This is surfacing a fundamental division between mindsets in federation: the people who say don’t worry about which instance you’re on are bought into the promise that federation can “just work” like email. But the reality is that if you care about moderation at all (like, even to the extent of being for or against having any of it) then sooner or later you’re going to have to make harder decisions about instances.
It’s pretty normal for long-term fediverse users to change instances several times over the course of however long this stuff has been around. It’s unclear to me whether any existing Lemmy instances would be a good fit for me in the long term TBH and I would expect that to be true for some time, as so many instances are still figuring things out internally.
Defederation decisions like beehaw made are extremely normal and rational. With their level of moderation staffing and for their user base, they determined it was unsustainable to remain federated with instances that were generating more moderation workload. If it wasn’t them today it would be another instance tomorrow; this will keep happening.
Also, I see a lot of folks saying this is lazy for beehaw, but it’s important to understand that from their perspective, this problem wouldn’t arise if moderators here were keeping a cleaner house and preventing bad actors from using the platform. (Not saying either take is entirely correct.)
In a sense, moderation best practices on the fediverse are inimically hostile to scaling the fediverse up to new users. (And if you ask folks with smaller but prosperous instances that have healthy internal vibes, they’ll probably tell you this is good.)
This is much more fraught on Lemmy than it is on Mastodon, because you’re building communities hosted on a particular instance and there’s not currently a way to move the community. So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Similarly, to avoid endless duplication of communities, folks have been encouraged to participate with existing communities instead of starting a new one on their own instance everytime. But anyone here who has gotten involved with communities on Beehaw will now no longer be able to do so unless they move to a different instance. (Which may be hard, as open instances that are easy to join are the ones that are harder for small instances to handle, which is what caused this in the first place.)
Some of those folks are going to create their own alternative communities on their servers, which to any third-party servers not in the loop on the defederation drama will be potentially confusing. This has the potential to create a cultural tend toward polarization of community norms between everything goes and what we see on Mastodon as content warning policing, but of which are, to me, undesirable.
The best case scenario is that the majority of large communities end up being hosted on instances that have sufficiently rigorous moderation standards and sufficiently robust moderation staff to not impose an unsustainable workload on smaller instances. Then as long as everyone who’s not a nazi federates with those instances, things should go smoothly…ish. But that’s hard both because “sufficiently rigorous” is different for everyone and because moderation labor doesn’t grow on trees.
The part where things get tricky is that beehaw currently has ~15 of the top 50 communities across the entire fediverse and has become the defacto discussion grounds for gaming/tech/news/etc.
One could argue this goes against the whole concept of decentralized communication in the first place, and this may be a position beehaw doesn’t want to be in.
Beehaw has every right to foster a tight-knit community that adheres to its desires.
But there also is a level of responsibility and custodianship over these large communities they foster for the betterment and adoption of the fediverse.
Very cogent writeup, seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw’s decision in my eyes. People are getting really angry, and I wonder if those were the same people who bought into the whole “lemmys great because no one has 100% control” idea, only to be upset when the person in control of a slice they like decides they want to do something disagreeable with it. In the first place, one community shouldn’t have carried the burden of the entire content and community of the “Gaming” or “Technology” sphere, it just kind of turned out that way because once they gained momentum, everybody else just flocked to it. And you can’t blame them, that’s where the content is, and the content is why they’re here.
On the whole, though the software doesn’t really restrict you to one or the other, instances are very quickly separating into two camps - viewer and host. Viewer instances are instances like mine, where the majority of users are consumers and not creators. Yeah, I like to run my mouth around these parts but most of the content on my instance doesn’t originate from it. The host instances host communities, and so they carry the burden of having to moderate those communities and the servers/sysadmins carry the burden of having to relay all that communication to all the other instances. I think it’s this part that needs work as we grow, because the best analogy for a Lemmy community is an email group. Can you imagine an email group with tens of thousands of subscribers all just emailing each other over and over again? Lemmy is pretty much just that, but displayed differently.
This is surfacing a fundamental division between mindsets in federation: the people who say don’t worry about which instance you’re on are bought into the promise that federation can “just work” like email. But the reality is that if you care about moderation at all (like, even to the extent of being for or against having any of it) then sooner or later you’re going to have to make harder decisions about instances.
It’s pretty normal for long-term fediverse users to change instances several times over the course of however long this stuff has been around. It’s unclear to me whether any existing Lemmy instances would be a good fit for me in the long term TBH and I would expect that to be true for some time, as so many instances are still figuring things out internally.
Defederation decisions like beehaw made are extremely normal and rational. With their level of moderation staffing and for their user base, they determined it was unsustainable to remain federated with instances that were generating more moderation workload. If it wasn’t them today it would be another instance tomorrow; this will keep happening.
Also, I see a lot of folks saying this is lazy for beehaw, but it’s important to understand that from their perspective, this problem wouldn’t arise if moderators here were keeping a cleaner house and preventing bad actors from using the platform. (Not saying either take is entirely correct.)
In a sense, moderation best practices on the fediverse are inimically hostile to scaling the fediverse up to new users. (And if you ask folks with smaller but prosperous instances that have healthy internal vibes, they’ll probably tell you this is good.)
This is much more fraught on Lemmy than it is on Mastodon, because you’re building communities hosted on a particular instance and there’s not currently a way to move the community. So, if I were to start a community here and then finally decide a year from now that this place is too big a defederation target to stay on, what do I do?
Similarly, to avoid endless duplication of communities, folks have been encouraged to participate with existing communities instead of starting a new one on their own instance everytime. But anyone here who has gotten involved with communities on Beehaw will now no longer be able to do so unless they move to a different instance. (Which may be hard, as open instances that are easy to join are the ones that are harder for small instances to handle, which is what caused this in the first place.)
Some of those folks are going to create their own alternative communities on their servers, which to any third-party servers not in the loop on the defederation drama will be potentially confusing. This has the potential to create a cultural tend toward polarization of community norms between everything goes and what we see on Mastodon as content warning policing, but of which are, to me, undesirable.
The best case scenario is that the majority of large communities end up being hosted on instances that have sufficiently rigorous moderation standards and sufficiently robust moderation staff to not impose an unsustainable workload on smaller instances. Then as long as everyone who’s not a nazi federates with those instances, things should go smoothly…ish. But that’s hard both because “sufficiently rigorous” is different for everyone and because moderation labor doesn’t grow on trees.
The part where things get tricky is that beehaw currently has ~15 of the top 50 communities across the entire fediverse and has become the defacto discussion grounds for gaming/tech/news/etc.
One could argue this goes against the whole concept of decentralized communication in the first place, and this may be a position beehaw doesn’t want to be in.
Beehaw has every right to foster a tight-knit community that adheres to its desires.
But there also is a level of responsibility and custodianship over these large communities they foster for the betterment and adoption of the fediverse.
btw, e-mail servers regularly defederate/block domains that allow a lot of spam…
Very cogent writeup, seeing how the lemmy.world people were reacting really validated Beehaw’s decision in my eyes. People are getting really angry, and I wonder if those were the same people who bought into the whole “lemmys great because no one has 100% control” idea, only to be upset when the person in control of a slice they like decides they want to do something disagreeable with it. In the first place, one community shouldn’t have carried the burden of the entire content and community of the “Gaming” or “Technology” sphere, it just kind of turned out that way because once they gained momentum, everybody else just flocked to it. And you can’t blame them, that’s where the content is, and the content is why they’re here.
On the whole, though the software doesn’t really restrict you to one or the other, instances are very quickly separating into two camps - viewer and host. Viewer instances are instances like mine, where the majority of users are consumers and not creators. Yeah, I like to run my mouth around these parts but most of the content on my instance doesn’t originate from it. The host instances host communities, and so they carry the burden of having to moderate those communities and the servers/sysadmins carry the burden of having to relay all that communication to all the other instances. I think it’s this part that needs work as we grow, because the best analogy for a Lemmy community is an email group. Can you imagine an email group with tens of thousands of subscribers all just emailing each other over and over again? Lemmy is pretty much just that, but displayed differently.
I think people have a right to be upset when they feel unfairly banned from communities for no fault of their own.