This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.
Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.
Two months on, I’m wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I’m just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?
From where I’m standing, I can’t really much has changed unfortunately… which really sucks…
Lemmy.world has grown substantially meanwhile the moderation tools have not improved at all. All I can say about the moderation tools is that we now know that the tools suck more than they used to.
Here’s a list of moderation problems that we have discovered since then:
- If a Berson is reported on another instance, we never get the report.
- If a mod is banned from the community they mod, they can still take mod actions
- If you get site-banned from Beehaw while you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from that instance and kbin can see your posts
- People from other instances can’t know who if someone is an admin on the instance they’re interacting with
- People from other instances can’t see when we use the shield function to signal we’re talking “officially / as a mod”
- The modlog is not chronological
- The modlog breaks if you ban someone for more than 4 digit days.
- A banned user’s description is still visible so if they link to a scat image in their description, it is still visible to moderators.
Despite these newly known problems, there have been exactly no improvement whatsoever to the moderation tools. It is honestly unsettling and terrifying.
I just finished writing a small book in a thread about federation on literature.cafe yesterday, the thrust of which is that moderation, not federation is the threadiverse’s killer feature, and when in doubt smaller instances shouldn’t federate with larger ones. This list makes a perfect post-script to my point. Do you mind if I steal it? I’m a big fan of what you’re doing here. I’d also love your feedback on my observations if you have time.
No, you are definitely right. There is a time and place for federation, it’s like a town deciding to incorporate with a larger region. If the town is too early in its infancy, the overall culture and debate will be drowned out by larger servers. But the risk of also not federating the town means that there is a chance of the community dying off. I’m thinking there should at least be a snaller period of considering the effects of opening up your server to the network, and consulting other instance admins about the idea.
JFC there are a lot of typos in your comment! No worries since most of it is discernible. I’m in agreement with all of these points regardless.
I think I corrected them - feel free to tell me more specifically if you still see some.
Berson
😁
Berson = Beehaw person.
TIL
Support. No one wants to hear about the negative stuff about their platform of choice, but it’s important to talk about it so it can improve.
If a mod is banned from the community they mod, they can still take mod actions
Why not remove them as mod? I don’t understand why you would keep anyone in the mod team that has been banned from the community?
If you get site-banned from Beehaw while you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from that instance and kbin can see your posts
Yes that is a problem with Lemmy in general. But why this only seen as a problem for people from Lemmy World and sh.itjust.works?
The modlog is not chronological
We fix this by having enough admins to go through these reports as soon as possible.
The modlog breaks if you ban someone for more than 4 digit days.
Why ban for 9999 days if you can leave it empty and perma-ban?
Anyway, I agreed that there are a lot of issues that haven’t improved, but at least I heard that users will be able to block instances themselves soon so fingers crossed. But Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works very early on and in the meantime they are federated with instances that are as big as Lemmy.World was back then.
Why not remove them as mod? I don’t understand why you would keep anyone in the mod team that has been banned from the community?
Oversight - that simple.
Yes that is a problem with Lemmy in general. But why this only seen as a problem for people from Lemmy World and sh.itjust.works?
That is not actually a problem with Lemmy in general - community bans do block posting unlike site bans. As for why, well, it was done at that point in time because Lemmy.World and Sh.it just.works took a lot of moderation time - for one reason or another, bad actors liked to go there. I have no reason to believe this has changed now that .World is now many times bigger than it was.
Why ban for 9999 days if you can leave it empty and perma-ban?
Oversight or malice. You can break the modlog of everyone you’re federated with because of this - that is dangerous.
But Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works very early on and in the meantime they are federated with instances that are as big as Lemmy.World was back then.
Size doesn’t necessarily mean problems though. I think it’s probably a culture problem as the root cause but I don’t think .World wants to tackle that problem so all I can do is wait for better tools.
I really don’t get the “oversight” part of keeping someone who is banned from a community on the moderator team there. Can you give me an example how this would make sense?
The modlog breaking XXXX amount of days bug was reported to the devs by me btw. And it was fixed on 12/08: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2058
It just feels like you are looking for excuses to keep defederated while there is no actual problem that can not be handled by working together as admins. We’ve always said we are open to discuss actions but you’ve always said when the “when modtools are available”. Now it’s a culture problem - how are Lemmy World users different from lemm.ee, midwest.social, programming.dev or other instances? And what do you propose should be done to tackle these issues?
I really don’t get the “oversight” part of keeping someone who is banned from a community on the moderator team there. Can you give me an example how this would make sense?
Oversight as in, “I would never think this would not work so I commited a mistake”.
We’ve always said we are open to discuss actions but you’ve always said when the “when modtools are available”.
And I stand by that.
And what do you propose should be done to tackle these issues?
I generally think that Lemmy.world’s focus on growth while being the biggest instance results in a bad site culture but I still think this problem can be tamed on our side with better mod tools.
Is it a problem of contributions (nobody made a PR adding those missing features so they don’t make it), technical challenge (those features would be hard to implement due to how Lemmy and federations work) or policy (whoever is maintaining of Lemmy does not want these features to happen)?
Some of these are likely not hard to fix but some of these are a bit more complicated like fixing the report system.
So it’d say it’s largely the former two though I’d like to mention that these issues appear to not be treated as critical problems by the main Lemmy developers so I believe this is also a policy problem.
Hi,
I’m speaking on behalf of the admin team of Lemmy World - we feel like we have to step in here and give some feedback to the things being said in this thread and give our perspective.
About “Supporting nazi’s”:
So we support nazi’s because it took us ‘long’ to defederate from exploding heads? That’s straight up false. We were one of the first instances to defederate with them and advocated heavily to have them defederated on other instances. FYI Lemmy World as a whole is just over 2 months old and so is this post: https://lemmy.world/post/747912
There was an issue early on with the original moderator of the Lemmy World https://lemmy.world/c/conservative community which was handled instantly:
- The problematic moderator https://lemmy.world/u/OptionHome that was posting misinformation (and worse) was banned
- The https://lemmy.world/c/conservative community was given to other moderators.
- We asked people to stop bombaring the /c/conservative community with anti-conservative posts as to allow civil discourse. https://lemmy.world/post/149519
- The https://lemmy.world/c/maga community was also banned
We take a hard stance on extremism from both sides of the political spectrum, and we believe that civil discourse should always be the first option. We ban hate communities on sight no matter whose side they are on, and we work hard to resolve the hundreds of reports we receive each day. As of today, 3733 users were banned from Lemmy.World, and that number will probably have gone up by the time you read this comment. We follow-up on moderation teams if we see reports that stay open for too long and if communities are abandoned we actively look to replace the moderation team.
So we ask everyone to keep sending in reports when you see any post that breaks the Lemmy World rules which can be found here: https://lemmy.world/legal.
About Beehaw’s decision to defederate with us: Even though we don’t agree with it, we have always been supportive of Beehaw and their choice to defederate with us until the mod tools improve. Even when the question gets posted in our community we defended the decision: https://lemmy.world/post/895811.
But wether or not Beehaw will refederate with us is ofcourse 100% your decision.
deleted by creator
I replied somewhere else in this thread but we - the admins of lemmy world - have always been supportive of the beehaw decision to wait until better tools come along for moderation. We went through a few growing pains with LW but I’m happy to see how far we have come already and we keep working to make things better. Our legal page with the rulesets is actively being maintained and defines what we stand for: https://lemmy.world/legal.
lemmy.world is just hot garbage imo
I’m on Lemmy.world every day and I’ve never seen any of that. I don’t doubt it exists, but it’s definitely not a problem on any of the communities I’m subscribed to.
deleted by creator
Lemmy.world feels the most Reddit-like in my experience. Beehaw felt… different even when I was browsing it from Lemmy.ca in April and the entire Lemmyverse as a whole had maybe a couple dozen posts a day. There were real neat and in-depth discussions by people who were capable of feeling and caring, and no propaganda spam that many instances had. We had a few bumps along the way but overall I’m still very happy about how things are.
deleted by creator
We handle our reports daily and urge our users to keep reporting anything that goes against our rules.
deleted by creator
…they seem to think they are the best instance and are better than everyone else…
So incredibly childish.
I trust the admins. I was attracted to beehaw specifically because of the tight moderation. If they think they can keep to the same high standards and refederate, great. If not, oh well. I’d rather miss out on some content than expose myself to rude assholes, bigots, fascists etc
deleted by creator
Completely agree! I trust the admins, they have proven that they know how to run a community that stays kind ❤️
I just moved from Kbin and I like it so much more @ Beehaw y’all ;)
I’m from kbin, here’s my perspective.
Stay defederated from lemmy.world. The admins are at the very least sympathetic towards fascists being on their instance as long as they’re “polite.”
Shit just works is mostly fine, but world is a shithole and honestly I wish everyone would defederate them to force them to be broken up or isolated.
Honestly I would suggest defederatibf from lemm.ee as well. I have noticed a ton of fascists originating from there.
Not sure what you mean by ton of fascists originating from lemm.ee, but please be sure to report users if you notice something weird, rather than trying to create random defederation in the fediverse.
I agree. I haven’t noticed anything from lemm.ee in my casual browsing.
Honestly I would suggest defederatibf from lemm.ee as well. I have noticed a ton of fascists originating from there.
Does Kbin show you what instances users are on? Recently lemm.ee has had a high quantity of users from another instance interact with their posts discussing defederation.
Personally I have not once seen a lemm.ee user fitting the description of “fascist”
Defederation should only ever be used as a last resort. Every instance will have some amount of problematic users, or even users you simply don’t agree with.
If we’d all defederate from one another because some users on each instance are out of line, the Fediverse would die out quickly.
I’ve recently made a blog post about this subject if you’d like to read it : https://lionir.ca/posts/open-limitless-federation/
That said, defederation is a tool like any to build site culture and moderate spaces. If the only thing we can have are awful spaces because we should not curate our own community, we’d be better off not federating at all. Thankfully, most admins understand this and do take actions when necessary.
The main problem I personally have with defederation is that it can make it very difficult to discover and participate in already niche communities.
Sure, being open to everyone comes with its problems. But a large user base that’s able to connect with each other is essential to these niche communities. Let’s say I had an interest in Virtual Boy homebrew development. Say someone created a community for this on lemmy.world, I would obviously want to join this one instead of creating my own, because we’d likely already only be a handful of people. Now a lot of instances start defederating from lemmy.world for whatever reason(s) (and sure, there are likely good reasons to do so). This would likely completely kill such a niche community. Sure, you could try and coordinate moving the community to a different instance, but finding an instance that isn’t defederated from any of each users’ home instances will be hard if defederation becomes so commonplace. Users could also all create an account on that new instance, but most users probably don’t want to create dozens of accounts because each of their communities happens to be on a different instance.
I already created accounts on multiple instances because the instance I was using either defededated from communities I wanted to interact with, or other instances with communities I wanted to interact with defederated with my home instance. I don’t even care about my accounts as such (content history, upvote count or whatever), and transferring subscribed communities (and saved posts/comments) is done with a simple script within minutes or even seconds, but having to find a new instance every few weeks because instances start defederating from one another can be cumbersome (and again, it will eventually lead to shrunk niche communities).
If I see a user or community that I don’t want to interact with, I simply block it and move on.
I agree, this is kinda hurting the fediverse.
I came here because I happened to see a post on lemmynsfw (coming from lemmy.world through federation) about Threads, and I was looking to reply from beehaw (because replying with a lemmynsfw account gives a certain “flair” of course) so I was looking for that post here. But I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then I started looking into the reason here. Then I found this post which explained it.
But I think it’s important to realise that this way the fediverse will stay very niche and fragmented. It would be better to let the users have a choice who they want to see. And defederate only in very heavy situations (for example, nobody would expect beehaw to federate with gab.com because they support actual total nazis). But blocking lemmy.world as one of the biggest instances is… strange.
The thing is, I came here as a new user because spez makes reddit so inhospitable with his dick moves. So I went to https://join-lemmy.org/ and found beehaw. (well in fact I went to lemmy.ml first but didn’t like the attitude there). But join-lemmy doesn’t describe this whole complex fabric of defederation, it appears as if I could see the whole fediverse from beehaw. Because lemmy.world is a really major instance this is a little bit disingenous. For a new user like me (and a very technical one) this is really hard to grasp. And will lead to users being put off.
I think this whole fragmentation thing is a much bigger threat to the fediverse than Threads is to be honest.
I saw the same on Mastodon, with a lot of German sites instantly blocking federation as soon as another instance doesn’t copy exactly the same set of rules word for word (so no incidents are even necessary). In my opinion this hurts the fediverse a lot. As a user I don’t want to maintain accounts everywhere, the whole point of ActivityPub was not having to do that.
And don’t forget that not all communities on lemmy.world might necessarily bad. Reddit itself is full of toxic communities like the old the_donald (now banned of course). But also really good ones. The same is true for lemmy.world. By by defederating we’re blocking the chance of even seeing them.
Defederation should only ever be used as a last resort.
That depends on the, particular, situation. Using words like ‘should’, in your estimation here, shows that you’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. You haven’t carefully thought through all of the possible scenarios.
thank you for your take! being here on beehaw (and being relatively new to lemmy in general), i have not had a ton of interactions with either of these instances. This came up for me because there are well-populated communities in those spaces that i want to subscribe to. That said, if World is that rife with fascists, then it is obviously not worth the gain in communities.
I have an account on world, and I’ve not come across any fascist stuff. Then again, I’ve blocked several communities like politics, where such people may tend to congregate.
Personally, I treat Beehaw as a standalone community. I do not really see the point of Beehaw federating with others, when the rules, and feel of the community, is so different.
I prefer using a Beehaw account for Beehaw, even gave it a yellow colored theme so it’s clear that I’m browsing Beehaw, and know that it’s “safe” browsing Local/New.
I appreciate your take! For me, I don’t really want to make multiple accounts for Lemmy, even if that seems to be a common way to use it. I like the size of beehaw - it keeps me away from the “endless feed” nature of Reddit.
even gave it a yellow colored theme so it’s clear that I’m browsing Beehaw
I did the same but I only browse “local” on it since I can access the rest of the fediverse from my other account and I don’t want to accidentally double dip.
I value the principled approach and slower pace, the low tolerance for stirring. Moderation has such a huge effect on feel and the big ones never did enough to try to build healthy communities. Beehaw has mostly taken the sting out and I’d hate to see that lost.
I feel torn on the issue. I spend 90% of my Lemmy time on here, but the growth feels much slower than many other communities. I’m mostly ok with that. Content is pretty good, but still not much chatter on many posts. I mainly go there to post to !superbowl, but even with 10x the users as here I only just started getting decent up votes, and I don’t want to mod, so I don’t feel like starting it here and trying to build an audience again.
Lemmy is probably still going to be finding its legs for another year or 2, so keeping multiple logins is probably the best way to roll for now.
The amount of moderation actions from those instances were a lot higher than from elsewhere, specifically lemmy.world. With how lemmy.world is now after browsing it for ~5 mins I can confidently say that that would be the case again if we were to refederate
Yes it is. Yes it is.
If you really interact with the lemmy community you know they are very pro “freeze peach”, which means it comes with all the fascists, all the phobias, and the trolls.
I like Beehaw for what it is. Tight moderation.
Lemmy World is not a “free speech” platform.
Point 1 in the “Principles that Guide Us” section: https://lemmy.world/legal
My understanding is admins of some of those communities actually agreed with the decision because of the lack of proper moderation tools to handle their new scale. Some are basically un-moderated as well.
Speaking for Lemmy World - we look for new moderators when we notice communities are un-moderated. We follow the reports closely and if we notice they aren’t picked up by that community’s moderators we reach out.
And yes, we were also told initially that it was because of a lack of moderation tools but now @Lionir@beehaw.org seems indicate a “cultural” difference. But we are left wondering what the difference with LW and the other instances they federate with are.
And yes, we were also told initially that it was because of a lack of moderation tools but now @Lionir@beehaw.org seems indicate a “cultural” difference. But we are left wondering what the difference with LW and the other instances they federate with are.
Yes, there are differences in site culture between Beehaw and Lemmy.world that make the need for moderation higher.
Having accounts on both instances, I can say the “cultural” difference is the moderation style, and user expectations:
- Lemmy World: Reddit-like rules, a huge influx of Reddit refugees who think every comment has to go against the parent one, free registration which makes it easy to create an account and go troll mode on federated instances.
- Beehaw: Very open-ended but at the same time strict “be nice” moderation with minimal rules, users who had to “write an essay” (sic) to create an account, a general non-Reddit culture of… well, being nice.
- Lemmygrad, Hexbear, Exploding heads, etc: I think the cultural differences are obvious there.
- Other instances: they have much smaller user bases than Lemmy World, so even when there are cultural differences (dbzer0, lemm.ee, etc), they are not overwhelming (yet) the mod team on Beehaw.
The problem is not just having moderators on LW, but moderating LW’s userbase on federated instances. Some number of LW’s users seem to be hostile towards Beehaw, and there is little LW can do about that other than banning their accounts, which I don’t think would be that much better for anyone.
I can only say that I spend less time on beehaw because there are communities on both of those instances I want to interact with. This isn’t really an argument to refederate because as an end user I can filter the noise and focus on the communities I want, but I know admins don’t have that luxury. It’s more of an impact statement. I like beehaw, and I don’t want to leave, but I do probably spend more time with my other account just because there’s more activity I’m interested in there. So I fully support whatever decision gets made and certainly support this community, but I can’t be the only user whos spending less time here than I otherwise might.
I genuinely recommend against re-federation for Beehaw.
My unique take and experience from lemmy.one is simply the number of users who simply seek to stir the pot.
My blocklist is full of people from lemm.ee and sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world as well as lemmy.ca . When I compare the number of blocks to the number I’ve blocked from beehaw or even my own instance; a paltry one or two; I’m only ever seeing trolls or idealogues coming from those instances to argue with my posts no matter how well reasoned they may be. For context; if I tell someone they are absolutely wrong and they persist; they automatically meet my block list. I won’t suffer people who aren’t going to discuss things civilly or rationally.
Blocking someone because they don’t agree with you telling them they are “absolutely wrong” isn’t civil or rational discourse. Unless you meant something different?
Blocking someone because they don’t agree with you telling them they are “absolutely wrong” isn’t civil or rational discourse
Who says that is the objective of blocking and why should I extend that courtesy to people who are behaving neither civilly nor rationally?
If I go to a bar and someone next to me keeps chiming in on my conversations with homophobic takes, I’m going to pick up my beer and move away from them (block them). What moral imperative do I have to give them the time of day, and how does letting them constantly shoehorn bigotry into my discussions undermine “civil and rational discourse”? If that person keeps doing this to people, is the bar owner required to allow them to stay, or can they show them the door?
Calls for civility, free speech arguments, etc. are all cudgels used by people who want to go where they want and say what they want without scrutiny and I for one have no desire to adhere to some arbitrary moral standard imposed on me by people who want to behave that way. If you want to behave like an ass and pursue me, then I’m cutting you out of my life. No one would blame me at a bar, why should they on my favorite gaming forums?
As one of the Bar owners of Lemmy World, we show anyone with homophobic takes the door.
I would like to note that sh.itjust.works hasn’t hasn’t had unverified sign ups enabled for a while now. I have an account there too so it really doesn’t make much of a difference to me but I would like an updated stance from the admins here. The initial concerns they voiced don’t seem as relevant as they once were.
As for lemmy.world, it’s the biggest, and issues can arise from that, so that makes more sense to me.
My takeaway from this thread is that it makes sense to keep lemmy.world off the rolls, but maybe sh.itjust.works is safe to refederate? I just want to join their Patient Gamers community 😭
I think so. sh.itjust.works is no where near as big. And the admin there has always been very responsive and transparent whenever I had concerns. The patient gamers community is also very friendly.
Yes Lemmy World is the biggest but we take our reports serious and have teams working hard to keep it a friendly space. Again, keep reporting the posts that go against the site or community rules.
Stay defederated. On top of all the great points already made, I don’t understand people demanding instances behave a certain way. If you don’t like the way this instance is handled go find another one. People are just so whiny.
Here are my two cents as an outsider looking in. I spend ~15-30 mins a day on Lemmy (usually while doing other things), so I see a decent amount of content but I am not at the leading edge of posts. When I look at posts, I rarely, if ever see spam. For the most part there is civil conversations and those that attempt to derail them are downvoted and, in some cases, banned.
Does this mean that moderation isn’t a problem? No, I am but one user. However, it does indicate it is not a chronic issue. Personally I would like to see you guys refederate, as that could only increase the quality of discussions throughout the fediverse.
See I have the exact opposite experience outside of beehaw and a few key communities I browse on Kbin.
Does this mean that moderation isn’t a problem? No, I am but one user. However, it does indicate it is not a chronic issue.
This is contradictory. You are admitting your experience is anecdotal yet also saying it clearly shows there isn’t a problem.
