this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023

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Beehaw defederating update - sh.itjust.works (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Like many of you, I woke up this morning to discover that our instance, along with lemmy.world, had been unexpectedly added to the beehaw block list. Although this development initially caught me off guard, the administrators at beehaw made an announcement shedding light on their decision.

The primary concern raised was our instance's policy of open registration. Given my belief that the fediverse is still navigating its early stages, I believe that for it to mature, gain traction, and encourage adoption, it is crucial for instances to offer an uncomplicated and direct route for newcomers to join and participate. This was one of the reason I decided to launch this instance. However, I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls. Despite these hurdles, I maintain the conviction that our collective strength as a community can overcome these issues.

After this happened, the beehaw admins and I had a good chat about their decision. While our stances on registration policies might diverge, we realized that our ultimate goals are aligned: we both strive to foster communities that thrive in an atmosphere of safety and respect, where users can passionately engage in discussions and feel a sense of belonging.

Although the probability of an immediate reversal are slim given the current circumstances, I believe we have managed to identify common ground. It's evident that, even in separation, we can unite to contribute positively to the broader fediverse community.

In the coming weeks or months, we plan to collaborate with other lemmy instance administrators to suggest enhancements and modifications to the lemmy project. Primarily, our proposals will concentrate on devising tools and features that empower us, as instance administrators, to moderate our platforms effectively.

In the meantime, while I understand may not be ideal for everyone, users who choose to participate on the beehaw instance will be required to register a separate account on their instance.

Thank you all for continuing to make this community great!

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 2 years ago

I'd just like to say that I appreciate your stance on open registration and making things as uncomplicated as possible. I signed up for a Beehaw account before this even happened, but I did find having to explain myself and justify my presence a little confusing. I also signed up for a discuss.tchncs.de account and I was so confused and thought their website was broken because once I clicked sign up, it didn't do anything. Just span around in a circle. It wasn't until I checked my email that I realised it wanted me to confirm my email. Here, things did just work. No complications, just entered my name, email and password, clicked sign up, and I was done! I guess you could say... shit just works on sh.itjust.works

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I'm disappointed that we have to suffer because of a few bad apples but I can understand the situation. We'll all have to do our part to report and remove these trash brain bigots from out instance. I really enjoy the laid back atmosphere of this instance but it is acutely vulnerable to trolls as evidenced by that shithead.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago

Honestly, I'll take a risk of trolls over losing the atmosphere here any day. Don't really need to see content from instances that are bothered enough to defederate anyways, there's plenty of stuff here and on lemmy.world and other communities we're federated to.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 years ago (6 children)

Brief explanation of how defederation works.

Basically Beehaw and all its communities and users are now blocking everyone from this server. We can't post to their communities and they can't see anything that we post on third party communities either.

However, this server has not defederated Beehaw. Therefore, we can still see their users commenting on third party communities, and we can even reply to them, they just won't see our reply, although neutral parties will.

Both Beehaw and sh.itjust.works are still able to contribute significant activity to Lemmy as a whole, just not directly to each other for now. Let's all be diligent on reporting and banning trolls quickly so we can maintain the collegial atmosphere here.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

i joined the fediverse to shitpost, but more importantly to create a new community.

beehaw's actions are VERY bad for the fediverse. for any social network to succeed it needs USERS. and when you have an entrenched giant, you need all the help you can get. federation is great but it also means a more spread out community which makes it hard for any one instance to succeed. what beehaw is doing is just chopping the legs off the fediverse right when it's finding its footing.

also to an outsider, the fediverse is already confusing enough. now we can to deal with the whole "oh you can join this server and not that" and "if you join here, you can see them but they can't see you" nonsense. closed registrations turn away people, this sort of chaos also turns away people.

i'm personally blocking all beehaw servers. i appreciate moderation is hard, and sad that trolls are coming in so early. but moderation is a solvable problem. instead of opening applications for more mods, they decided to go the cowardly route.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I get that we need more users. But allowing the communities who were here first to get torn apart is not how you do that. The beehaw users have already shown the ability to grow communities from scratch. That's exactly the kind of people we want here.

But they also need to be given space to build those communities. This is essentially the core concept of Lemmy, that federation allows you to have large high activity communities coexisting in peace with small niche communities. You get to have both things on the same platform, because instances that come into conflict can defederate without having any impact on the network as a whole.

There are many bigger reasons that the platform is confusing, the beehaw situation doesn't even move the needle. If anything, I think the defederation has helped many people start to understand how cool the federated structure can be.

I understand you're frustrated they couldn't just moderate the problem away, but seriously man, don't be so dramatic. Beehaw is cutting the legs off the fediverse? Bro if the fediverse fails it won't be due to the actions of beehaw, I can tell you that much.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

This might be good for some folks to read here to get a better feel of what Beehaw positions themselves as and their thinking:

(What is Beehaw?)[https://beehaw.org/post/107014]
(Behaw is a community)[https://beehaw.org/post/140733]
(A few thoughts on Beehaw's design)[https://beehaw.org/post/439918]

Edit: My assumption is that the links will open in your browser. If this isn't the case maybe I can stick these posts in a pastebin or something, lemmy know ;)

I'm personally disappointed but don't fault them. MY thinking is along The Dude's - ease of participation is key, with all of the risks that entails - but that's why I'm here rather than elsewhere.

Something I don't think a lot of people quite get yet - this is the DIY web. Different people take different approaches to community building, some very carefully and meticulously, and others not so much. And that's good - cool, even, IMO. Clashes are going to happen, but that's ok.

So you can pick another instance, or spin your own, but I'd rather people come from a place of participation rather than consumption on Lemmy writ large. One of the bigger instances defederated from us? Well shit, guess we're gonna have to make some content ourselves.

Post often, comment often, call fellow sh.it.heads (and other folks too) out if they're acting like shitheads. Be a positive presence in the Fediverse. Make some friends. The rest will sort itself out in time.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

Fuck em, I applied to several different servers and it took days to get accepted. Open registration is necessary

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Serious question: What is the alternative to open registration? Invite-only? What is the expectation?

Seems a bit kneejerk to defederate, that's employing the nuclear option as the first step. It doesn't leave a lot of room for dialog.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Unfortunately Lemmy currently lacks sophisticated moderation tools and any other tools other than full defederation. From Beehaw's statements they would really have rather has options other than full defederation.

One way defederation and/or providing other instances read only access to a Lemmy would probably be very helpful feature to have. While not the most useful at the moment, since everything is so new, being able to vary other instances access on their instances age and age of accounts would probably be helpful in reducing the worst of the trolling/spam.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago

Yeah I've been reading into it and it seems like it's more of an issue of the maturity of the software. Their post about their tools not scaling well make a lot of sense.

If the moderation team has the tools to handle a community of 10,000 people but suddenly the next week there is a new instance with 100,000 users trying to post in your communities then they simply cannot keep up. That results in bad posts being up for longer, spam being up for longer and it degrades the communities.

I'm sure they will re-federate as tools develop so that they can get a handle on the issue. I think there needs to be actions on both ends. Instances should bear some responsibility for the users who use their instance as well. If this instance is causing trouble for another instance then there should be tools available so that the local moderation team can deal with the problem.

All in all it seems like a software maturity thing. They simply had no other options available but to de-federate until the tools/manpower are available to hand the influx of users.

It's just growing pains.

That being said, if you're registering here just to harass people in other communities: Go fuck yourself.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Manual admin approval for every signup.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Why? What would you even check?

It's not like you can interview the person and check their ID, etc. - it's just meaningless bureaucracy that stifles growth.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago (1 children)

From what I understand, it's 'did this human read what we're about here and respond in a way that demonstrates they know what they're signing onto'?

At minimum, it weeds out folks who don't take the time to write a couple sentences, and kinda acts like a crappy lock on a door. If someone's determined to start some nonsense, it's not hard to get in and try. But a lot of folks will try the door once, see it doesn't open right away, and fuck off. They don't want growth for growth's sake, so the fact that this stifles growth to a degree isn't a concern.

But yeah, I agree it doesn't scale very well.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago (4 children)

That does not seem sustainable.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

Oh, so the person who posted their tiny penis on the feminism community actually admitted to it? Fascinating. They do know their post lasted like two minutes, right? I was more impressed with Beehaw's moderation team acting so fast than I was with their quick shot.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Anyone else noticing that the only people getting pissy about this instance being defederated from beehaw due to trolls....

...Aren't even from from this instance?

Just asshats from exploding heads feeling the need to come defend their right to be dicks.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I've been on the Fediverse since around 2015-2016 (don't remember if it was just before or just after I went back to school). It seems like a lot of the newbies here don't understand what the Fediverse is for and about. There's a lot of anger and hate that the Fediverse is supposed to be free and open and all the instances all federate with each other, and it's just like… No. That's not the point. Why would we even architect ActivityPub to have whitelist and blacklist functionalities if we didn't want server admins to be able to use them? The point of the fediverse is that you own your relationship to your server's moderators, and you pick your server's moderators based on their moderation style.

Think of it this way. On reddit, the administrators have full power over all communities. Don't like it? You are welcome to have no avenues to participate in any of the discussions. On the fediverse every server has a team that has full power of that small section of the internet. Don't like how they federate? Pick a different instance that better matches how you would like to interact with the fediverse. If you're angry that Beehaw is doing this, it just means Beehaw isn't a good fediverse home for you. You can just... Not go to beehaw for your fediverse needs. Do you like it here, but still want to see posts from Beehaw? Maybe an instance that federates with both is right for you. Because if you like what's on beehaw, to some extent, you are enjoying the community that is there because they like how things are run there. There is an extent to which you have common ground with those moderators. An instance that federates both there and here is saying "We like what both of these moderation teams are about."

Here's another way to think of it. Let's think about the internet as being the world. The Fediverse is one country in the world. Each project is like a city. You pick which city you want to live in based on what's going on in your life and how you want to go about things. Here in the Lemmy city (which is very near the KBin city. Think New York and Newark), every instance represents a house with a garden. When you move into the Lemmy, when you pick your instance you move into a house where your profile lives, and then you go hang out in the communities in the back garden. Who your administrators choose to let into the garden is just them creating the atmosphere they want for their garden party. And almost every Lemmy garden has defederated from someone. Almost every server has set up rules about what it takes to walk through the back gate to come kick it in the back garden. The largest instance with a fully open door policy is lemm.ee, not lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. They're the 3rd largest instance overall.

All beehaw.org is saying is that our house is very crowded and their bouncer can't keep up with all the people trying to get into their garden party. And it's what makes the fediverse beautiful. That's the point of the fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

I've been on the Fediverse since around 2015-2016 (don't remember if it was just before or just after I went back to school). It seems like a lot of the newbies here don't understand what the Fediverse is for and about.

These people might lack technical knowledge of how federation works, but they get the ramifications of federation just fine. The fediverse didn't invent federated protocols in 2015, there are some truly large and successful federated networks we can learn lessons from.

Email is often used as a cultural touchstone to introduce people to the fediverse. You know what a major email provider almost never does? Blackhole customers from another major email provider en masse. They understand that the value of their service is in its interconnectness, and an email address that can communicate with everyone you know is much much more valuable than an email address that can communicate with a confusing subset of people you know. They don't eschew blocklists, which are an essential tool for combatting abuse. But when deploying a block, they consider their own costs and also the costs to the network as a whole. This wasn't always a given, there were many walled gardens before and some tried to operate email that way, they were not successful.

The internet itself is the most successful federated network in the world. Do you know what a tier 1 isp almost never does? Depeer other tier-1 ISPs in a way that disrupts the global routing table. Again, they don't eschew selective peering, every few years somebody plays chicken with tier 1 peering agreements that could isolate Comcast customers from Netflix or Verizon customers or whatever. But in the end they do consider the costs to the network, and understand that the value of their service is it's ubiquitous interconnectedness. Again, this wasn't always a given. In the early days there were vigorous debates about who got to join the internet.

... every instance represents a house with a garden.

Beehaw has about 13 thousand registered users. At this scale the garden party metaphor looks pretty silly. A much better metaphor is that each fediverse app is a world, and each instance is a nation. Beehaw has a problem with the immigration policies of other nations (registration), and it's enacted drastic trade and travel sanctions as a negotiating lever. As an independent nation, it's entirely within their purview to do this, but as in real life the costs of doing so are high both within Beehaw and beyond.

The idea of federation/peering as a negotiating lever is always popular when a federated network is young, has poor abuse management tools, and the cost of severely damaging the network is low. But as soon as the network becomes useful enough to matter, the value of interconnectedness dominates all other concerns and people suddenly find other ways to resolve their disagreements.

So I disagree that people aren't getting federation. They get intuitively that interconnectedness dominates the value equation in networks that matter, and are treating the Lemmyverse like it matters to them. The Beehaw admins are treating it like a toy they can break if it doesn't work the way they want, and in doing so they will ensure that it remains a toy until the network routes around them and makes them irrelevant.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago (7 children)

That's a bummer. I get it (somewhat), but I'm not really fan of that type of gatekeeping by beehaw. On the positive side, it makes me really appreciate this instance/community and makes me want to interact more on here instead. So I'm looking forward to that.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago

That announcement from beehaw was how I found and subscribed to this instance lol

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (6 children)

I know I'm kind of late to this party, but it seems to be a good time to take a moment to say, if no one else has, that there are apps out there like Jerboa, that allow you to keep track of multiple Lemmy accounts quite easily. :)

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I made an account here as a beehaw user and I'm glad that the two mod teams are in discussion. Servers have the right to cordon off their users, but I'd hate to miss out on the content. I feel mixed on the decision, as is represented by my dual accounts.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I fully support their right to defederate as they did, but I am a little concerned by the chilling effect that sudden removal of large userbases who had been communicating with each other creates. I don't mean specifically in this particular instance because it happened very quickly, but what if the beehaw communities who are large and popular with many users from different instances get disconnected all of a sudden? You'll get a retraction of users, communities and a general distrust of talking to users on other instances because that communication channel you've grown to rely on suddenly just poof disappears effectively on a whim of the instance admins. I do not disagree with Beehaw and what they chose to do. I am just trying to point out that it's dangerous to defederate and should never be taken lightly.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago

Better moderation tools are always welcome. I'm sure that is 90% of the problem, but it is just a software problem and it will be resolved.

I think there should be standards of moderation (simple things like average time to answer a report) that instances should have to adhere to in order to ensure the moderation:community ratio remains at a level to prevent the worst abuses.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The Beehaw moderator just release an update that is interesting and very good-willed. But I'm confused. I had no problem commenting in Nature and Gardening which is on the Beehaw instance. I thought this wasn't possible as a sh.itjust.works user?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (3 children)

You can comment there and I probably can see it. They can't because they're not pulling sh.itjust.works data.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It is possible, but Beehaw users won't see your comment (I may be wrong, this is still a bit complicated for me as well).

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Defederating both sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world was such an asinine decision that I honestly hope Beehaw just dies. They are doing a disservice to the entire lemmy community. They just siloed their users. They did not poll them for that decision. I hope most of their users leave them.

I would also be for removing Beehaw from join-lemmy.org. They are using lemmy software, indeed, but they are not really using the lemmy community, not the most of it at least. Someone who joins Beehaw may notice that the community is significantly smaller than they had hoped and go back to other alternatives, which is obviously a bad outcome. We need users.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Like OP said, the long term goals of both instances are aligned.

Federation and defederation are just part of how the fediverse works. Don't think of the fediverse as a reddit-like network that should always stick together and grow as one userbase. Rather, the focus should be on growing smaller communities that put their interests and users first (just like Beehaw did), while exchanging information with other communities where it benefits them both. If one instance doesn't work for a particular user, they can always leave and join another one. That's the beauty of it.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

I'm all for them running their instance however they want. It's not what I want and that just means I'll be avoiding them.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Has there been a problem with bad actors on this server yet? I certainly haven't noticed any.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

There has been an individual who flamed beehaw via our server. It happened fast and while we can moderate what this user does locally, we cannot moderate on other instances... as others have stated, there is not much moderation granularity, yet.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

So I don't know what solutions you have discussed with the other instance admins, and I actually know little about how it all works currently, but I had a thought about this for the fediverse as a whole: the admins/moderators of a user's home instance should be moderating/responsible for that user's engagement with communities on other instances.

Right now if Person A creates Instance A and a community on that instance becomes really popular fediverse-wide, Person A is stuck in the lurch of dealing with all of the engagement from everywhere else in the fediverse. If Instance A has 10 users or 100000 users, they still have to deal with x-thousands of users from all over the fediverse. More than likely they'll just want to defederate, especially if they are small. At the same time, if Person B creates Instance B that invites trolls (on purpose or not) it seems that they have little say in what their own users do on Instance A's community. In fact, as you pointed out, Person B might not even know that a user from their instance is trolling Instance A.

Instead, if mods on Instance A take any action against the user on their instance, mods on the user's home instance (AKA Instance B) should immediately and automatically be notified. Then the moderators from Instance B will need to respond how they see fit with the user. If they don't see a problem, maybe they do nothing (e.g. the two instances have different philosophies.) But if they do see an issue, they then have the opportunity to respond in whatever way makes sense. Then, between the two instances, if the actions taken on either side seem appropriate, the two instances can continue to get along (i.e. federate). If they disagree in some way (maybe Instance B thinks Instance A is too draconian or maybe Instance A thinks Instance B is too lax) they can part ways (i.e. defederate).

As an extension to this, it could help Instance B from being a source of brigading. If they suddenly see a bunch of reports coming in from Instance A they would be able to take action on their own side to stop it, either through temporarily defederating or some other mechanism.

All in all the purpose would be to give both instances the chance to deal with the issues before defederating; hopefully alleviating some of the pressure off of Instance A, and giving Instance B the opportunity to show whether they should be trusted (or not) in general.

This could be taken a step further and their could be trusted and untrusted federations. Trusted federations work like normal and untrusted federations require mods from the user's home instance to moderate all engagement before it actually posts to the remote instance. This puts a burden on the home instance, but that's actually the point. If you're willing to grow to large numbers and federate widely, then you need to be willing to moderate your users' content, rather than imposing your users on everyone else (until they defederate.)

Edit to add: I should mention that I very much appreciate this instance and that I was able to easily create an account, and, I was disappointed by the defederation as it seems like the kind of thing that will kill Lemmy from scaling to something mainstream. I don't think that's what the creators of Lemmy want though, anyway.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago

I do think that the open sign up could become a problem in regard to bots. That being said, they could just as easily open their own instance.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Love this. There is absolutely no need to feel hate towards each other, I can definitely see both sides of the argument as valid concerns. Each instance has their own way of curating a community, but as long as the end goal is the same and communications are open, we all win. For now let's just focus on making this instance a better place to be, the day we all reunite as one will come eventually.

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