ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
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.
thanks for using our site folks.
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Weird - I can still view both banned instances using Jerboa app! Not sure if that is a glitch or I'm just not understanding something properly.
me too, I can still see futurama at https://beehaw.org/c/futurama@lemmy.world for instance, so I don't know what it means? I think it is that we can still see everything at lemmy.world, but all the users on lemmy.world cannot see the communities/posts on beehaw ?
Defederation stops the flow of things. Everything you are seeing on !futurama@lemmy.world falls into one of two categories.
- Content that was submitted before defederation
- Content that was submitted by beehaw.org users and is only seen by other beehaw.org users
The defederation system in Lemmy, as implemented, is bidirectional. When beehaw.org blacklists lemmy.world, lemmy.world will stop receiving updates from beehaw.org, and beehaw.org will stop receiving updates from lemmy.world. Users on both servers may be seen on other instances (sopuli.xyz, for example), but they will not see each other.
Hopefully, someday we will see tiers of defederation like what we see with more mature Fediverse software programs, but the threadiverse software products (Lemmy and KBin) are immature and very immature, respectively. The idea there would be that when beehaw.org limits lemmy.world, lemmy.world users can see beehaw.org communities (!technology@beehaw.org, for example) but their comments on those communities would not be propagated to beehaw's users. In this case, a visitor from sopuli.xyz might see comments on !technology@beehaw.org from beehaw.org users and lemmy.world users. Further, beehaw.org users would be able to see and comment on lemmy.world posts (like !futurama@lemmy.world) but when a lemmy.world user replied to the beehaw.org user, that would be seen on something like sopuli.xyz, but not beehaw.org.
If that sounds complicated, you might be starting to gather why that feature isn't available in early beta software that has larger hurdles to overcome right now. Lemmy as a system was not positioned to be a Reddit replacement over the course of a 30-day window. It's being forced to do that, and is on the whole performing quite admirably for it, but it both doesn't have the time investment it needs to do that yet, nor should it actually be a full drop in Reddit replacement. The Fediverse's programs are not and should not be beholden to an expectation that they behave the same as corporate counterparts. That was not ever the original intention. The original intention of the Fediverse was curated moderation. The idea of the Fediverse is that your home instance is reflective of your ideal moderation style. Every instance should have a different attitude and feel when it comes to moderation, and users should gravitate to the instance that matches what they want from moderators.
For example, lemmy.ml serves a general interest community, but has a tendency to moderate in a way that nurtures authoritarian left wing political views, and removes or bans users who are critical of authoritarian left wing regimes like those of the USSR (CCCP) and People's Republic of China (CCP). If you decide you don't like that, you could consider lemmy.world. Lemmy.world is interested in that it is the second-largest instance and is so new that it does not currently appear in my DNS resolver (Next DNS)'s registry, and it allows basically an "anything goes" methodology to user signups. This instance might be a good fit if your ideal online community is purely self moderated by users blocking other users who bother them, but if you're someone who gets exhausted quickly of online, you might want another instance. That's where we meet Beehaw.org's place in the Fediverse. Beehaw.org is interesting in that it is run on a wholly different moderation format than most of us are used to. Rather than having a list of rules that you must explicitly violate for moderators to do anything, Beehaw has set for their moderation style an ideal community model of interaction, the only rule is to not take actions which are harmful to that model of interaction. Personally, I really like this. I've spent far too much time on Reddit filling out mod reports explaining why a group of comments were inflammatory, rude, or hurtful to the community only to have a mod say the particular comment I had flagged didn't violate any rules, and therefore I was wasting their time.
And of course, assuming none of the 225 Lemmy instances listed on Fediverse.observer suit your ideal moderation style, you also have the option to run your own instance and defederate from any instance you want nothing to do with. You might notice that beehaw.org, lib.lgbt, tagpro.lol, lemmy.techstache, and f.jbradaric.me all have over 380 instances they have blacklisted. Not all of these 380 instances are Lemmy instances. Most of them aren't. Because Lemmy has interoperability with other popular Fediverse projects (like Mastodon, for example), users running on a non-blacklisted instance of another project could post to Lemmy. It's very common to see Lemmy comments coming from mastodon and KBin users. That list of 380 instances includes mastodon instances like skinheads.top-level-domain (I'm not giving them full domain spaces, fuck fascists). Did users at those skinhead mastodon instances stir up trouble on all five of those lemmy instances? Nope! They're on a common list that all of those servers elected they didn't want to interact with from the get go.
So, what am I getting at? I'm getting at, "what instance you join doesn't matter since you'll be everything to see everything from whatever instance you pick" is patently false and misses the point of the Fediverse. What instance you pick will very distinctly influence what kinds of community interactions you will have, especially on a community hosting platform like KBin and Lemmy where there's less one-on-one interaction and far more community group discussions.
Sorry to have blown up this comment explaining from a technical standpoint what's going on with the server caches, but I've seen so many misconceptions about what the fediverse is and isn't ever since this was announced that it's been bothering me
Your comment perfectly summarizes what Lemmy and the Fediverse is about and why some people that came over don't get it or don't want to get it because they're just looking for something like reddit without being reddit. So thank you.
I agree there are valid concerns and feature requests that also exist on reddit and are useful to have. But I've seen way too many people complaining about things which are inherent to Lemmy by design. At this point, and I'm sorry for being blunt, but they might as well go back to reddit.
This is the best comment I've seen so far describing not just what is going on or how is works, but the ethos behind the fediverse and how instances are meant to be used. Thank you very much for taking the time to write it up.
In the couple comments I made about this on reddit before I left I tried to make sure to emphasize that which instance you signed up on should be a conscious choice (and would be a little bit of a commitment), but I fear that "just sign up anywhere" was the far more common refrain – and probably still is. Based on the number of comments on this post saying some variation of "this (defederation) is antithetical to the point of the fediverse," I think a lot of people unfortunately didn't get the message that it's a choice that would actually matter.
Thanks. It took a long time to write since I was on my phone, and as such, is riddled with typos and grammatical errors. I also hadn't had my coffee yet, which made things harder and worse.
As a fellow phone-poster, I totally get it! Lol
I hope some mature 3rd party apps for That Other Link Aggregator do end up making the switch. Jerboa is an excellent proof of concept, but it has some serious issues (like deleting the space before a word if I try to edit the word)
Yes! I've actually switched entirely too using the mobile web UI (for now) because of that particular bug (edit: plus the fact that I can't do any moderation in Jerboa). It makes writing any comments longer than a couple of sentences extremely frustrating. I'll keep my fingers crossed for Boost to come over, but I also won't be holding my breath.
I'd do that but I like being able to have both my accounts in one app. I think if I'm thinking about this right for two accounts as web app installs (or whatever the hell it's called) to my home screen I'd need to install one for each server I want to participate from (and therefor one for each account)
Oh yeah, I just have the one account for now, so I'm just using a Firefox tab without "installing" it
I understand, I went on beehaw especially to not have to deal with trolls/extremists/racists/etc so I'll stay here, but I think I'll open an account on LW just to follow some communities there, like Futurama...
I did that too. I had several Lemmy.world subscriptions before defederarion that I've recreated on another instance that still federates with them. It's a definitively less fun account to be logged into
No it is no longer syncing up with lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/futurama/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
https://beehaw.org/c/futurama@lemmy.world/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
Understood, it's a little fucked up, so I guess I'll need an account on lemmy.world and one on beehaw :/
I decided to go with lemmy.one since it's able to access all the instances I want so far including lemmy.world and beehaw.