ou might have seen that we've been defederated from beehaw.org. I think there's some necessary context to understand what this means to the users on this instance.
How federation works
The way federation works is that the community on beehaw.org is an organization of posts, and you're subscribed to it despite your account being on lemmy.world. Now someone posts on that community (created on beehaw.org), on which server is that post hosted?
It's hosted on both! It's hosted on any instance that has a subscriber. It's also hosted on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, etc. Every instance that has a subscriber is going to have a copy of this post. That's why if you host your own instance, you'll often get a ton of text data just in your own server.
And the copies all stay in sync with each other using ActivityPub. So you're reading the post that's host on lemmy.world, and someone with an account on beehaw.org is reading the same post on beehaw.org, and the posts are kept in sync via ActivityPub. Whenever someone posts to that community or comments on a post, that data is shared to all the versions across the fediverse, and these versions are kept in sync. So up until 5 hours ago, they were the same post!
"True"-ness
A key concept that will matter in the next section is the idea of a "true" version. Effectively, one version of these posts is the "true" version, that every other community reflects. The "true" version is the one hosted on the instance that hosts the community. So the "true" version of a beehaw.org community post is the one actually hosted on beehaw.org. We have a copy, but ours is only a copy. If you post to our copy, it updates the "true" version on beehaw.org, and then all the other instances look to the "true" version on beehaw to update themselves.
The same goes for communities hosted on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Defederation affects how information is shared between instances. If you keep track of where the "true" version is hosted, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on.
How defederation works
Now take that example post from earlier, the one on beehaw.org. The "true" version of the post is on beehaw.org but the post is still hosted on both instances (again, it has a copy hosted on all instances). Let's say someone with an account on beehaw.org comments on that post. That comment is going to be sent to every version of that post via ActivityPub, as the "true" version has been updated. That is, every version EXCEPT lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. So users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won't get that comment, because we've been defederated from beehaw.org. If we write a comment, it will only be visible from accounts on lemmy.world, because we posted to a copy, but our copy is now out of sync with the "true" version. So we can appear to interact with the post, but those interactions are ONLY visible by other lemmy.world accounts, since our comments aren't send to other versions. As the "true" version is hosted on beehaw, and we no longer get beehaw updates due to defederation, we will not see comments from ANY other community on those posts (including from other defederated instances like sh.itjust.works).
The same goes for posting to beehaw communities. We can still do that. However, the "true" version of those communities are the ones on beehaw, so our posts will not be shared to other instances via ActivityPub. And all of this is true for Beehaw users with our communities. Beehaw users can continue to see and interact with Lemmy.world communities, but those interactions are only visible to other Beehaw users, since the "true" versions of the Lemmy.world communities (the ones sent to/synced with every other instance) is the Lemmy.world one.
Communities on other instances, for example lemmy.ml, are unaffected by this. Lemmy.world and beehaw.org users will still be able to interact with those communities, but posts/comments from lemmy.world users won't be visible to beehaw.org users, as defederation prevents our posts/comments from being sent to the version of these posts hosted on beehaw.org. However, as the "true" version is the one on the third instance, we can still see everything from beehaw.org users. So we see a more filled in version than the beehaw users.
Why can I still see posts/comments from beehaw users?
Until they defederated us, posts/comments were being sent to lemmy.world, so we can see everything from before defederation. After defederation, we are no longer receiving or sending updates. So there are now multiple versions of those posts.
Why can I still interact with beehaw communities?
This won't ever stop. You'll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won't see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities.
Those communities will quickly suck for us, as we're only talking to other lemmy.world users. Your posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. I highly recommend just unsubscribing from those communities, since they're pretty pointless for us to be in right now.
Why do I still see comments from beehaw users on lemmy.world communities?
Again, comments from before defederation were still sent to us. After defederation, it will no longer be possible for beehaw users to interact with the "true" version of lemmy.world communities. Their posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. They also aren't getting updates from any other lemmy, as the "true" version of those communities is on our instance.
Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?
That's because the "true" version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn't defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.
The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.
This seems like it's worse for beehaw users than for us?
Yes. In my opinion, this is an extraordinarily dumb act by the beehaw instance owners. It's worse for beehaw users than for us, and will likely result in many beehaw users leaving that instance. They said in their post that this is a nuke, but I don't think they fully assessed the blast area. Based on their post, I don't think they fully understand what defederation does.
I can understand wanting to have a well-moderated community.
What I don't understand is how they expect to do that with a moderation team of just 4 people.
I guess now people will just leave Beehaw, its communities that were popular here will be replaced by others in the Fediverse and life will go on. The Fediverse is built to be resilient to such changes.
A lot of people are missing the point of their defederation, which is a lack of proper moderation team and tools for the sudden scale they are exposed to as one of the most popular place of discussion with the rexxit with them harboring some of the most active communities around.
Their issue is mainly bad actors, trolls and harassers coming from those big instances and overwhelming them.
Defederation is the big-nuke symptom of a wider fediverse problem, a lack of moderation tools and readiness for scale, that I also saw happen a lot on Mastodon. I followed the infosec instance and they basically ended up having to defederate the biggest mastodon instances for a few days at a time when stuff like spam and cryptobro DMs ran rampant. I've received many of those so I can tell you that it's pretty real.
Construing their decision as a desire to fracture the community is missing the actual reason they've tried to articulate. It's a temporary stopgap for the 4 admins who just weren't expecting the sort of volume and associated misbehaving problems they are suddenly getting.
Overall, Lemmy is getting through a pretty intense "shit just got real" moment. Please bear with it, people are working really hard at solving this from what I can see.
I came up with a list of examples to explain this, but I can't see to add them to the post. I'm having a really hard time posting today. So here they are in a comment. I think this helps show exactly what's going on.
Examples
If this still doesn't make sense, then try the following examples. I hope being able to see defederation in action makes this a little more clear.
Beehaw Communities
We're going to use gaming@beehaw.org as an example of what happens to beehaw communities
The first link is the beehaw gaming community as hosted on beehaw. All of these are sorted by new, because it makes it very obvious when defederation went into effect. You can see that there are several new posts.
The second link is the beehaw gaming community as hosted on lemmy.world. You can see that all the posts before defederation (5 hours ago at time of writing) are the same as the beehaw one. But now, none of new posts are visible. We no longer get updates from the "true" version on beehaw. There are some new posts there, but all are posted by lemmy.world users. And the posts from lemmy.world users are not visible on beehaw.
The final link is to the beehaw gaming community as hosted on lemmy.ml. This is identical to the beehaw.org community, as the "true" version is on beehaw.org, the one that gets updated on other communities is the "true" version.
Lemmy.world communities
We'll use the lemmyworld base community as an example:
The first post is the version of this community as hosted on beehaw.org. You can see from 5 hours ago, there are no more posts. That's because they no longer receive the "true" version of this community. Someone on there could still post, but then it would only be visible to other people on beehaw.org.
The second shows it as hosted on lemmy.world. We can see all the posts. The last link shows it as hosted on lemmy.ml, and we can see it's the same as the lemmy.world version. The "true" version is on lemmy.world, so lemmy.ml keeps up with the updated version.
Third instance communities
Finally, we have the example of communities that are on instances that have not been defederated by beehaw.org.
We can see all three of these versions look pretty similar. That's because for the most part they are. We are identical with lemmy.ml, as lemmy.ml hosts the "true" version, and we get all updates from the "true" version. Beehaw.org will not get posts/comments from us, so beehaw actually doesn't have the most "true" version of this community.
This is the same post hosted on three different instances. Since the community is on lemmy.ml, the "true" version of this post is the lemmy.ml one.
It was posted by a beehaw.org user AFTER defederation, but it's still visible to lemmy.world users, since the community it was posted to is lemmy.ml, not beehaw.org. We can comment on it, and those comments are sent to the "true" version on lemmy.ml (and then shared to the wider fediverse). However, comments from lemmy.world are NOT sent to the version of this post on beehaw.org.
When I found this example, there were only two comments on this post, both from lemmy.world users. So the poster did not get an initial response because of defederation.
Hey I am just going to throw this out into the ether, I have been on the lemmy instances longer than beehaw, and I have yet to find an instance whos admin team I would trust less with their stated reasoning. I would not trust their stated reasoning and if I had to guess they are trying to get Lemmy.world to change something to come into line with them. if you ask me you have dodged a bullet. I hope lemmy.world stands strong
Looks pretty dumb to me, but hey if they want a walled community they have the right to have it.
It doesn't align with me and it makes me super happy of being here instead of there.
Thanks a lot for the explanation and also your other example comment, super useful!
As for me, I'll simply unjoin their communities and find the same somewhere else, I feel a bit sad tho for open users there that will have to create a new account somewhere else.
It seems like Beehaw want to create a closed community they can moderate. That kind of makes sense for their aims but they will need to defederate from more and more services to maintain that over time.
It seems a bit of a kneejerk in reaction to the influx of new users but essentially it means they'll not be part of the fediverse, and they risk creating an echochamber. It's rather the opposite of their stated aim of creating a diverse community, and will probably stymie their growth going forward.
I've got to say I'm really frustrated with this. Beehaw ignored or denied my registration so I joined here, spent time curating a feed and now I guess I lose out on a substantial amount of that?
Which server is going to cut off my stuff next?
Profoundly frustrating and discouraging. I don't know what server to recommend to people so that they can get the most content.
Should lemmy.world defederate from beehaw.org so we don't even see their posts/comments? It seems a bad user experience to have posts/comments appear that we can't properly interact with.
As a Reddit refugee, and thus part of the problem, this kind of thing is what makes me unsure if I want to use Lemmy. I don't want to suddenly lose access to communities I've become accustomed to for reasons beyond my control.
Also, is there a way to see all the instances that have specifically defederated or blocked this one?
I feel like this is a bad decision under the current circumstances, but also this shows the problems when one instance holds too large a portion of the user base and why we want to decentralize in the first place.
Defederation is a big decision that should not be taken lightly. You are effectively silencing an entire group of people from your group and when it’s a group as large as these two instances there is a lot of collateral damage.
However, we need more instances that are as well run as Lemmy.world if we want to truly be decentralized but I guess that is easier said than done.
I feel like the mods at bee haw are just putting a band aid on the problem because the “trolls” are going to keep coming as long as Lemmy is growing. They can just as easily come from any other instance. Defederation is not a replacement for good moderation.
Either way, I hope that as Lemmy matures we get more and more well run instances so we don’t have to rely on a small group of instances and hope they can get along
I would love to see some specific examples of the so called "trolls" from lemmy.world that trolled them. But defederating an entire instance, nearly 20k users, due to the actions of very few users just seems extreme.
join-lemmy.org should probably add the info that beehaw is very strict in their decentralization/federation, so much so that they are becoming just another walled garden.
This is not to say that I agree with low-effort content, trolls or alt-right people. They should be blocked and even possibly banned. But this should be done on an individual basis. They categorizing an entire instance as "unworthy". We have names for these kind of generalizations.
This is an incredibly selfish, dipshit move. They’re trying to prioritise the growth of their own instance at the expense of Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole, at a time when we should all be banded together to accept the massive influx of departing Redditors.
To be honest, as time went by and a few of my subreddits I frequented started to get brigaded by transphobes and fascist bawbags (Scotland and unitedkingdom subs are a great example of this) I stopped participating altogether in them.
I found the casualuk sub and that became pretty much the only place I’d comment/post. It felt like a much closer-knit community and I’d much rather have that than a massive community that may not feel as “homely” if that makes sense.
EDIT - I replied to the wrong post, I've not had a coffee yet.
That's a real bitch move, basically shadowbanning huge portions of the reddit migration. Unsubscribed from everything they host and lost a ton of content. Hopefully we can grow our own technology, gaming and whatever other large discussion hubs.
This isn't much better than what reddit is doing, fucking safe spaces. I miss the hell out of the internet at the turn of the millennium. When the users started touching things it all went to shit.
It seems like Lemmy is already experiencing further fragmentation and authority struggles. It doesn't bode well for growing Lemmy as a whole. Federation seems to be a double edged sword.
People joined Beehaw because it's the most similar instance to current reddit. The problem is that current reddit policy just doesn't work.
I think it'll take time for all the reddit migration to develop a unique Lemmy culture away from reddit (there is always risk for a bad culture like what happened to Voat of course), and if they continue their current course, Beehaw will just get left behind as proof of failure of Reddit remnant on Lemmy.
The biggest issue I'm having with Lemmy is the lack of new posts and discussions which I mainly use reddit to read - especially football related.
Seems like splintering will just make it even harder to do that here. I'm not sure how Lemmy is supposed to grow if discussion and growth is limited by instances.
Thank you for the wonderful explanation. I'm super sad because most of what I wanted to interact with was in beehaw. However I'm not willing to make multiple accounts in order to interact with their instance. I'm sure that other instances of their will be made and quickly overtake beehaw.
Seems like there should be a notice when a community is just a copy that isn't being updated anymore, to encourage people to abandon it and use one that is updated across instances. Or discourage them from subscribing to it.
i deleted my beehaw account and registered here as soon as i read about the defederation. They're trying to police the beehaw community way too much, bunch of softies imo..
Just reading through this post, I think it would be good for Lemmy to have a feature that shows users when writing a comment or post that it won't be seen by users on X instance (in case lemmy.world users are not aware that beehaw.org has defederated them).
If they still go though with the comment or post, it would have an icon that if you hover over/click on it, it shows the communities that have defederated them or what the effect is (X users can't see this post, Y users are not seeing the "True" post etc.)
I don't think I'm explaining it well, but there needs to be some visual indication so anyone on any instance knows that a certain comment or post isn't being seen by users of a certain instance or whatever - or maybe that isn't feasible as there are certain instances that everyone would block.
I don't know whether or not this was the right decision for beehaw, although I certainly sympathize with them having staffing and mod tool issues. Modding any forum is a thankless and tiring job, and I'm sure in it's super early state Lemmy doesn't exactly have a mature suite of tools to work with.
I am very interested in the community reaction here though. There seems to be a shared assumption that instance creation in the Fediverse means an open exchange of users and content (outside of bad actor or extreme instances), and most instances should only be distributing technical burden and otherwise be almost just an aesthetic in the larger Fediverse.
This despite the user philosophy in the Fediverse being 'go where you want, interact with who your want', and federation tools meaning that philosophy applies to instances as well. And if you want meaningful differences between communities and instances, this has to be so - there has to be a strong ability to self-regulate, up to and including the ability to defederate from incompatible instances.
I think it'll be very interesting to see how the Fediverse develops. A wider Fediverse composed of sets of federated instances which aren't federated with other sets is possible. A largely open Fediverse with limited walled off instances is also possible. I know right now the latter is probably preferred to encourage growth, but in the long run? (these are not the only conceivable arrangements either, but this post is long enough already)
I feel like this is a bad decision under the current circumstances, but also this shows the problems when one instance holds too large a portion of the user base and why we want to decentralize in the first place.
Defederation is a big decision that should not be taken lightly. You are effectively silencing an entire group of people from your group and when it’s a group as large as these two instances there is a lot of collateral damage.
However, we need more instances that are as well run as Lemmy.world if we want to truly be decentralized but I guess that is easier said than done.
I feel like the mods at bee haw are just putting a band aid on the problem because the “trolls” are going to keep coming as long as Lemmy is growing. They can just as easily come from any instance. Defederation is not a replacement for good moderation.
Either way, I hope that as Lemmy matures we get more and more well run instances so we don’t have to rely on a small group of instances and hope they can get along.
If you look at the table on Awesome Lemmy Instances, Beehaw is far and away the most block-happy instance around, blocking over 70% of all instances in the Fediverse. They seem to see it as the defacto way to manage their instance.
Makes sense since, as other users have pointed out, the whole instance seems to be run by only a handful of the same Admins/Mods, so they are likely stretched very thin and are just taking the biggest swings they can to manage everything. They either need a major overhaul to their approach or that instance is going to fade into nothing.
Amazing post with great info, thank you! There literally nothing in UI to let people know this is how it works tho and relies on words of mouth sharing. Communities essentially look exactly the same but like there's been no activity unless lemmy.world users post in it so you have to be able to guess posts are on a defederated instance or be hypervigilant in checking usernames if you haven't seen any posts about it, or are a new user in a week when this is t discussed as frequently. This is a huge oversight tbh and leaves me feeling a little uneasy. With more questions.
For example the LGBTQ community hosted on beehaw. Hypothetically say all of us genuine users who are aware of this unsubscribe because we find other communities that allow us to participate with a wider community. The shell community is still there, using beehaw branding, looks like a legit LGBTQ space but is now exclusively populated by trolls and unfortunate users who have missed announcements that this has happened. Nothing in the UI informs anyone posting or commenting there that it is not the true instance, and therefore no longer moderated by the owners.
Unaware user who already subscribed before the defederation posts a topic they want to discuss in a few weeks time, and suddenly they're flooded with highly upvoted troll responses That post ends up on the lemmy.world local/all page and is broadcast to other users who may not be aware, and a lot of new users who have no idea this ever happened. Now Beehaw is known as a hub for homophobic trolls that allows queer users to be trolled, and the trolls know they can get away with it in that community. Sure, eventually someone will come in to let that user know what's up and where to go, but by that time the damage is already done.
That also leads me to question how reporting works for this type of thing. If I report a user for breaking sub rules on the false version, who does that report go to? Is it a random lemmy.world mod/admin because we are both lemmy.world users in a community without beehaws mods or is it lost to the ether because there's no longer a connection to beehaw mods? If it goes to world mods, what if someone violates the subs rules that are still shown on the false instance, but not lemmy.world rules? My understanding was that moderation happened in communities by the host instance so does that mean these shell communities are completely unmoderated? That makes me feel very uncomfortable that these shell communities are even still available to world users, if it is the case, and should be cause for a mutual defederation until it's addressed but I'd like to have my reasoning corrected here if I'm off base. I'm still learning but this has me a little concerned so would appreciate being corrected if I'm wrong.
Edit: people are misunderstanding what I'm saying in the comments.
Who is moderating posts made by lemmy.world users in 'false' beehaw communities since the official beehaw moderators can no longer see these posts?
I do get where Beehaw admins are coming from. They want their instance to be a tight-knit safespace, and it is pretty hard to accomplish when there are only several admins dealing with an insane wave of newcomers. Unless Lemmy moderation tools get better, that seems like an OK temporary solution. Though, it is still kinda unfortunate that federated services, while being a great idea overall, are so prone to balkanization (that is, essentially, the fragmentation of mastodon situation all over again) but it gives user choice.
I've just recently had this discussion with a friend where he told me he prefered Nostr because he was afraid instances would randomly start banning eachother. I told him that I've never been banned from anywhere on my life and it just wasn't realistic at this stage of growth.
I was just poking around a bit over at beehaw, earlier. and I got the STRONG impression that they really weren't in a position to deal with the sudden influx of users: not enough mod team, not enough money, not enough spare time in the day for the few people running it. I'm not holding that against them, that's to be expected in Fediverse spaces, which I gather intend to spread the load across thousands of instances, not just one.
Is this just them trying to get things under control, or was there some other problem?
Say I never read about these news: am I able to somehow see that a community belongs to a defederated instance, or do I have to guess based on the (lack of) new activity?
Its convenience. 99% don't care about anything apart from getting what they need. The blackout caused them inconvenience so its therefore annoying. Its the same attitude that can appear when workers take strike action.
I think this is the best explanation of how federation works that I've seen so far. Really appreciate it. So would it benefit us to use an account for me different website to get the benefit of both communities? Is there a way to be essentially logged into two accounts at once so that you can see separate federated communities all at once?
In my opinion, this is an extraordinarily dumb act by the beehaw instance owners. It’s worse for beehaw users than for us, and will likely result in many beehaw users leaving that instance.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but how is it "worse for them"? Sure, if your goal is to create a big community, it's obviously bad, and perhaps it will lead to the death of that community. But their main goal isn't growth, it's having a "save space" and highly moderated community.
In your opinion, how should they have acted to achieve that goal when according to them, they are not able to moderate that much content at the moment in a way they want to? Lemmy.world allows any user to register without any vetting and is one of the biggest communities, does it not make sense to temporarily block content from here to decrease the amount of content to moderate?
If anything I hope this will serve all communities as valuable experience. I hope to see beehaw sharing the results sometime in the future. We'll se what happens.
I think it's gonna be allright. Defederation from big instances might be very good for those that want to maintain somewhat intimate wibe for themselves.
This explains things really well. Beehaw's goal is to be the tight-knit, invite only home for all kinds of people. It's not supposed to be a Reddit alternative, but a thing of its own. However, KBin and other instances aren't blocked yet from federating with them, and making a new instance is also an option, so it's not like all is lost. This is a reason why having more than one account helps.
Thank you for this explanation; it’s super helpful. Regardless of our views on this decision, I think it’s important to remember why we’re here in the first place. This decision does seem drastic, but I don’t think hoping that beehaw “dies off” is the right mindset. I’m sure Reddit is sitting on the sidelines waiting for something like this to happen, so we should be doing whatever we can to keep the momentum we’ve gained in the past few days and ensure the fediverse doesn’t implode.
So maybe this is a silly question and I don’t understand things completely but does this mean as a lemmy.world member I should unsubscribe from beehaw communities and find similar communities elsewhere?
I think this entire issue is showing a critical issue with Lemmy's maturity, which is honestly the number one thing blocking people from sites like Reddit from joining. All of Lemmy's tools for dealing with moderation are currently a bit underdeveloped. From the Admin tools of an instance to the moderator tools for each community, there just isn't very much granularity. That means right now Lemmy can't handle large communities, and with one as large as lemmy.world some trolls filter in. Even worse, right now if a lemmy.world user goes and posts a homophobic rant on a queer instance, like Blahaj, and people proceeded to report it, those reports would only go to Blahaj when they should probably go to both Blahaj and lemmy.world, meaning that those toxic users are only banned within the instance they offended in and can retreat to the refuge of their main instance, and proceed to attack other communities. One of the issues is less so with the tooling and moreso with just how fast Lemmy has grown, for example beehaw has 5 admins but over 12 thousand users, plus the users from the other communities they are still federating with. That means that every admin is managing thousands of people, which is not sustainable. Until these critical issues with the tooling are solved, Lemmy is going to be staunched in its growth, and we are going to end up with instances defederating to try and take control.
Edit: The report thing might be incorrect, and if so I apologize for not verifying that information before spreading it.
I‘m just gonna go with whatever communities or bubble of instances feel nice to me and I don‘t mind making multiple accounts for it. Seems like that is not beehaw cause the mods seem too heavy handed for me. Thanks for the post anyway it was insightful.
This is a really good explanation for how defederation works.
I understand your point that Beehaw defederating from two subs for moderation and user management seems like an extreme reaction. But it's one I kind of expected from them given Beehaw's philosophies as as an instance.
Their detailed posts about what Beehaw is always made it very clear to me they think carefully about how they run their space and the users they want to grant access to. They really prioritise making their instance a safe space for well-meaning discussion through their vetted registrations.
I'm not an admin. I'm not an experienced Lemmy user. I'm not someone who has had experience moderating and being an admin on several communities before. They have and I've also seen activity on the Lemmy repo from them showing they have dev experience too.
As you pointed out, the entire site of 12k users is currently managed by 4 people who seem to have quite a lot of experience managing communities. That's a big workload. I've been using both Beehaw and Kbin since Reddit's awful API changes to see how both places grow and so far I've found Beehaw to be a very enjoyable experience with a pretty high engagement rate. I usually get hella upvotes and replies to anything I say. It does feel like a pretty active, close-knit place of well-meaning people even at this early stage. I think they're running Beehaw pretty well so far. Kbin is very solid too, but Beehaw I've found tends to have a deeper level of engagement and longer, more in-depth post styles that I prefer.
I know any instances with open registration could hop in and contribute to Beehaw, so this issue they have of not being able to vet and control users isn't unique to those two instances. But given so far the place to me as a user still feels the same as when I joined a few days ago more or less, I'm going to take them at their word that they're getting an influx of activity that isn't a particularly good fit for Beehaw for now. There's a lot of instances that could defederate from. 2 is not a huge number so far. Plus they did explicitly say at the end this is not a permanent decision, they may very well change their minds later on.
So personally, I respect and understand Beehaw's decision at this moment. Lets give things time and see how things develop. It's definitely a temporary, broad axe to cutting an apple type solution to their troll problem - which may very well continue as Lemmy gets more popularity as a platform overall - but I think they want to be specific about who they pull into their moderation team to ensure the vibe of Beehaw is maintained. Lets give it some time to see what happens.
The more I think about it, the more it seems that the appropriate response is mutual defederation. It will cause a lot of unnecessary confusion if lemmy.world and the other affected instances don’t do that.
One main issue (or benefit, depending on your POV) with federation is that it trends toward the lowest common denominator of moderation. Because of the way things scale, you rely on others instances to moderate their users. But what if your standard for etiquette differs? For a large instance, you either try to convince other instances to get in line and adopt a shared value system, or you relent, or you defederate. All of these options will likely result in a more "average" standard of quality among the wider pool of instances.
Maybe that's good, maybe it's bad, but I'm not surprised instances with quality standards on the extreme ends get pushed out.
@AgentGoldfish Hrm .. the actual dumb thing is not getting defederated but owerwhelming other instances moderation team because of the lack of moderation on _your_ site.
I'm still confused on how the sending works of posts and comments between instances. Like if I want to set up my own instance and pull posts from lemmy.world and beehaw.org, surely I can do that without both of them needing to give me permission via federation? Unless they actively blocked my instance. It would only be when I make a post or comment on my copy on my instance that their users would not see it unless they federated with me. But let's say Midwest.social federates with my new instance, would their users not also see my posts and comments regardless of the community I posted them to?
As someone just learning and exploring the Fediverse, what in your opinion would be a good reason to defederate? Also, thanks for the excellent write-up to help me understand better
Does anyone know of an instance I can sign up for that is the most likely to not be defederated. I guess that's a tall ask but I like seeing everything. For some reason I can't sign up for lemmy.ml and lemmy.world I signed up but then it started telling me my login credentials were wrong and when I choose forgot password there's nothing in my inbox.
I also signed up for sh.itjust.works but then the all feed on there doesn't even have this thread for some reason and a bunch of stuff is old.
Defederation is stupid and should never be done, not even for instances with Nazi communities. Just let the users decide to block those communities themselves.
Why can I still interact with beehaw communities?
This won’t ever stop. You’ll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won’t see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities.
Is there any downside to staying subscribed to their communities if I just want to see the posts? It's a shame because their communities seem to have the most posts at the moment.
They have a right to build a walled community, but lemmy is a strange choice to do it. By connecting to a network known not to handle such disruptions well, (the OP is proof that it doesn't) and then disconnecting from it, seems like a small FU.
I think this is the best explanation of how federation works that I've seen so far. Really appreciate it. So would it benefit us to use an account for me different website to get the benefit of both communities? Is there a way to be essentially logged into two accounts at once so that you can see separate federated communities all at once?
How is Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works for whatever reason is not like exactly like what Reddit is doing to third party apps? You want to federate with us? Sure, but you have to play by OUR rules. That’s not how it should work. You don't get to cherry pick on instances based on some political views. Either you federate with all, or you don't federate at all and you're just your own website.
I'm still new here and super confused about all this lemmiverse stuff. I'm so confused I don't even know what questions to ask to un-confuse myself. This 1000 word essay is dense and confusing. I asked chatgpt to summarize as succinctly as possible and it gave me this:
"In a nutshell, federation refers to the way communities and posts are shared across different instances or servers. Each instance hosts a copy of the posts, and these copies stay in sync using ActivityPub. The "true" version of a post is the one hosted on the instance that created the community. Defederation occurs when instances stop sharing information with each other.
After defederation, updates and interactions between instances are limited. For example, if an instance is defederated, its users won't receive updates or interactions from other instances. Only interactions within the defederated instance will be visible to its users. However, the "true" version of posts/comments remains accessible to the defederated instance, while interactions from that instance are not shared with other instances.
In the case of beehaw.org and lemmy.world, beehaw.org users can still interact with lemmy.world communities, but their interactions will only be visible to other beehaw.org users. Lemmy.world users won't see interactions from other instances in beehaw.org communities.
Defederation can make interactions limited and affect the overall experience of users. In this case, it seems like the defederation decision by beehaw.org may have unintended consequences and may not fully align with their expectations."
The bold portion is pretty much my only takeaway. I still don't really know why I should be on lemmy one vs world vs beehaw vs ???????????
It seems like Beehaw want to create a closed community they can moderate. That kind of makes sense for their aims but they will need to defederate from more and more services to maintain that over time.
It seems a bit of a kneejerk in reaction to the influx of new users but essentially it means they'll not be part of the fediverse, and they risk creating an echochamber. It's rather the opposite of their stated aim of creating a diverse community, and will probably stymie their growth going forward.
I'm trying to process this, as this federation thing is a bit new to me. So if I subscribed to Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org and I subscribed by using the syntax URL of https://lemmy.world/c/foss@beehaw.org then when they post, I see their stuff, but when I post they don't see my posts because of defederation?
Thanks for the post. I think I understand what's going on now.
If I'm understanding this correctly, I could still post to beehaw but only other lemmy.world users would be able to see it. Is a list or something anywhere on lemmy.world where I can see which other instances have defederated it (or have been defederated by lemmy.world)?