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.
Personally at least I had no expectations of your team moderating or otherwise being responsible for the content coming from those instances and thought it was enough to use the new icon set to clearly identify content from Beehaw vs the others.
It's a shame because such a move feels very anti-fediverse to me but I am new to the platform so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
It may feel anti-fediverse, but this is actually just a fact of federation: sometimes, there are reasons why you might want to cut off even the biggest instances. Of course, that may feel like Beehaw is becoming more siloed, but we still federate with large instances like kbin.social and a bunch of other smaller instances. We can still refederate in the future, but in the mean time, we stuck waiting for Lemmy to improve as a software - definitely going to need as many devs as we can to work on that problem.
I agree, which is why I understand that my opinion is ill-informed, but I still don't like the situation much because my experience has been mostly positive with those communities so far. I am not sure if I owe that to the otherwise excellent admins and mods we have here or luck so far though.
It's generally because of mods staying on top of it, haha, but from what I've gathered over the past few days from the other mods, doing so has been difficult. I've seen a lot of the content that's been deleted recently for being just downright toxic or spammy and a huge amount of it came from either of the two instances. Which is shitty, because I've also had lots of positive interactions from people from those places and I'm happy for all the cool people I saw who got to interact with Beehaw and experience our community. Hopefully, refederation will be possible in the near future.
The Android app supports multiple accounts so I just made one over there too and I can still enjoy the best of both worlds so yay fediverse!
Although it was nice to have everything on a single plain I'm glad to reduce the load on our mods and admins as I get how thankless and tiring the job is.
I think the larger issue was users from those external instances interacting with posts / comments in Beehaw’s communities. Since they’re open registration, bad actors could just create new accounts after being banned from Beehaw.
Isn't this always going to be a problem though? They can just go to other servers with open registration and do the same thing, the only way to avoid that is to never federate at all with the current tools available.
I imagine the admins will deal with these instances on a case-by-case basis, if they even become an issue.
And when tooling improves, refederation can happen
Personally at least I had no expectations of your team moderating or otherwise being responsible for the content coming from those instances and thought it was enough to use the new icon set to clearly identify content from Beehaw vs the others.
while we appreciate that, it's unfortunately not clear-cut in that way. if someone comes and comments here, we do in effect become responsible for them and what they post while they're here--not only in a literal sense, but because by the time their host instance notices what they're up to it's already probably too late for them to do anything (if they do anything at all!).
I'm happy to roll with it because you all seem to be doing an excellent job here in my experience so far. I've seen some otherwise great content come from those communities though too and ran into very little toxicity so it comes as a bit of a shock to me.
What we find with open registration is that people can make accounts not to interact with the lemmy.world community and harass there but rather to harass the communities in beehaw specifically.