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Beehaw Support @beehaw.org alyaza [they/she] @beehaw.org

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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  • I have had some questions that I can't seem to get answered over on world regarding moderation of the 'false'/shell/local beehaw communities left behind.

    Idk if anyone here will know, but background essentially is that while the beehaw communities are not live and posts from beehaw/federated instances are not visible, to a world user the community itself appears as normal (albeit with low engagement) and can be posted/commented in as normal with no indication the community is no longer moderated by beehaw mods.

    So how does moderation work in this regard? For example is the LGBTQ+@beehaw community now completely unmoderated for world users? Who does user reports made in those communities go to now, as world never had moderators for those communities?

    I'm concerned that unless world mutually defederates, there is essentially moderation-free pockets that are rife for trolls to overtake. Then because of the lack of UI indicators that the communities are not the real version can put unsuspecting world users to being exposed to harm under the beehaw banner, which will give the false impression that beehaw allow this behaviour. Can someone help explain how the moderation works in these circumstances?

    • Caveat: I've not gotten up to speed on lemmy's full implementation of the activitypub protocol, so some of this might be wrong in some way. But, to the best of my understanding:

      Those "shell" communities on L.W and S.IJ.W are, at this point, essentially unmoderated. I believe that reports will be visible to L.W / S.IJ.W admins (respectively), but this is the part I'm most uncertain about. I also don't know how much the admins on those instances would care to moderate the shell communities anyway, even if I'm right and they can see reports, and I also also don't know if L.W mutually defederating would hide the "shell" communities (my understanding is that it would not). Hopefully someone who understands activitypub and lemmy's implementation of it can jump in and answer some of these questions.

      When we defederated, L.W and S.IJ.W kept local copies of our communities with any posts and comments that were made before defederation. Now that we're defederated with them, any further posts and comments made by L.W users will only be visible to L.W users (and the same goes for S.IJ.W). Other instances that we're still federated with will continue to get the "true" copy of the community which we host, which will not include any posts or comments made by L.W users or users from any other defederated instance. So there is unfortunately a possibility for L.W & S.IJ.W users to be deceived if they're unaware of the defederation, but users on instances we're still federated with will have the normal, moderated experience.

      Ideally lemmy would do something about this: make the "shell" copy read only / archival, purge the community from the defederated instance, or at least surface the fact that the community was from a defederated instance in the UI somehow. Currently nothing like that is implemented.

      I do agree that there's a potential for harm here. If you have a L.W account and feel comfortable, one thing you could do is make a post on the "shell" community letting folks on that instance know that we've defederated and their instance's copy is essentially unmoderated. It's unfortunate that we're needing to find ad hoc solutions like this, and I hope that lemmy's tooling and protocols around this kind of thing improve in the (near) future.

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