Like many of you, I woke up this morning to discover that our instance, along with lemmy.world, had been unexpectedly added to the beehaw block list. Although this development initially caught me off guard, the administrators at beehaw made an announcement shedding light on their decision.
The primary concern raised was our instance's policy of open registration. Given my belief that the fediverse is still navigating its early stages, I believe that for it to mature, gain traction, and encourage adoption, it is crucial for instances to offer an uncomplicated and direct route for newcomers to join and participate. This was one of the reason I decided to launch this instance. However, I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls. Despite these hurdles, I maintain the conviction that our collective strength as a community can overcome these issues.
After this happened, the beehaw admins and I had a good chat about their decision. While our stances on registration policies might diverge, we realized that our ultimate goals are aligned: we both strive to foster communities that thrive in an atmosphere of safety and respect, where users can passionately engage in discussions and feel a sense of belonging.
Although the probability of an immediate reversal are slim given the current circumstances, I believe we have managed to identify common ground. It's evident that, even in separation, we can unite to contribute positively to the broader fediverse community.
In the coming weeks or months, we plan to collaborate with other lemmy instance administrators to suggest enhancements and modifications to the lemmy project. Primarily, our proposals will concentrate on devising tools and features that empower us, as instance administrators, to moderate our platforms effectively.
In the meantime, while I understand may not be ideal for everyone, users who choose to participate on the beehaw instance will be required to register a separate account on their instance.
Thank you all for continuing to make this community great!
I'd just like to say that I appreciate your stance on open registration and making things as uncomplicated as possible. I signed up for a Beehaw account before this even happened, but I did find having to explain myself and justify my presence a little confusing. I also signed up for a discuss.tchncs.de account and I was so confused and thought their website was broken because once I clicked sign up, it didn't do anything. Just span around in a circle. It wasn't until I checked my email that I realised it wanted me to confirm my email. Here, things did just work. No complications, just entered my name, email and password, clicked sign up, and I was done! I guess you could say... shit just works on sh.itjust.works
I'm disappointed that we have to suffer because of a few bad apples but I can understand the situation. We'll all have to do our part to report and remove these trash brain bigots from out instance. I really enjoy the laid back atmosphere of this instance but it is acutely vulnerable to trolls as evidenced by that shithead.
Basically Beehaw and all its communities and users are now blocking everyone from this server. We can't post to their communities and they can't see anything that we post on third party communities either.
However, this server has not defederated Beehaw. Therefore, we can still see their users commenting on third party communities, and we can even reply to them, they just won't see our reply, although neutral parties will.
Both Beehaw and sh.itjust.works are still able to contribute significant activity to Lemmy as a whole, just not directly to each other for now. Let's all be diligent on reporting and banning trolls quickly so we can maintain the collegial atmosphere here.
Oh, so the person who posted their tiny penis on the feminism community actually admitted to it? Fascinating. They do know their post lasted like two minutes, right? I was more impressed with Beehaw's moderation team acting so fast than I was with their quick shot.
Defederating both sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world was such an asinine decision that I honestly hope Beehaw just dies. They are doing a disservice to the entire lemmy community. They just siloed their users. They did not poll them for that decision. I hope most of their users leave them.
I would also be for removing Beehaw from join-lemmy.org. They are using lemmy software, indeed, but they are not really using the lemmy community, not the most of it at least. Someone who joins Beehaw may notice that the community is significantly smaller than they had hoped and go back to other alternatives, which is obviously a bad outcome. We need users.
That's a bummer. I get it (somewhat), but I'm not really fan of that type of gatekeeping by beehaw. On the positive side, it makes me really appreciate this instance/community and makes me want to interact more on here instead. So I'm looking forward to that.
I made an account here as a beehaw user and I'm glad that the two mod teams are in discussion. Servers have the right to cordon off their users, but I'd hate to miss out on the content. I feel mixed on the decision, as is represented by my dual accounts.
I know I'm kind of late to this party, but it seems to be a good time to take a moment to say, if no one else has, that there are apps out there like Jerboa, that allow you to keep track of multiple Lemmy accounts quite easily. :)
Better moderation tools are always welcome. I'm sure that is 90% of the problem, but it is just a software problem and it will be resolved.
I think there should be standards of moderation (simple things like average time to answer a report) that instances should have to adhere to in order to ensure the moderation:community ratio remains at a level to prevent the worst abuses.
Love this. There is absolutely no need to feel hate towards each other, I can definitely see both sides of the argument as valid concerns. Each instance has their own way of curating a community, but as long as the end goal is the same and communications are open, we all win. For now let's just focus on making this instance a better place to be, the day we all reunite as one will come eventually.
The Beehaw moderator just release an update that is interesting and very good-willed. But I'm confused. I had no problem commenting in Nature and Gardening which is on the Beehaw instance. I thought this wasn't possible as a sh.itjust.works user?
So I don't know what solutions you have discussed with the other instance admins, and I actually know little about how it all works currently, but I had a thought about this for the fediverse as a whole: the admins/moderators of a user's home instance should be moderating/responsible for that user's engagement with communities on other instances.
Right now if Person A creates Instance A and a community on that instance becomes really popular fediverse-wide, Person A is stuck in the lurch of dealing with all of the engagement from everywhere else in the fediverse. If Instance A has 10 users or 100000 users, they still have to deal with x-thousands of users from all over the fediverse. More than likely they'll just want to defederate, especially if they are small. At the same time, if Person B creates Instance B that invites trolls (on purpose or not) it seems that they have little say in what their own users do on Instance A's community. In fact, as you pointed out, Person B might not even know that a user from their instance is trolling Instance A.
Instead, if mods on Instance A take any action against the user on their instance, mods on the user's home instance (AKA Instance B) should immediately and automatically be notified. Then the moderators from Instance B will need to respond how they see fit with the user. If they don't see a problem, maybe they do nothing (e.g. the two instances have different philosophies.) But if they do see an issue, they then have the opportunity to respond in whatever way makes sense. Then, between the two instances, if the actions taken on either side seem appropriate, the two instances can continue to get along (i.e. federate). If they disagree in some way (maybe Instance B thinks Instance A is too draconian or maybe Instance A thinks Instance B is too lax) they can part ways (i.e. defederate).
As an extension to this, it could help Instance B from being a source of brigading. If they suddenly see a bunch of reports coming in from Instance A they would be able to take action on their own side to stop it, either through temporarily defederating or some other mechanism.
All in all the purpose would be to give both instances the chance to deal with the issues before defederating; hopefully alleviating some of the pressure off of Instance A, and giving Instance B the opportunity to show whether they should be trusted (or not) in general.
This could be taken a step further and their could be trusted and untrusted federations. Trusted federations work like normal and untrusted federations require mods from the user's home instance to moderate all engagement before it actually posts to the remote instance. This puts a burden on the home instance, but that's actually the point. If you're willing to grow to large numbers and federate widely, then you need to be willing to moderate your users' content, rather than imposing your users on everyone else (until they defederate.)
Edit to add: I should mention that I very much appreciate this instance and that I was able to easily create an account, and, I was disappointed by the defederation as it seems like the kind of thing that will kill Lemmy from scaling to something mainstream. I don't think that's what the creators of Lemmy want though, anyway.
I think flexible federation is likely a good thing, and means we can have separate meta-communities with different basic attitudes, so people can be in the kind of spaces they want. My first experience of the fediverse was mastodon, and while the format wasn't really my thing, I loved the amount of individual control it gave users over what they could see.
I wonder if there could be some kind of system to make this simpler, chunkier and less-drama, though.
What if there were:
different individual policies that instances could subscribe to
coalitions based on adoption of specific policy bundles, and allow-lists based on them.
coalition-curated deny-lists of non-compliant instances.
A little bit Schengen area, a little bit NATO.
Ferinstance I can see some instances only wanting to talk to others with curated signup, curated community-creation, no-NSFW, specific political leanings etc - and I can see some instances not wanting those things. Some people may want very safe spaces, others may want in-your-face free speech. Both are reasonable (imho), and there's no reason both sides can't have what they want, without it having to be a big deal.
Possibly this could be layered, I haven't worked out the mechanics yet - but even if you have groups around rules ABCDE, AB, ACE, BCD, etc - it would still help set and stabilise people's expectations, and help them reach consensus, preferably with a bigger granularity than single servers - and reduce the number of nasty surprises down the track.
I'm happy to see that the first 2 lemmy instances I've joined are run by nice people. Sometimes it feels like there's a shortage of nice, but not today.
I've made some suggestions on my Lemmy.ml alt in the original defederation announce thread. Taking a look at the API, it should be possible to make a bot that addresses at least some of the concerns.
I really get where they are coming from and it's an unfortunate aspect of things that when you try to be open it can allow for so many negative consequences. However I will say for my own part I tried signing up for beehaw initially and my application was never approved. I am not a bot or a toxic person so I still need a community even if beehaw won't accept my application for reasons I can't understand.
Just a quick idea I had, and this may have been suggested before and maybe be untenable. But... Could communities be made invite/approval only as well as instances?
For example, on beehaw they want to ensure that everyone posting to their communities have been vetted in some way. So could have all the communities not allow posts by who haven't agreed to beehaw's "content policy"? Either by naturally having an account on beehaw, or by submitting a request to a moderator of the community.
Would allow people on other instances to see and follow those posts (but not post themselves, unless they go through beehaw's approval process), and beehaw people to go and interact with other communities on other instances.
Hey @TheDude@sh.itjust.works! I think we may be on the same side of the fence with a lot of this. I just got my server online, but I'm self hosting with a couple old Dell R720xds and R730xds so I've got you matched in the hardware department at least :-)
Hopefully in this for the long haul and want to help collaborate with other communities and contribute to the development as much as I'm able.