FederatedDrama write up.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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wait why did they defederate us?
lemmy.world and and sh.itjust.works have a lot of users and it seems like beehaw was getting too much content from them. There are apparently only 4 people running beehaw and they felt they couldn't moderate all the content and felt like it was a vulnerability that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works just let anyone sign up.
participate the effort to create an alternative to Reddit people leave Reddit to join the alternative be unable to handle the influx of people trying to use the alternative to a website with millions of users
Their reasons are much more selfish than that. They insist on only having 4 moderators while never scaling up, and they don't like how federation allows users from other instances to post on their instance because it disrupts their rigid ideal community vibe. According to their suggestions on "improving moderation tooling", the ideal federation setup is that their users can post on other instances, but other instances' users can't post on theirs, so they can save time on moderation work. The moderation work of other instance admins for their users doesn't matter, clearly.
Every interaction I've had with Beehaw so far has reminded me of overlord Reddit mods that think they are god.
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I read their post explaining the decision, but it seems like it is at odds with itself. If your goal is to create a safe space, why are you using a federated service? I understand you have the option to defederate, but at that point why didn't you just setup a standalone message board. It just feels that their use case doesn't fit the system.
Isn't this like... the whole point of the Federated Universe? The mods do Beehaw want their server to be a "safe space". They're perfectly within their rights to restrict who can post in their own community. But you, the user, are not in any way beholden to their whims, and can make an account on any other Lemmy instance, or create your own and make it as restricted or unrestricted as you please.
It seems logical to me that the creators of a safe space for marginalized communities would restrict their community from the internet at large because people on the Internet feel emboldened by anonymity to attack others.
Yes, the point of the Fediverse is that everyone is free to associate with groups they choose. There is nothing wrong with creating instances that are very isolated. What Beehaw wants with the "improving moderation tooling", however, is a safe space where the network is restricted from them, but they still have full access to the rest of the network. That suggestion is what I was calling selfish, because this way their users would be parasiting off the content and moderation of other instances while giving nothing back.
I still don't see how this is not in line with the ideals and values of the Fediverse. If other instances don't want to take on the extra moderation you are referring to, they can simplify defederate from Beehaw, too.
Every instance can do whatever it wants, and if other instances don't like that then they can both go their own ways.
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I wouldn't call it selfish. They want tools for more granular control on their instance. That's perfectly fine. If they limit who can post or comment based on the instance they are from. The other instances are perfectly free to limit their users as well in response or for their own arbitrary reasons.
There seems to be a distinct lack of controls across lemmy as a whole. The only option for them is all or nothing at the moment.
I think the big take away is for users to think about what instance they create their accounts and communities on.
Ya I think a big part of the pushback is that I think a lot of people chose their "home" instance based on the guidance provided by the instance admins and then lost access to a lot of the network because of other decisions made by those same admins
Thank you, you put in words my thoughts exactly. Not all communities need to have the same rules as the others, not all need to be as open as others and that is more than fine.
Homogenization of the internet led us to a handful of corporations dominating social media websites and that is awful.
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The community vibe is definitely a huge motivation. They want to be able to control the sort of people on their instance which they can't do if the mass user bases from lemmy.world etc. that are (relatively) neutral have access. It's a shame because they had some good communities established.
Yeah, I don't believe for one second that those 4 admins have actually, meaningfully, personally vetted 11,000+ users. People have posted (sorry, I dont have the link) here that they just filled the "application" out with nonsense and still got approved.
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@Andreas @sebovzeoueb They new going into this that they would be federated. They waited to get enough people then do stuff like this. People will leave then as there content will get old fast. They sell realize like reddit that people want to be able to search and find new content
Is that right? That seems not in keeping with the spirit of the thing. If they don't want to moderate large communities, how about you don't host large communities at all. Maybe that's what they're after, but they had seeded the space with a lot of logical communities that people were going to click on from the "find federated communities" pages from around the fverse.
It seems like they really just want the well made, actively developed message boards software, but they dont truly want the federation stuff. They wanted (and got) the user boost from all the reddit nonsense (and no, I do not believe that four people personally, meaningfully vetted thousands of users in the course of a couple days) and now they want to wall themselves off.
According to their suggestions on βimproving moderation toolingβ, the ideal federation setup is that their users can post on other instances, but other instancesβ users canβt post on theirs, so they can save time on moderation work.
So basically they want to have their cake and eat it too. How lovely.
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Lemmy.world still has all the content it pulled from beehaw before they defederated, but they won't sync anymore, so you won't see new beehaw updates, and they won't see any updates from lemmy.world
Was there a reason why they defederated??
Apparently the 4 admins are having trouble dealing with the influx of new users, so they defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works because their open registration policies are giving them the most problems.
Ok I'm one of the new users and it looks like I've commented on communities hosted there maybe a half dozen times. I guess I'm part of the problem π
But I'm a little unclear about the role an admin plays on an instance? Are they actually taking on mod responsibilities, in which case I can certainly understand how 4 would be totally swamped?
I guess in my head I sort of imagined each community has its own mod(s) and the admins would only step in as a kind of "supreme court" if some dispute gets out of hand? I've probably got this totally wrong.
Yeah that's what I was wondering. I'm just going off what they said. I know they don't allow communities to be created except what they did themselves, so maybe they are taking on all the mod responsibilities?
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So when an instance is blocked, it means users on the blocked instance will no longer be able to see that instanceβs content. For example, beehaw.org has now blocked lemmy.world. However with the way federation works, the content from beehaw is cached on lemmy.world servers. So you can only see what has already been cached; there will be no updated content on any existing cache.
Edit: here's a recent post from kbin.social going into further detail on how federation works.
Wrong.
beehaw blocked lemmy.world. lemmy.world has not blocked beehaw. lemmy.world will continue to get content from beehaw. beehaw has stopped all content from lemmy.world from comming to beehaw.
lemmy.world accounts can still see new post and comments from beehaw but no comments will be responded to by behaw users because they cannot see lemmy.world post or ocmments.
Wrong wrong. You won't get any new content hosted from beehaw.org
You will see beehaw users in other instances, but you won't be able to see anything new on BeeHaw communities, like /c/[email protected]
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From what I understand, if you, using a lemmy.world account, post something on a beehaw instance, only people from lemmy.world would be able to see it.
So I guess the next question is do we now recreate beehaw communities that were popular and fragment the community, or do we make accounts on a smaller instance that has access to beehaw.org and lemmy.world? Iβm not about to start logging in and out of multiple accounts because beehaw mods are getting butt hurtβ¦
That's the thing, though. Since any accounts would be on different servers, you don't have to log out of one to log into another. You don't have to log out of Gmail to log into ProtonMail, you can be in both at the same time in the same browser.
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On reddit you could get banned from many subs for posting in a sub that its moderators didn't like. And in the fediverse it's exactly the same. So what's the point? I'm here, because I hoped that it won't be like reddit.
That's just the nature of any site that allows community moderation. If you're looking for something different, try fark.com
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Man, This is so cool, Not related to the topic but im able to see yall talk about lemmy from lemmy instances while im on kbin
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They are taking their ball and going home
You have Beehaw content that was synced before they defederated.
Federation isn't accessing remote content on remote instances, it's content mirroring. So, anything that was mirrored before Beehaw defederated will stay exactly where it is. You just won't see any updates to it.
At least, not from Beehaw.
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