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.
we don't have any spam here on kbin. but beehaw might consider some kbin style posts to be "trolling" since the reddit vibe has pretty much come here 100%.
We defederated not because of "trolling" but rather people posting pornography on our communities, suggesting that gay people should die and calling the main dev of Lemmy an homophobic slur in the span of uh, 10minutes?
I'm not even sure kbin has rules other than the obvious "don't post illegal stuff". Our magazines are moderated by users however they please. and afaik the admin here hasn't really clarified any rules or anything.
And as you said beehaw is clearly strictly regulating their community, for better or worse. I don't agree with their style, but that's why it's not my home lol. I don't mind being polite/respectful while a guest though.
The vibe I got from lemmy users is very similar to the vibe I get from kbin, albeit I think lemmy is a bit more "free range" and much more populated. I guess we'll see how things go.
It's not the content on other instances (except illegal porn) that is the issue.
It's the users-from-those-instances behaviour on the beehaw instance (and the volume/quantity of it)
I'm not really sure how you can distinguish between one open-registration instance and another, since spammers and trolls can just sign up to any open-registration site and interact with beehaw like I'm doing now.
You could run metrics on how often you have to moderate users of a given server vs you're own. Hit a certain threshold and that instance is de-federated. Open registration might not mean much if the mods of that instance are proactive about banning people.
But I'm obviously biased. I like the vibe on Kbin and hope we aren't de-federated from Beehaw. I'm signed up to a bunch of communities here.
My worry is the trolls from lemmy who were bothering beehaw will just sign up at kbin so they can continue bothering beehaw, and then they'll ruin the vibe at kbin too. Nazi bar theory.
At the end of the day the idea is that an instance is responsible for their users. If kbin.social (or any other) allows a bunch of trolls to sign up in droves there and harass users of another instance, then it seems to me like it's completely justified to defederate them until they get their house in order.
Moderation is going to be a big issue in fediverse and it seems like the only way to keep it manageable is to make instances self moderate properly. It might be rough in the start but it will eventually lead so properly moderated instances remain connected to each other, while 4chat-like environments are in their own space.
Based on this post, it seems like the mods were responding specifically to having a lot of issues with regard to users from that specific instance. I feel like there are likely plenty of smaller &/or more niche instances with open registration who don't attract users looking specifically to troll Beehaw.
It's possible to run an instance in a whitelist mode where you only federate with approved instances, but I don't think the admin team really wants to go that route. The intent isn't to wall users in (although that's an unfortunate side effect in this case since there're no tools like the one you linked available for lemmy yet)
The fediverse won't always consist of just 3-4 major instances. Even if beehaw stays defederated to the largest ones, there will be many other smaller, moderated, communities like beehaw that we'll want to interact with.