I don’t get what the problem is? Anyone can elaborate.
Beehaw is meant to be a safe space, mitigating toxicity, while other instances, by having registration open to all without moderation, causes that.
By being federated, they can interact with one another. Beehaw defederated them in order to avoid that. The main argument being that the modding tools right now aren’t good enough to help them do it any other way.
Sucks that some bad actors caused the defederation, but I understand the reasoning. Modding is a difficult and largely thankless job, and without a good set of tools to keep that kind of behavior out and nothing else but the big “block 'em” switch, it seems to have left them at an impasse.
That’s a bummer. I really liked Beehaw but wasn’t able to sign up for whatever reason, which is why I signed up here. Sucks that hateful jerks can ruin it for everyone.
Sucks that hateful jerks can ruin it for everyone.
The history of humanity
All of these services are very new. Exactly what people want out of them — including what the people operating instances want out of them — is still being worked out.
This is not a commercial production service that you have a contract with. It’s an experimental system run by volunteers who don’t all have the same ideas in mind. People aren’t just working out the kinks — the process of discovering what this is all really for is still ongoing.
Expect friction. Expect weirdness. Expect rapid growth and, therefore, rapid change.
Also, expect people to fuss when they get surprised they can’t do something they want to. That’s also normal.
To clarify a minor point, beehaw isn’t new. It was established in Feb 2022, and it’s been thriving with a relatively small community up until this months crazy growth. They’re not so much finding their feet as trying to maintain an existing communities safety in the face of rapid growth.
Seems they’re just discovering what being “federated” actually means.
Not at all. They’ve been one of the largest instances on lemmy for over a year, and they federated widely during that time. The issue is that lemmy is still a relatively immature platform in terms of moderation features. The workload on their moderators to sustain federation and community safety with rudimentary moderation tools whilst the threadiverse population increases in size over 1000 fold is incredibly high.
So until moderation tools improve, their options are
- Give up their safety focus. We can assume that’s not going to happen
- Find more admins, which is easier said than done, because at this point in time, one of the lacking moderation features is the ability to add instance moderators. Right now, the only instance elevated role is admin. You have to be able to trust the new admin with the keys to everything.
- Defederate with instances that threaten their high value on community safety
My point is, there wasn’t really all that much content on other instances that would have posed a problem from a federation perspective before Lemmy blew up due to the reddit stuff. They largely were used to being in their own bubble with limited outside influence due to the obscurity of the Lemmy platform broadly.
I respect their desire to form the community how they see fit. That’s the beauty of the fediverse after all. I think it’ll be confusing for new users though who aren’t used to federation, both from those outside the instance and those who only created an account there because it hosted several large communities without really thinking about the implications of what the admins desire for their instance.
The answer is to create communities that mirror their biggest on more general purpose instances. A lot of contributors to Beehaw’s communities who weren’t on their instance probably feel a little miffed that they were helping pump content onto the Lemmy platform broadly, and now they’ve been defederated. Kinda sucks, but a good lesson for choosing your instance and the instance of communities you choose to contribute content to and help build, I guess.
Everything you’ve said here though is very different to your previous comment about them not understanding federation.
This reply is closer to the truth. They understand it quite fine, but have different priorities, and those priorities probably weren’t clear to a lot of their new members
It’s the other way around: new people and instances are learning that federation also means that other servers don’t want to federate with you, and that that’s okay. This is different from the usual ‘freeze peach’ stuff, this is just communities saying ‘we don’t want to hear you’.
The short version is that beehaw was struggling with the (currently) limited toolset available to moderate user content, and they saw a heap of users posting things they don’t allow on their instance were coming from the two other big instances, so it was more effective for them to defederate to try and stem the tide.
I imagine regeneration will occur in future when the lemmyverse stabilises a little, and when better mod tools are available
lemmy.world has had a handful of back to back queerphobic trolls spamming hate across multiple groups and instances.
They would get banned and come right back.
The reason they were able to do that is because of the open signups on lemmy.world.
Beehaw is an instance that takes protecting their members as their highest goal. They value it significantly more than wide federation.
And so they blocked lemmy.world, as it was a source of bigotry towards their members, and there were no other moderation tools available to them to resolve the issue.
New to all this, does that mean lemmy.world accounts can no longer even see any beehive content?
Yep. Though it’s not intended to be a permanent change as I understand it
Hopefully, as these federations mature, community/magazine moderators get greater ability to moderate content.
And these sorts of defederations may also serve as a “hey, do something about this” smack to the defederated instances. Provided that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works don’t actually want to have trolls like that among their users they could implement mechanisms to make it harder for them to sign up.
If someone wants to deliberately run a 4chan-like free-for-all instance, that’s fine, but I expect nobody’s going to want to federate with it.
What instances don’t have open signup? I’m on kbin but also signed up to sh.itjust.works and another instance because I had no idea what I was doing. The only difference was that one of them required that I write a quick blurb on why I wanted to join. What does a closed signup look like?
