Beehaw defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works

beehaw.org ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works - Beehaw

hey 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...

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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.
- 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
  
  We need to crowd source a common list of instances to block from users and mods across the network for instances to use, like people on Mastodon started doing. It was really effective. Defederation is really the only way to deal with / only check on users that sign up on instances that don't moderate them at all in order to harass others with impunity, since moderators can't effect users on s different instance and so it basically gives such users free reign. That's why IMHO defederation is a REALLY crucial tool to make this place livable, otherwise it'd be filled with trolls doing their thing with absolute impunity and there would be nothing mods, who are supposed to be the first line of defense for that kind of thing, could do,
- 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.
  
  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?
  
  Writing a paragraph about why you want to join isn’t necessarily a great vetting process though
  
  But isn't that true of many more smaller instances as well? Will Beehaw defederate from everyone?
  
  Most likely only if those small instances become hot beds for signing up for accounts to go cause problems
  
  Sure, there are smaller instances that don't vet, but according to the beehawk admins, they aren't an issue in terms of moderation, probably because of their small size. If other instances were to cause an immense need for increased moderation, I'm sure they will defederate from them as well.
  Also the admins made it clear that this is supposed to be a temporary action until they are able to effectively moderate their community according to their rules and 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.
- 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?

265 comments