ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
hey folks, we'll be quick and to the point with this one:
we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.
we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is--particularly with federation in mind--basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we're being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).
an unfortunate reality we've also found is we just don't have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don't scale well. we have a list of improvements we'd like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible--but we're unanimous in the belief that we can't wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.
aside from/complementary to what's mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:
these two instances' open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don't care about what our instance stands for
as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:
There's a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it's not just that, there's a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it's really hard to trust and support who's around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there's more hostility around them. They'll even shut themselves off when there's fake nice behavior around. There's a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it's not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can't even assess that for people who aren't from our instance, so we're walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn't sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.
Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren't open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.
and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it's in effect. but we hope you can understand why we're doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.
this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community's owner, i should add--we just have differing interests here and that's fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we'll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.
A similar transition took place with mastodon.social and mstdn.social when they both grew prohibitively large; however, in that case, Mastodon now offers much better tooling for moderating and managing federation. Until Lemmy's software similarly matures, this is the best solution that Beehaw can put up.
We expect we'll be able to refederate as soon as we get an adequate level of granularity in moderation tools to prevent bad actors like this. If you're a developer looking for a good target for what is needed, it's precisely this.
I made a post mentioning this earlier, hopefully at least a few peeps will see it and join in. I don't have the needed skills or I'd take a stab at it myself.
Mastodon really has top tier moderation and federation controls. Unfortunately Lemmy was very niche before the recent surge in users, so the project never got the attention it needed to get these tools ready for the current surge in activity.
Absolutely - mastodon had similar moments in the big twitter waves where some pretty large instances defederated from some other large ones (some of them even mastodon.social) over moderation policy. Defederation like this is also a means of moderating the fediverse as a whole - if the admins of an instance are unwilling to moderate their users, other instances can encourage action like this.
I think this is an advantage of the system. On something like reddit, a subreddit has to make use of heavy automation tools or a lot of manpower to create a culture, ultimately any sub on reddit is subject to the overall reddit culture, it can be hard to grow something of your own.
Federation gives power to communities to separate themselves to be more selective. If someone wants something more similar to reddit, those mass-connected instances will always exist. It gives choice to communities in how they want to grow and present themselves.
I think ultimately the flaws are in the tools that are available currently.
It's just growing pains, literal thousands of people joining small free services managed by volunteers in their spare time, not thousands of employees of a megacorp working on it 24/7, it's EXPECTED that things like this happen. The fact that they have all this transparency and thoughtfulness on it is GOOD.