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.
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. ↩︎
In my application here 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” types from reddit.
I’ll be interested to see whether their admins succeed in wrangling their ‘hives’.
This is in the nature of the domain name. If you name your site “shit just works” you can’t be surprised if you build a bubble for idiots in the first wave of registrations.
I’m not bashing on the site or their Admins.i say that out of own experience over the last 25+ years on the internet and some exp in hosting forums and all that myself.
Fun fact. Your take just made me sign up there too.
I actually seek different perspectives and don’t quite agree with any particular place that is very “ideologically packeted” like most tend to. Where “they insult” and “we don’t, because if they feel insulted is because of Reality and how right we are”.
I’m new to all this fediverse and I’m curious to see how different niche interests develop and if we can actually form the usefulness that Reddit threads could have or if it’s a unique and different usefulness…
Sometimes I wanna see what everyone else sees. That’s why I also have an account on another instance. But sometimes I don’t want the risk of seeing people question my right to exist (how often on reddit do I come across someone who’s “just asking questions”). That’s why I’m here. So glad reddit is dead now bc we’re all here instead.
I’d word it as, you don’t want the risk of other people writing a specific opinion on a specific topic that you don’t agree with.
Because the whole “right to exist” thing is very relative and dependent on framing.
It’s very common that criticism of X is taken as “you are -ism” or if you’re not voting exactly how I tell you to then you are denying my rights to exist. There’s lot of nuance In conversations of “where does my rights end and yours start” but the typical thing I see is “I want there to be no discussion about this, only axiom A”.
Reddit is not dead, only time will tell what happens with but I’d say Reddit is pretty much like what you talk about, with some slight variations on niche places.
There have been open calls to “eradicate transgenderism”, along with a nearly endless amount of anti-trans legislation in many parts of the world. Their rhetoric frequently borders on genocidal. It is 100% about our right to exist.
We’re not some hypothetical to have a pleasant debate over tea about, we are real people with real lives being directly harmed by real policy. Some of us are tired of being nice about it.
There’s a difference between having an opinion I don’t agree with and comparing being trans to “wanting to be peppa pig”. And then when I rightfully get offended and angry they lose their fucking minds bc I dared insult them. It’s happened many times, and yes, this is based on a real example from reddit. (tw: transphobia obviously)
I don’t know why you would share that link thinking it reflects what you initially said.
I will avoid continuing this conversation because I don’t think it will get anywhere but to me, it’s clear who is bullying whom and who misrepresents opinions as “denying your right to exist” and allows no debate.
It’s easy to think being righteous does not make you a bully but that’s exactly how mobs operate, by thinking their righteous ends justify the means.
just fucking defend the reactionaries why don’t you. Bet you’re the type who sees nazis committing genocide, and minorities fighting back, and says “man why can’t both sides stop fighting???” Enough with the fucking respectability politics already. In an uncivil age, y’all motherfucker’s calls for “civility” are just a device to squash all protest so you can get your way, not actually an argument made in good faith.
Only if that rule is accurately defined. It’s definitely not occuring in the link provided unless you consider “getting bullied and disagreeing with other user” transphobia.
I’m not going to engage with the other user anymore. They want freedom to insult and censor because “they’re righteous”. It’s not an attitude that’s specific to one group, mind you, but it’s definitely an enlightening interaction in the context of this thread.
Authortiarianism doesn’t sit well with me and I consider it an absolute no but I’m playing by the instance rules. I don’t think they are but it is what it is.
We’ll see how this space develops. Individual users are not relevant, anyway, but the aggregate.
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.
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
I also read the comments. Glad we’ve defederated. Seems like there are plenty of people over there with really bad ideas and they’re scouring the internet for people to poke them with.
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.
I understand the decisions made but I would be pretty annoyed if I had a lemmy.world or a sh.itjust.works account and I’ll explain why below.
Looking on https://browse.feddit.de/ Beehaw has the largest communities for Gaming, Technology, Chat, News, Programming, Politics and Music (and probably more). These are staple communities that the majority of users will be subscribed to one or more.
Those users now need to make a decision, they either make a new account on Beehaw (or another instance that isn’t defederated by Beehaw) so they can continue to browse those communities, or they instead keep their accounts on lemmy.world / sh.itjust.works and join smaller and less active communities to replace the Beehaw ones.
Unfortunately trolls can create a load of accounts in instance ABC and spam Beehaw until Beehaw defederate instance ABC until there are no large instances left.
It’s good that Beehaw are looking to refederate with both instances, but I imagine that the majority of people expressing their opinions thought defederation was a final decision.
I think there may also be a bit of a defensive reaction in that without the full context, there’s sort of an implication that Beehaw admin thinks everyone on these other two instances are just terrible people. Couple that with Beehaw’s…erm…opinionated language, and it’s a recipe for hurt feelings.
I’ve seen some comments mentioning that it feels like guilt by association, and it seems somewhat reasonable to take that personally – especially as people are still wrapping their heads around how federation works and how blunt the mod tools are at this stage.
I also think there’s maybe some harsh feelings over the idea that Beehaw’s ideal state is Beehaw users being able to comment on other instances but not the other way around. There’s some sentiment I’ve seen that this amounts to Beehaw taking the big communities for itself and hanging everyone else out to dry. I don’t really think that’s Beehaw’s intention, but when the big conversations appear to be happning behind closed doors, it makes sense that some feathers would be ruffled.
And last, I’ve seen some users commenting that the only reason the two defederated instances got users is because the signups are open and anyone who was put off by Beehaw’s registration either can’t use words effectively or was born to antagonize Beehaw’s users. I really don’t think that antagonistic view other other instances’ users is helpful, and it’s definitely making the situation on the ground worse. For example, the reason I didn’t register with Beehaw is that I just couldn’t think of any actual reason I wanted in there versus anywhere else – I just wanted to be where the people were, so I could use a social platform to talk to strangers, and the way Beehaw’s reg page is worded, it sounds like this would likely not be a good enough reason to be allowed to participate there. So I just went somewhere else that seemed more interested in having me around.
So i guess for anyone who bothers to read this, please don’t lump all users from the defederated instances under a banner of “degenerates” or whatever. They seem to really be taking it to heart, and I think it’s more hurt feelings than actual antagonism for anyone who didn’t personally harrass anyone.
It is, but why not embrace the good aspects of it while at the same time working to overcome the bad?
The way I see it, beehaw is doing a solid for their “tribe” by holding to account those that are being nasty. This is one of the best things a tribe can do; work towards justice. Plus, this whole event is leading to collaboration with The Dude to make the fediverse better, right?
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.
People need to learn that the point of the fediverse isn’t clustering, but distributed governance. Everyone can have the fediverse experience they want by picking a server that self-governs and federates with other servers the way they want. The idea isn’t to distribute load (though it is a nice benefit), the idea is that Beehaw can be very friendly, sh.itjust.works can be very permissive, lemmygrad can be very tanky, and exploding-heads can be very supportive of American-style conservatives. What people are upset about is that the system works haha
On your account here you can only subscribe to communities that are within beehaw and other communities from instances that beehaw is federated with.
However if you really want to participate in those defedetated instances you can go over there and sign up for an account on those. Nothing is stopping you from having another account in that space. I certainly do, but i definitely prefer things here for the philosophical approach and community.
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.
The defederated list does not include reasons and we can’t add it from Lemmy’s tools. The Lemmy instances we’ve defederated from memory are : Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml because they deny certain genocides, exploding-heads.com and lemmygrad.com because they are queerphobic, burggit.moe because they host child pornography.
Finally, lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works because of the reasons mentioned in the post.
Ew Child porn, wtf!
Thanks for defederation. I see the news headlines: “All Reddit alternatives host child pornographie !!!111!!”
I like your clear communication. On the other hand, would it be better to not give the exact reason and instead refer to “content that violates out guidelines” or similar?
Just a thought and really just to keep the image clean. I can’t tell if I’d rather have honest communication or a better view of us in public.
A downside of open source platform software is that it can be mis-used for purposes the developers and most users abhor. There isn’t much they can do to stop that. Defederation, however, can be very effective in keeping those instances separate - far better than on proprietary platforms like Twitter, where the only defenses are moderation and individual blocking. Neo-nazi instances using Mastodon software are just using Mastodon software, they’re not part of the broader Mastodon community.
Clickbait news headlines thrive on misrepresentation. But when it comes up, we can use that as an opportunity to teach others about how these sorts of platforms work.
My understanding is that there was illegal content and that it’s been dealt with. There were other things too, thus the temporary defeds.
Mastodon.social and its main dev are in Germany. That would be an example to look at. I think for Lemmy it’s both the instance hosting the account and the instance hosting the community it’s posted to which bear responsibility for removing illegal content.
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.
Just as a note, but you can check which instances a Lemmy instance is federated with by hopping on the /instances list, eg. https://beehaw.org/instances (the link is on the bottom of every page)
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !support@beehaw.org
Support and meta community for Beehaw. Ask your questions about the community, technical issues, and other such things here.
A brief FAQ for lurkers and new users can be found here.
Some days it feels like there’s a shortage of nice people. Today is not one of those days. Thank you.
A big thank you for beehaw mods protecting our community. I feel warm and loved. :)
In my application here 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” types from reddit. I’ll be interested to see whether their admins succeed in wrangling their ‘hives’.
This is in the nature of the domain name. If you name your site “shit just works” you can’t be surprised if you build a bubble for idiots in the first wave of registrations.
I’m not bashing on the site or their Admins.i say that out of own experience over the last 25+ years on the internet and some exp in hosting forums and all that myself.
Fun fact. Your take just made me sign up there too.
I actually seek different perspectives and don’t quite agree with any particular place that is very “ideologically packeted” like most tend to. Where “they insult” and “we don’t, because if they feel insulted is because of Reality and how right we are”.
I’m new to all this fediverse and I’m curious to see how different niche interests develop and if we can actually form the usefulness that Reddit threads could have or if it’s a unique and different usefulness…
Sometimes I wanna see what everyone else sees. That’s why I also have an account on another instance. But sometimes I don’t want the risk of seeing people question my right to exist (how often on reddit do I come across someone who’s “just asking questions”). That’s why I’m here. So glad reddit is dead now bc we’re all here instead.
I’d word it as, you don’t want the risk of other people writing a specific opinion on a specific topic that you don’t agree with.
Because the whole “right to exist” thing is very relative and dependent on framing.
It’s very common that criticism of X is taken as “you are -ism” or if you’re not voting exactly how I tell you to then you are denying my rights to exist. There’s lot of nuance In conversations of “where does my rights end and yours start” but the typical thing I see is “I want there to be no discussion about this, only axiom A”.
Reddit is not dead, only time will tell what happens with but I’d say Reddit is pretty much like what you talk about, with some slight variations on niche places.
Sometimes I do wish for a downvote.
There have been open calls to “eradicate transgenderism”, along with a nearly endless amount of anti-trans legislation in many parts of the world. Their rhetoric frequently borders on genocidal. It is 100% about our right to exist.
We’re not some hypothetical to have a pleasant debate over tea about, we are real people with real lives being directly harmed by real policy. Some of us are tired of being nice about it.
There’s a difference between having an opinion I don’t agree with and comparing being trans to “wanting to be peppa pig”. And then when I rightfully get offended and angry they lose their fucking minds bc I dared insult them. It’s happened many times, and yes, this is based on a real example from reddit. (tw: transphobia obviously)
I don’t know why you would share that link thinking it reflects what you initially said.
I will avoid continuing this conversation because I don’t think it will get anywhere but to me, it’s clear who is bullying whom and who misrepresents opinions as “denying your right to exist” and allows no debate.
It’s easy to think being righteous does not make you a bully but that’s exactly how mobs operate, by thinking their righteous ends justify the means.
Hey, well, I’m blocking you so I don’t have to see this bullshit again.
just fucking defend the reactionaries why don’t you. Bet you’re the type who sees nazis committing genocide, and minorities fighting back, and says “man why can’t both sides stop fighting???” Enough with the fucking respectability politics already. In an uncivil age, y’all motherfucker’s calls for “civility” are just a device to squash all protest so you can get your way, not actually an argument made in good faith.
I’m ok if Beehaw bans transphobia from their instance.
Only if that rule is accurately defined. It’s definitely not occuring in the link provided unless you consider “getting bullied and disagreeing with other user” transphobia.
I’m not going to engage with the other user anymore. They want freedom to insult and censor because “they’re righteous”. It’s not an attitude that’s specific to one group, mind you, but it’s definitely an enlightening interaction in the context of this thread.
Authortiarianism doesn’t sit well with me and I consider it an absolute no but I’m playing by the instance rules. I don’t think they are but it is what it is.
We’ll see how this space develops. Individual users are not relevant, anyway, but the aggregate.
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.
is this it?
Yes it is! Thank you!
Your work is the bee’s knees!
thank you for the transparency
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
I also read the comments. Glad we’ve defederated. Seems like there are plenty of people over there with really bad ideas and they’re scouring the internet for people to poke them with.
Thanks for the update!
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.
I understand the decisions made but I would be pretty annoyed if I had a lemmy.world or a sh.itjust.works account and I’ll explain why below.
Looking on https://browse.feddit.de/ Beehaw has the largest communities for Gaming, Technology, Chat, News, Programming, Politics and Music (and probably more). These are staple communities that the majority of users will be subscribed to one or more.
Those users now need to make a decision, they either make a new account on Beehaw (or another instance that isn’t defederated by Beehaw) so they can continue to browse those communities, or they instead keep their accounts on lemmy.world / sh.itjust.works and join smaller and less active communities to replace the Beehaw ones.
Unfortunately trolls can create a load of accounts in instance ABC and spam Beehaw until Beehaw defederate instance ABC until there are no large instances left.
It’s good that Beehaw are looking to refederate with both instances, but I imagine that the majority of people expressing their opinions thought defederation was a final decision.
Plenty of them make it clear that they very much wants the decision to be final and for beehaw to die off.
But yeah, there are always going to be trolls online I suppose.
I think there may also be a bit of a defensive reaction in that without the full context, there’s sort of an implication that Beehaw admin thinks everyone on these other two instances are just terrible people. Couple that with Beehaw’s…erm…opinionated language, and it’s a recipe for hurt feelings.
I’ve seen some comments mentioning that it feels like guilt by association, and it seems somewhat reasonable to take that personally – especially as people are still wrapping their heads around how federation works and how blunt the mod tools are at this stage.
I also think there’s maybe some harsh feelings over the idea that Beehaw’s ideal state is Beehaw users being able to comment on other instances but not the other way around. There’s some sentiment I’ve seen that this amounts to Beehaw taking the big communities for itself and hanging everyone else out to dry. I don’t really think that’s Beehaw’s intention, but when the big conversations appear to be happning behind closed doors, it makes sense that some feathers would be ruffled.
And last, I’ve seen some users commenting that the only reason the two defederated instances got users is because the signups are open and anyone who was put off by Beehaw’s registration either can’t use words effectively or was born to antagonize Beehaw’s users. I really don’t think that antagonistic view other other instances’ users is helpful, and it’s definitely making the situation on the ground worse. For example, the reason I didn’t register with Beehaw is that I just couldn’t think of any actual reason I wanted in there versus anywhere else – I just wanted to be where the people were, so I could use a social platform to talk to strangers, and the way Beehaw’s reg page is worded, it sounds like this would likely not be a good enough reason to be allowed to participate there. So I just went somewhere else that seemed more interested in having me around.
So i guess for anyone who bothers to read this, please don’t lump all users from the defederated instances under a banner of “degenerates” or whatever. They seem to really be taking it to heart, and I think it’s more hurt feelings than actual antagonism for anyone who didn’t personally harrass anyone.
Amazing how fast tribalism takes form
Sad isn’t it? :(
It is, but why not embrace the good aspects of it while at the same time working to overcome the bad?
The way I see it, beehaw is doing a solid for their “tribe” by holding to account those that are being nasty. This is one of the best things a tribe can do; work towards justice. Plus, this whole event is leading to collaboration with The Dude to make the fediverse better, right?
Very true. It’s too easy to get dragged along with negativity… I need to focus on the positive!
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.
People need to learn that the point of the fediverse isn’t clustering, but distributed governance. Everyone can have the fediverse experience they want by picking a server that self-governs and federates with other servers the way they want. The idea isn’t to distribute load (though it is a nice benefit), the idea is that Beehaw can be very friendly, sh.itjust.works can be very permissive, lemmygrad can be very tanky, and exploding-heads can be very supportive of American-style conservatives. What people are upset about is that the system works haha
This is pretty cool, I love how you got in touch. The instances get woven together so much and I love it. A neat kind of collaboration.
I hope Lemmy and other Reddit alternatives thrive and go well together!
Yes, please. The mod-tools are pretty basic, if existent.
So new here does this mean that we cannot subscribe to communities in their instances or just the other way around?
Unfortunately, it means both.
So follow up question, is there any limitations to the communities that I do subscribe to beyond if they are federated or not?
On your account here you can only subscribe to communities that are within beehaw and other communities from instances that beehaw is federated with.
However if you really want to participate in those defedetated instances you can go over there and sign up for an account on those. Nothing is stopping you from having another account in that space. I certainly do, but i definitely prefer things here for the philosophical approach and community.
Really love the transparency and communication. It’s a breath of fresh air, honestly.
very well said. It’s been a really eye opening experience to how good a community can be. From the admins to the users, it’s been smooth.
I find the content and discussion to be much more intimate and worthwhile than what was on reddit.
Hear, hear! I’ve actually experienced a general decrease in anxiety (personally) and everything! It’s fantastic!
It’s nice to be with nice people.
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.
The defederated list does not include reasons and we can’t add it from Lemmy’s tools. The Lemmy instances we’ve defederated from memory are : Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml because they deny certain genocides, exploding-heads.com and lemmygrad.com because they are queerphobic, burggit.moe because they host child pornography.
Finally, lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works because of the reasons mentioned in the post.
Is there a non tankie leftist instance? I’m honestly looking for one
New fear unlocked: unknowingly signing up to an instance that federates with servers hosting CP 🤢
Ew Child porn, wtf! Thanks for defederation. I see the news headlines: “All Reddit alternatives host child pornographie !!!111!!”
I like your clear communication. On the other hand, would it be better to not give the exact reason and instead refer to “content that violates out guidelines” or similar?
Just a thought and really just to keep the image clean. I can’t tell if I’d rather have honest communication or a better view of us in public.
A downside of open source platform software is that it can be mis-used for purposes the developers and most users abhor. There isn’t much they can do to stop that. Defederation, however, can be very effective in keeping those instances separate - far better than on proprietary platforms like Twitter, where the only defenses are moderation and individual blocking. Neo-nazi instances using Mastodon software are just using Mastodon software, they’re not part of the broader Mastodon community. Clickbait news headlines thrive on misrepresentation. But when it comes up, we can use that as an opportunity to teach others about how these sorts of platforms work.
Yeah Admins are doing their best and that’s super important. I do wonder what will happen if Lemmy grows enough to be monitored by officials.
Here in Germany we have NetzDG, where platforms need to act on illegal content as they reach a certain size.
My understanding is that there was illegal content and that it’s been dealt with. There were other things too, thus the temporary defeds. Mastodon.social and its main dev are in Germany. That would be an example to look at. I think for Lemmy it’s both the instance hosting the account and the instance hosting the community it’s posted to which bear responsibility for removing illegal content.
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.
Just as a note, but you can check which instances a Lemmy instance is federated with by hopping on the
/instanceslist, eg. https://beehaw.org/instances (the link is on the bottom of every page)we defederated with them already, so no worries on this front
I’m glad to hear that, thanks for being so proactive in keeping us safe.