hey folks, here's a quick update on our decision to defederate from sh.itjust.works! (and here's sh.itjust.works's side of this update)
we got in touch with the head admin over there, The Dude, and we had a pretty good chat about our concerns and reason for defederating. while immediate re-federation is just bluntly off the table with the rudimentary state of Lemmy's moderation tools, we now have a pretty good idea of the roadmap to refederating with them. we think we'll eventually be able to do this, although we don't have a timetable on when yet.
we're also now collaborating with him on how to move forward--and in the weeks and months to come we'll be pushing to expedite the process of developing some of the necessary tools. this decision has really helped us make connections that can hopefully realize those tools both on the desktop side and in apps being developed for Lemmy. we're also hoping to collaborate with other Lemmy administrators who have needs like our own, or just generally want more granular tools at their disposal.
we did also get in touch with the lemmy.world owner prior to defederating to share the concerns that prompted us to defederate[^1]--but we have not received any communication from him since it was levied, so there's no roadmap at all there as of now. we're always open to reconsidering and collaborating to end the defederation with him, but for now the earliest i can give you is "when mod tools are in a better state".
that's all for now folks. if any new significant developments take place we'll announce them as needed.
[^1]: we're only bringing this up now because it was just not useful information in the context of our announcement. it almost certainly would have been interpreted as some sort of callousness and/or brought unnecessary sectarianism and grief to him. at the end of the day he has his reasons and desires for running lemmy.world how he does, and we have ours for running Beehaw as we do. because of social and technological circumstances those are just incompatible right now, and that's fine.
Lol .. tried commenting from my lemmy.world account but duhh that's defederated..
This was my reply:
Hi there! Lemmy.world calling!
I read here that I’m unresponsive, but after a chat with one of your team, the last mesasge I got was:
"Sorry for the bad news especially after we’ve had such a good conversation but we have defederated. It was not an easy decision and I hope it doesn’t hurt our relations. It’s not personal, it’s just that our goals don’t work together, we wish it was possible to “limit” a la mastodon… I hope you understand "
I didn’t know that was a question… ;-)
I would very much like to get in touch with you, I have also been in touch with the sh.itjust.works admin. If there’s anything we could do to solve your concerns, let us know.
You can reach me on matrix @ruud:h-y-p-e-r.space or mail info@lemmy.world (But I’ll be asleep the next 8 hours hopefully, so I’ll be unresponsive)
I genuinely think Reddit lowered my expections of moderators so much over the years without me even realising, it's great to come to a place like this where everyone on both sides sounds reasonable and competent at what they're doing. Really excited to see how Lemmy and the Fediverse more generally develops.
The replies to the post by the sh.itjust.works admin are fascinating. Admin's post is calming, reasonable, minimises outrage and indicates ways forward which will improve the platform. Win win win, with some temporary inconvenience.
So of course others are forgetting all of that and inventing things to get upset about.
How do we (collectively) unlearn this habit? I learned by observing it in action and reading others' writing about it. Maybe someone will learn something from reading this. Tiny drop in the vast ocean but I don't know how to scale it. We need to figure it out though.
In my application I cited the decision to de-fed from them as why I chose to sign up for beehaw. I was looking through shitjustworks and was absolutely not liking how it seemed to be absorbing some of the worst "libertarianism and rationalism are my excuse to insult people" chuds.
I'll be interested to see whether their admins succeed in wrangling their 'hives'.
The comment section of sh.itjust.works is much more understanding of the issue at hand than those from lemmy.world. Crazy how opposite they are. They do showcase a prominent disagreement with the beehaw mods actions, but nonetheless remain respectful in their opinions. At least compared to lemmy.world which stance was basically "lol they shot themselves in the foot".
Reading this and the other admins replies has given me a proper little boost this morning. Thank you for the transparency, it won't always be good news like this but I value it anyway
And with this kind of cooperation and outreach, the Fediverse will be that much better! Thank you to all parties involved for communicating and working together!
While exploring kbin I've been checking out lemmy world a bit and there's a surprising level of toxicity towards beehaw going on. From a vocal minority of course but some have seem to have taken the degeneration as personal slight and some are just aggressive towards beehaw on a general term.
A lot of people seem to understand the reasons and even if they don't agree with it they're at least understanding.
The toxic minority is hard to grasp though.
Then again, I suppose the ones that caused the issues in the first place are among that group.
Related to the topic of defederation, I saw a post on kbin about an issue with an instance called exploding-heads.com being full of right wing troll types. Has the mod team investigated this instance? Would rather we be out ahead of it before they start coming over here to create issues.
Lemmy.world is free to ignore us, and we’re free to defederate from them. No corporate overlords are making the call. This is what the fediverse is all about. It’s not ideal, but few things are.
I appreciate the transparency especially the link to sh.itjust.works's update. As a newcomer, one thing that confuses me about the fediverse is how communities with different moderation policies can be federated together. My impression now is that a comment has to be moderated separately by each instance in which it appears, so either a larger number of moderators or more advanced moderation tools would be required compared to a similarly sized community in a centralized network. Hopefully you continue to have productive conversations with the other instances and these issues are eventually able to be resolved.
Thanks for the transparency. Is there no way to see a list of defederated instances? The one in the instances page includes mastodon instances which makes it hard to read, and also doesn't list the reason for defederation.
Thank you for the transparency! I definitely understand the original decision to defederate (especially looking at the troll's post, which was linked to in The Dude's side of things), but I also look forward to better, more granular moderation and administration controls to come out so that refederation can happen.
I would also like to give kudos to the admin team and users over at sh.itjust.works - there's some good discussion going on over there in the thread linked here. I love that, despite the fundamental difference in views on how an instance should be run, it seems to be respectful on the whole. Even the people that firmly disagree with Beehaw's vision essentially leave it at "I think it can be done better, and want to demonstrate how." I think that's perfect, and encapsulates the benefit that Lemmy has over centralized platforms. There is also no support for the troll that triggered this situation to begin with.
It's great how you're keeping us in the loop. I was really disappointed when I heard about the de-federation of specifically sh.itjust.works because it has some really good communities that I was missing from Reddit. I'm also really excited about the idea of different communities having different homes, but defederating too quickly can break that concept, and instead lead to only really having reliable access to communities on your local instance.
That's all to say this update has put my concerns to rest. I trust the admins on this site are doing their best to foster community with everyone possible, while also trying to keep the community here safe. I really appreciate the work you all are doing.
Hopefully you can link the Github issues created for the specific moderation tools you need, I'm excited to dig into the Lemmy codebase and hoping to contribute to the Beehaw community!
Honestly it'd be neat to have a local beehaw community for this dev related work, if one doesn't exist already
I appreciate the update and link. While it seems like most of the people on the thread there understand that it's early days and this is more a reflection of kinks in Lemmy that need to be worked out than Beehaw being unreasonable, the exceptions to that underscore to a larger extent than the original defederation action why it needed to be taken.
There's a lot of entitlement out there of the how-dare-people-who-put-in-time-and-money-into-a-passion-project-feel-they-have-the-right-to-any-level-of-control-over-said-project variety.
I remember reading a detailed post with a list of concrete mod tool improvement asks - things like the ability to filter the modlog to local only, or auto-report posts or comments containing certain keywords. Can anyone else find that? My searching is coming up empty. Maybe I dreamed it.
I'm curious what exactly you mean with "better modding tools". I am working on a iOS/Android app and I'm wondering if those are tools I could integrate into it.
Being here from kbin.social, none of this directly impacts me, but I am more than interested in seeing how this all plays out. This is a whole new dynamic, and getting to see how it develops is fascinating.
It seems to me that the whole point of a fediverse-based system is that different instances should defederate, if that serves the purposes and desires of the admins of a particular instance. I know that user accounts and their various configurations are currently locked to a single instance. (If you're from the Microsoft world, think of old NT4 domains where the PDC controlled everything, in comparison to Active Directory with multimastering.) At some point, tools will emerge to import/export your user configuration, making it easier to switch from one instance to another to suit your own personal needs better. And maybe a multimastering kind of thing can happen eventually, too, so you could take your ActivityPub-based account and log in with it to any instance.
at the end of the day he has his reasons and desires for running lemmy.world how he does, and we have ours for running Beehaw as we do. because of social and technological circumstances those are just incompatible right now, and that's fine.
Exactly. One is not better or worse than the other, they're just different, in some incompatible ways.
Thanks for the update. If any Github issues are brought up that would assist with getting the necessary moderation tools implemented be sure to broadcast them!
I feel like this is a healthy thing to do. We all want to enjoy the fediverse and being able to work with other admins where they may have been some problem users and create lasting working relationships towards a goal that would benefit everyone is a great next step for strengthening lemmy as a whole. Thanks for the update!