Seems like beehaw is doing everything they can to isolate themselves from the community. They seem to have good intentions but they are way too uptight.
Beehaw has good intentions, but I don’t know if those intentions are entirely compatible with the fundamental architecture of Lemmy.
They literally are because being able to defederate is part of the fundamental architecture of fediverse apps. And defederating from instances that are putting the kind of content into your community that you don’t want is… like, that ability is one of the core selling points of fediverse apps.
Yes, but in their post they wrote about how the large influx of users from other instances made their specific goals too hard to accomplish.
It wasn’t a philosophical difference with lemmy.world, which is a case that federation would have worked well with, it was simply that there were enough new users that they couldn’t maintain the tighter moderation that they want. And that’s fine, they have the right to administer their instance however they’d like, but if they are having trouble with new users from lemmy.world then they’re going to have trouble with any federation with enough cumulative users.
From a purely operational standpoint, rapid growth stresses a network service not only in its technical capacity, but also in the ability of the service’s operators to keep up with fighting fires. Engineering capacity to work on a service is itself a limiting factor on healthy growth.
If the tools aren’t yet there to mitigate a rapid growth in abuse problems, then it just makes sense for them to limit their exposure to the rapid-growth part of the network. It takes time to write those tools.
The main issue with an instance such as lemmy.world is that they don’t vet people at all. Beehawk manually approves their users, but that becomes kinda pointless when anyone can just create an account on lemmy.world and then go post on beehawk.
Writing a paragraph about why you want to join isn’t necessarily a great vetting process though
Yeah, but then is Beehaw just going to defederate with every instance that has open registration or limited vetting, past a certain user threshold?
That includes lots of instances. Kbin.social has open registration and is growing, for example.
At that point, is a federated social network really what served their goals?
I disagree with that assessment, and it doesn’t match with what they said in the post. 4 bullets justified the decision, all of which outlined philosophical differences to my eyes.
It’s true that in the future, they may have sufficient mod tools/capacity to overcome these philosophical differences with brute force. But at minimum, it is a union of both practical ability and philosophical differences that led to this decision and that is totally in line with the decentralized nature of the fediverse.
I don’t know if it was the right decision for them. Time will tell. But being able to make those decisions on their own judgment is crucial to the longterm health of the system. We’re two outsiders to Beehaw. I can’t speak for you, but personally, I chose not to register at Beehaw because I didn’t like the sound of a more curated safe space. I also chose not to register at Lemmy.world, because there are things about it that rubbed me the wrong way, too. That’s a crucial part of how the fediverse is supposed to work.
What about lemmy.world rubbed you the wrong way?
Hard to say since it’s totally subjective. I’m not in love with Lemmy as an ActivityPub service to start with. Devs have enough closet skeletons and the UX just seemed… not my style. Lemmy World, at least from the join list, had zero personality. It also expanded incredibly quickly, to the point that I truly am skeptical any kind of local moderation is going to be possible for a while. I have a feeling I am going to have to start filtering content from it myself – my front page is being absolutely assblasted with porn, stupid memes, and low-effort posts all coming in from LW already.
Long term? Probably not a big deal. But in these early days, it is a turnoff. LW is a firehose right now, and the mod tools available are not yet up to that task.
None of these issues are fundamental. They stem from poor planning from the mod team. You cannot moderate all of the largest communities with four mods for ALL communities.
Less than an hour ago, I was reporting some pretty vile shit that was being spammed on some of their places I was subscribed to. It was a lot, all at the exact same time. If they are getting coordinated attacks like that regularly, I’m not sure I can really blame them for wanting to wait for the tools they need to keep it in check.
I saw the same thing, lots of slurs being thrown around. I blocked the individual users. I’m not on either instance so I can still see both
The stuff I saw was worse than just slurs. One was a meme about murdering drag performers. Really hateful shit.
Have these instances blocked the known shit lists yet? There are some well known block lists on mastodon that every admin should have here
Lemmy and Kbin should ship with these nazi block lists built in
they are way too uptight.
I don’t get why people have such a hard time seeing how hard effective moderation of 100’000s of people is… The people running lemmy aren’t companies or businesses, they are hobbyists… They do all the administration and moderation in their spare time… Taking care of the server cost is one thing, but moderation is no joke… Especially when the tools provided are also build by hobbyists who have been building this in their spare time as well…
And it’s better to act when you notice that you cannot effectively moderate when things are relatively harmless… Because what happens when trolls notice that they cannot moderate effectively and actually post harmful content, like threats, cp, etc?
*> *- -
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25114
Called this becoming an issue on my first day here. Beehaw seems like a very sensitive group of people. Which is fine but just means we need to restart some of the popular communities they had on more open-minded servers.
I feel that I should also mention that I understand and respect the rationale given by the beehaw admins for defederation. I think they made the correct decision for their community. Just kinda sucks for us.
Well I’ll take this opportunity to invite everyone over to The Garden : a bed for gardeners and everyone else to grow their roots and thrive. We have open registration and community creation.
Gotta say this being one of my first impressions of lemmy… Its not great. Beehaw had a large tech and gaming section that I literally only just subbed too.
Welcome to human nature.
It’s easy to look at Reddit or any other communities and pin the blame all the bad things on mods, admins, or whoever in charge. However, the truth is, anyone who gets in any position of power will make decisions that may not benefit the larger whole or reflect the community at large. Lemmy will deal with this, just as Reddit dealt with it (and succeeded in spite of it).
Yea I mean I get it. It just sucks that this is the first real experience I am having with this system. Would have been nice to get a little more experience under my feet before having to deal with this. I suppose this should be expected. Lemmy is likely experiencing some extreme growing pains unlike anything it has seen before.
I totally understand that while this is an annoyance at the end of the day this is likely still a more desirable outcome then what is happening with Reddit. At least here that set of admins can only do so much damage to the overall system while the Reddit admins have total control over the whole system.
This seems to be new frontier for a lot of users. Lemmy is like Reddit in a lot of ways but so much different in so many more ways. As new users, we’re pretty much guinea pigs (or lemmings, I guess) and I imagine there’s going to be a lot of this in the weeks to come.
Would have been nice to get a little more experience under my feet before having to deal with this
This is experience! If Lemmy works out, we’ll be able to say we helped pave the way!
Hmm.
Consider that Beehaw is more comparable to a major subreddit already. Lets say /r/wsb was having issues with new trolling users and they decide to go private for a week to preserve their culture (and have done in the past before).
Now instead of “just” one subreddit making that decision, the entire alignment of Beehaw (including all their communities) made a decision in one fell swoop.
No matter how you look at it, this is better for the Beehaw community already than what we’ve had in Reddit. And yeah, it sucks for us here in lemmy.world to not talk with Beehaw and for those users to not talk with us for now, but like /r/wsb, there’s no reason why this has to be a permanent defederation. They can refederate after this “Reddit Boom” and when traffic slows down maybe a week or two from now and their moderators/admins can keep up with the new influx of users.
From the perspective of “What Lemmy-software needs to do”, perhaps a “super-moderator”, below Admin but above moderator who has access to user-bans and/or user-vetting is what’s needed for this community. That way, Beehaw and Lemmy.world can re-federate, Beehaw can appoint community leaders who can perform user-vetting (Gmail-like invitations), but Beehaw admins remain the admins. And they get to have tight control over poorly-behaving users from other instances (ie: blocking them out entirely until they’re vetted or invited in).
Isn’t that a bit entitled? Reddit was a company who made money with their users, but Lemmy isn’t run by a company, it’s run by volunteers. Running a small server is one thing, but who is going to moderate content from 100’000s of users, content generated by an instance that doesn’t even have any basic restrictions on it’s userbase? What if a large group of people start spamming illegal shit? What if there is suddenly cp showing up on your server instance? Who is going to deal with that, what are the legal implications for that?
One might assume they quit their server, but they didn’t… They just temporarily disabled federation because they feel that they don’t have the capabilities to moderate that many users… You can still apply for a local account on their instance, you can still browse their content without an account…
EDIT: You can even still browse content from beehawk and comment on it, but comments made from lemmy.world will not be visible by beehawk.
Excuse me? I support the beehawk admin’s decisions, it’s a very sensible decision that I suspect other instances will have to seriously consider soon as well because moderation will be an important issue very soon.
My point is that the commenter I replied to and many users who are complaining about this decision, about how “it splits the community in two” and about how “this is classic reddit behaviour” are acting a bit entitled as they don’t seem to be aware of the immense problems that come with moderation, especially when you do it as a hobby…
The nature of federated platforms is that every so often one of the instances decides it wants to take its ball and go home, and all of its members either return to centralized platforms or join up with other instances.
Interested to see what they mean by bad behavior? Also, what a terrible, dumb decision. Beehaw always seemed like it was ran by uptight former big subreddit mods.
This is the downside of federated sites like this. While one person can’t take the whole thing down, there’s lots of small groups that can do stuff like this. Beehaw has dome of the biggest communities, and a small group just shut them down for a lot of people. And you can’t sign up to their community, without a completely opaque sign up process that barely works.
They lay it out very clearly in their long-winded “philosophy of beehaw” post (which you must read prior to application): anyone being a jerk because of bigotry or because the people in charge don’t like them or are having a bad day or feel like exercising their power or they are not sufficiently singing along.
They lay it out very clearly in their long-winded “philosophy of beehaw” post (which you must read prior to application): anyone being a jerk because of bigotry or because the people in charge don’t like them or are having a bad day or feel like exercising their power or they are not sufficiently singing along.
That… didn’t last long. It’s a shame as a lot of the communities I subscribe to are there, but I don’t have an interest in joining a restrictive instance like theirs. This really highlights the fragility of these self-hosted instances and the platform in general.
As they mentioned their decision is effective immediately and it looks like their users can’t interact with the defederated ones but the instances that federate with them can interact there. Isn’t this just a win-win for everybody?
I think this is going to produce some interesting results, which will likely help progress Lemmy as a whole.
One of the regular topics coming up is users not knowing which instance they should create a user on, and what the implications of being a user on a particular instance are. This change by the Beehaw is going to clarify some of the implications and help drive people towards one instance or another, or even to have multiple accounts on different instances.
I think this will increase the adoption of Beehaw for users that the Beehaw admins are looking for in their community, which benefits the Beehaw instance. Conversely, I think the more general communities on Beehaw that aren’t there specifically for the community Beehaw is trying to foster will likely migrate to the equivalent communities on other instances and settle there. While Beehaw was popular and federated it made sense to subscribe to technology@beehaw.org, but now it’s defederated I’d expect an equivalent community on a more permissive and widely federated instance to gain traction.
Right now it feels pretty disruptive. Arguably this occurring now with a relatively small number of users (thousands rather than millions) affected is preferable and will help shake out these issues, which will make it smoother for future users.
It will help Lemmy become more resilient. The tooling to help manage an instance defederating is also likely to be useful for instances going offline, or otherwise disconnecting from the fediverse. Better that that tooling is in place early.
Arguably this occurring now with a relatively small number of users (thousands rather than millions) affected is preferable and will help shake out these issues, which will make it smoother for future users.
I disagree, lemmy is seeing a temporary boost from all of us reddit refugees. We need content and a welcoming community for everyone to stay. This sort of infighting and politicking is going to come across as toxic and exactly the sort of thing redditors wanted to get away from.
If it were done later when the fediverse is bigger and more stable with enough critical mass of content, separating will affect more users but it will be least disruptive to the fediverse as a whole.
I can see your point and do agree that it’s disruptive now. It also exacerbates the difficulty of learning a new platform. Despite that though I think the early adopters are best equipped to cope with that. They’re already dealing with rough tooling and little documentation, official or social.
In terms of it happening when Lemmy, or even the fediverse as a whole, is bigger, if there aren’t tools and practices in place to manage it I think the impact would be significantly more detrimental. Without it happening in ‘the early days’ those tools and practices are a lot less likely to be developed.
We need content and a welcoming community for everyone to stay.
I think that idea is exactly what both Beehaw and lemmy.world are trying to do. I don’t know all the thinking of the instance admins, but from my observations I see Beehaw prioritising their community and lemmy.world prioritising federation and availability. I don’t see it as ‘infighting and politicking’, just co-existing view points for managing instances. To put it in terms of popular monolithic platforms, I’d imagine there would be a bit of a shakedown if 4chan, reddit, slashdot, digg, et al. started federating. I’ll not attempt to draw parallels between lemmy instances and other platforms, that’s above my pay grade :)
I imagine we’ll end up with a spectrum of instances with varying degrees of federation and permisiveness, and that the directory services that are popping up will continue to improve to help you find and instance that works for you.
I think one of the challenges with migration is that reddit doesn’t map one-to-one with Lemmy. With a monolithic platform, centralised admin can enforce the types of things I think your hoping for. On Lemmy I think inter-instance differences are inevitable, while on reddit the concepts didn’t exist for it to become possible. Working through how those are handled will result in Lemmy as a whole improving.
I’m pretty optimistic about it.
As a redditor it seems like scary infighting
As a lemmonereringer it seems intriguing, im interested where this goes and i will follow up on the development
As a drun,k im drunk👍
“subreddit drama” on steroids. The politics of federation might take substantial airtime in lemmy
Sounds like you had a fun evening!
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I know we can have multiple accounts (and I am sure apps will help the experience), but I almost signed up for Beehaw as it was big and chose here
I am glad I didn’t sign up and will probably unsubscribe to anything I was subbed to there as I can’t post, maybe I’ll signup so I can just in case there’s anything interesting…
I think it’ll take a little while to settle down, but I’d expect the communities to congregate on more permissive, well federated servers. In the short term I’m doing similar to you what you proposed, e.g. having accounts on various servers, but I expect the need for this to go away as things settle down. I already focus on a couple of instances more than others.
I do think that less permissive instances will still thrive though, although maybe not so much for general content. That may change as more granular controls and better tools emerge so it’s less of an ‘all or nothing’ approach to federating.
I was thinking about the multiple accounts thing. Maybe the concept of an “instance” needs to be separate from the concept of an account? Like, it doesn’t matter what service you choose for your email account; you can email anyone from Gmail, and anyone can send email to you. The only real difference is that your email address end in “@gmail.com” instead of “@comcast.net”.
On Lemmy, though, the place you make your account matters a whole lot. It determines what content you’re allowed to see, and who you’re allowed to interact with. If the instance you’re on gets federated, you need to migrate to a different account on a different instance. That never happens with email!
A lot of users have been managing this by creating their own instance, with the sole purpose of hosting their account and nothing else. Maybe that’s what we need: a set of “instances” that only host accounts, and a set of “instances” that only host communities. You could then use that account to subscribe to communities from any instance. That way, Beehaw could block content from instances they don’t like, without cutting off all of the users who happened to choose the wrong place to sign up.
Actually, under that system, there wouldn’t be a need for instances to federate content with each other at all. Users could just subscribe to communities with their account, and then the users would be the ones in charge of what they see, instead of their instance choosing for them.
That’s pretty big. I wasn’t a huge fan of everything they were doing, though. From all the communities I saw from Beehaw, they were all generic, cookie cutter ones that seemed to be trying to fill the default subs from Reddit. Gaming, Politics, Space, etc. All simple ones with the same icons and everything. I assume they were all ran by the same group of people, which loses the community feel I appreciate about most other instances.
The thing that makes this notable is that those beehaw communities were the largest and therefore defacto defaults.
Yeah, I do appreciate what they were trying, but making communities with the purpose of being popular default ones and then giving up as soon as the site starts to grow is not great.
I assume they were all ran by the same group of people
Yup, that’s correct. Beehaw’s 4 admins run every communty on there
I haven’t seen anything suspect coming from either of those instances yet; quite the opposite.
This is surprising, but oh well. We can rebuild, we have the technology.
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My problem is they had the technology. We gotta build a new technology now.
So just like that a bunch of communities I’m subscribed to are gone? I guess I could make another account on beehaw but this is quickly becoming more trouble than it’s worth. I’ve broken my Reddit addiction. Maybe it’s time to leave lemmy before I get attached.
None of this even existed just a few weeks ago. You’re very easily discouraged.
Problem: I guess I should give up.
Very promising behavior.
@johndroid Lemmy and the fedeverse isn’t for everyone. If your used to getting told what to do by corporations go back to Twitter/Reddit and they will sensor you and sell your activity/Data if you wanna stay free stick with lemmy and Mastodon
It’s not about getting told what to do or having your data sold, it’s about a friction-free social media experience. It depends on what the aims of the platform are and what the desires of potential users are. Personally, I’d imagine most users want something simple and easy, where they don’t have to think about what and where and how to post. But if the intent of the platform is to make that harder, then that’s fine, it’ll just result in fewer users and less content/activity.
@ppptan @johndroid Reddit and lemmy are hard when you first start l. Eventually you will get muscle memory and it will become second nature. I think people that are on Lemmy and Mastodon are there to escape oppression from the man (Corporate) They all provide a service but people want freedom. Nobody can’t stop you from using Reddit. We just know that the CEO is there for the bottom dollar no matter who gets in the way.
Mod heavy people always talk about this supposedly huge influx of trolls, toxicity, spam that they have to moderate, but I just don’t see it. I’m not sure that I have seen even a single post that obviously needed to be moderated this week. Maybe I’m just not looking in the right communities?
There are a few other commenters on this post that mention seeing mass spamming of slurs and a meme about killing drag performers. I see no reason to doubt the explanation given by the mods. Of course trolls would target beehaw, because that community made such a big deal of being nice and positive. It’s just a shitty situation all around.
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i think they’re anticipating it.
also, there’s a false accusation there. i had to register my email with lemmy world
The modlog is public at /modlog/ on the server if you’re interested enough to review it.
approx 25% of the banned posts are deserved
this sucks, specially as someone that was ghosted (assume denied) on beehaw signup, I’m glad that instances such as lemmy.world exist where I have the chance to post before assuming I’m an undesirable.
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Same here. But I found sdf which seems super cool. Maybe I’ll actually learn more than five vim commands now
@plumbercraic @lemmyworld But can you exit vim? That’s the real question😁
Sure thing - ctrl a, c, PS l grep vim, kill - 9 pid
Or something 🙃
[esc]: !sudo kill -9 $(pgrep vim)
Huh. Didnt know about pgrep
You just summed up my last 30 years of Linux. To be completely honest I knew vaguely of it but I’ve never used it before. My first inclination was to use killall, but something about its force command isn’t quite -9 and it refused to terminate the parent application.
I see several comments talking about this being a wrong decision, or Beehaw needing to change its attitude etc. I think these opinions come from a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of federation. Federation is not about all the instances coming together to cater to our needs. It’s about each instance doing its own thing, and communities will form around the ones that cater to them. In other words, we don’t need Beehaw to budge on its decision, we need to build the community we want without Beehaw, while Beehaw caters to the users who aren’t in this with us.
As long as beehaw is only de-linking these instances rather than actually blocking them, doesn’t that still allow them to pull new posts and comments from beehaw? It’s like the no-participation mode that r/bestof uses.
Federation works in the opposite direction. It’s push-based rather than pull-based. To get posts from Beehaw, Beehaw has to actively push those posts to your instance. With this move, Beehaw is choosing to no longer push posts to lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
It’s weird they are touting their sign up process.
I tried to sign up on Beehaw multiple times on multiple days and could never complete the process despite manually typing out answers to their inane questions several times. Some of the times it would just time out. When it would go through, I’d never get a response on my account.
So I ended up on lemmy.world.
And let’s be honest, it’s not like ChatGPT couldn’t generate responses to those questions. In a certain sense, maybe them self-quarentining is a good thing for this and other reasons. I guess that’s also part of the point of federation vs a single entity in control of everything.
that was me trying to get on lemmy.ln. someone recommended lemmy.world.
ah, this issue again. well, back to reddi… or not. :( bellow this is harsh opinion, sorry
spoiler
I think some people is just too sensitive to be on open social media that it is better that they don’t participate on it at all. And any instance that catering to that kind of people should explain it better on homepage and shouldn’t federate with other instance from the start so that many open-minded people doesnt end up creating community/magazine there.
Just want to vent , sorry if this rubs some people in the wrong way.
I think you’re 100% right.
I think Beehaw is being pretty honest about not wanting to be a purely open social media experience. There’s a place for that, for sure.
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