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ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works - Beehaw
beehaw.orghey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one: ##### we have made the
decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this
is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a
decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our
thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary. — we have been concerned
with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with
federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related
[https://beehaw.org/post/520044?scrollToComments=true] how difficult dealing
with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four
Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to
deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below). an
unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time
here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some
pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of
improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and
federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t
wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now,
while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain. aside
from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by
and large, boils down to: - these two instances’ open registration policy, which
is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it
makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior; - the
disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two
instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on
those two instances; - our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a
vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to
participate in; - and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not
possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account
for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom
explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of
whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for as Gaywallet puts it,
in our discussion of whether to do this: > There’s a lot of soft moderating that
happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just
that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust
and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around
you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when
there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when
there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a
community like this and it’s not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes
people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only
works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can’t
even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a
tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t
sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a
short timeframe. > > Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open
to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw
problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of
energy to undo. and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people
legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful
while it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re doing this. our
words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle
platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want
a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you
disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with
the understanding it was an informed decision. this is also not a permanent
judgement. in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and
interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether
we feel capable of refederating with these communities. thanks for using our
site folks.
Interesting bit of news for the threadiverse. All three of these are fairly large lemmy instances
I’m fairly new to kbin but we do have mod tools here, and people have used them to moderate their community. So far I haven’t seen any issues with spam or what I’d say is trolling (though beehaw may think different). As for whether the mod tools are “good” I guess is one’s opinion. I find they’re enough to moderate the small communities I started here on kbin, though I have to imagine much larger (100k-1m) communities might struggle with the tools available. kbin is very new and still under development. so we’ll see.
Yeah. I would also imagine that a place like Beehaw is going to attract bad actors and trolls who want to wreck the place at the expense of Beehaw users, who specifically joined in order to have a community of nice people to hang out with.
the vibe here on kbin is I think very similar to what you might find on more serious subreddits or on something like hacker news. we’re interested in content, discussion, etc. but there’s not really overt trolling. I rarely see “shitposting” and other stuff as well. If you think “nerds who wanna talk about stuff and share news/content” you’ve got the right gist. I don’t really think anyone I’ve seen here would go out of there way to cause problems. but kbin does have open signups (not invite).
idk what the mindset is for lemmy, beehaw, and the rest of the fediverse, but I think due to the long downtime for federation here on kbin there’s this vibe of “we have kbin stuff, and then we have stuff from those other guys” It’s to the point where someone quickly made a script to be able to easily see where someone is posting from.
In that regard, it’s always very obvious to me when I’m among beehaw users and in beehaw communities. same for when I’m in lemmy spaces, or kbin spaces. whereas I think lemmy users may not know or care about that distinction. Though this might just be my own musing and others aren’t thinking like that haha.
Oh? What makes beehaw users different and recognizable?
beehaw stands out among the lemmy instances because of the unique culture.
so idk how things work over on the lemmy instances and beehaw, but here when we get threads from other sites, the logo of the site is shown pretty blatantly. likewise the url is clearly visible. In beehaw’s case, just looking around there it seems pretty strictly moderated with a certain cultural/style emphasis. Maybe not obvious at first glance, but reading some of the ethos pages makes it clear.
It’s a very… “tumblr” vibe. So beehaw defederating from lemmy.world isn’t really a surprise.
Like to me the different instances have different “feels” to them. and on kbin they’re clearly marked so it’s obvious. it’s further emphasized as i said by the fact that we were isolated for a while.
The advantage Beehaw has is the way the communities are organized - so much neater than in other instances. Every community on there is a giant hub, making these communities more visible and active than what we see on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, and to some extent kbin.
Well thats mostly the case because only the admins on Beehaw can open new communities.
Really? The tone in Beehaw is obvious yeah, but I thought the tone for kbin and lemmy was slightly similar – unless things really changed in the few days when federation was down (which is possible)
I wasn’t here before kbin’s federation went down, but rather joined during that time with most everyone else. I do think the tone and “feel” between kbin and lemmy is similar for sure, and I think a lot of that is probably due to mutual ex-reddit culture. but while federation was down there was a lot of kbin users saying things like “it’s a bit better like this because we build up a kbin culture, and understand things better” and “we can build up kbin communities so we’re less reliant on other instances”.
I think lemmy just ended up with the “everything reddit” culture, while kbin ended up with a more reserved technical reddit culture. Though that might just be my perspective (and not shared with others). But I can understand why beehaw defederated with lemmy and not kbin. even though it kinda feels like we’re next lol.
I feel like KBin is one of those “we only show our magazines by default, but if you’re an advanced user or you want to explore the fediverse a bit more, we have that option too, and you can even subscribe to federated communities/magazines” type of sites in the fediverse.
nope. that was the case for a while, when the federation wasn’t working right. but now it pretty openly shows threads from across the fediverse.
Yeah, I do wonder if Beehaw is just block happy. I am scared of clicking on their list of banned instances (like if it’s really shitty stuff that no sane human can look at), but they have blocked almost 400 instances.
They haven’t blocked the main Lemmy one though. I’m guessing the main Lemmy instance has gotten better with the reddit migration.
What they did was the following : they defederated with Top 2 and Top 4 from what I understand (2 of the top 5).
For, reference Lemmy.ml has 35k users, Lemmy.world around 20-25k ish, shitjustworks 10k, beehaw 10k. Then theres a lot of small lemmy instances beehaw hasn’t banned which go from a few hundred to a few thousand. The numbers might be slightly off since the user count tools are having issues on the lemmy side of things.