Like many of you, I woke up this morning to discover that our instance, along with lemmy.world, had been unexpectedly added to the beehaw block list. Although this development initially caught me off guard, the administrators at beehaw made an announcement shedding light on their decision.
The primary concern raised was our instance’s policy of open registration. Given my belief that the fediverse is still navigating its early stages, I believe that for it to mature, gain traction, and encourage adoption, it is crucial for instances to offer an uncomplicated and direct route for newcomers to join and participate. This was one of the reason I decided to launch this instance. However, I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls. Despite these hurdles, I maintain the conviction that our collective strength as a community can overcome these issues.
After this happened, the beehaw admins and I had a good chat about their decision. While our stances on registration policies might diverge, we realized that our ultimate goals are aligned: we both strive to foster communities that thrive in an atmosphere of safety and respect, where users can passionately engage in discussions and feel a sense of belonging.
Although the probability of an immediate reversal are slim given the current circumstances, I believe we have managed to identify common ground. It’s evident that, even in separation, we can unite to contribute positively to the broader fediverse community.
In the coming weeks or months, we plan to collaborate with other lemmy instance administrators to suggest enhancements and modifications to the lemmy project. Primarily, our proposals will concentrate on devising tools and features that empower us, as instance administrators, to moderate our platforms effectively.
In the meantime, while I understand may not be ideal for everyone, users who choose to participate on the beehaw instance will be required to register a separate account on their instance.
Thank you all for continuing to make this community great!
I was going to add a lemmy and bluesky node but when I discovered they were only libtard echo chambers like the old Twitter was and anyone with opposing views wasn’t welcome, I abandoned those projects because my take is the fediverse is about free speech and free speech has no value if you aren’t allowed to disagree.
Fuck em, I applied to several different servers and it took days to get accepted. Open registration is necessary
I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls.
Annnnnnd there it is.
What?
It’s almost as if they’re getting the result they were looking for. People saying they disagree with their choice are exactly the people they’re trying to avoid lol.
I was enjoying their tech and news communities, fuck me right? So toxic 🙄
I’d just like to say that I appreciate your stance on open registration and making things as uncomplicated as possible. I signed up for a Beehaw account before this even happened, but I did find having to explain myself and justify my presence a little confusing. I also signed up for a discuss.tchncs.de account and I was so confused and thought their website was broken because once I clicked sign up, it didn’t do anything. Just span around in a circle. It wasn’t until I checked my email that I realised it wanted me to confirm my email. Here, things did just work. No complications, just entered my name, email and password, clicked sign up, and I was done! I guess you could say… shit just works on sh.itjust.works
Brief explanation of how defederation works.
Basically Beehaw and all its communities and users are now blocking everyone from this server. We can’t post to their communities and they can’t see anything that we post on third party communities either.
However, this server has not defederated Beehaw. Therefore, we can still see their users commenting on third party communities, and we can even reply to them, they just won’t see our reply, although neutral parties will.
Both Beehaw and sh.itjust.works are still able to contribute significant activity to Lemmy as a whole, just not directly to each other for now. Let’s all be diligent on reporting and banning trolls quickly so we can maintain the collegial atmosphere here.
i joined the fediverse to shitpost, but more importantly to create a new community.
beehaw’s actions are VERY bad for the fediverse. for any social network to succeed it needs USERS. and when you have an entrenched giant, you need all the help you can get. federation is great but it also means a more spread out community which makes it hard for any one instance to succeed. what beehaw is doing is just chopping the legs off the fediverse right when it’s finding its footing.
also to an outsider, the fediverse is already confusing enough. now we can to deal with the whole “oh you can join this server and not that” and “if you join here, you can see them but they can’t see you” nonsense. closed registrations turn away people, this sort of chaos also turns away people.
i’m personally blocking all beehaw servers. i appreciate moderation is hard, and sad that trolls are coming in so early. but moderation is a solvable problem. instead of opening applications for more mods, they decided to go the cowardly route.
To gain users, users need to find a space that matches what they want. If you want a 4chan style environment, beehaw.org is not for you. If you want a beehaw.org style environment, then maybe it’s a GREAT place to be. It’s getting angry at users for wanting different things from the experience that will reduce the number of users, not that some spaces are different from others
I get that we need more users. But allowing the communities who were here first to get torn apart is not how you do that. The beehaw users have already shown the ability to grow communities from scratch. That’s exactly the kind of people we want here.
But they also need to be given space to build those communities. This is essentially the core concept of Lemmy, that federation allows you to have large high activity communities coexisting in peace with small niche communities. You get to have both things on the same platform, because instances that come into conflict can defederate without having any impact on the network as a whole.
There are many bigger reasons that the platform is confusing, the beehaw situation doesn’t even move the needle. If anything, I think the defederation has helped many people start to understand how cool the federated structure can be.
I understand you’re frustrated they couldn’t just moderate the problem away, but seriously man, don’t be so dramatic. Beehaw is cutting the legs off the fediverse? Bro if the fediverse fails it won’t be due to the actions of beehaw, I can tell you that much.
This might be good for some folks to read here to get a better feel of what Beehaw positions themselves as and their thinking:
(What is Beehaw?)[https://beehaw.org/post/107014]
(Behaw is a community)[https://beehaw.org/post/140733]
(A few thoughts on Beehaw’s design)[https://beehaw.org/post/439918]Edit: My assumption is that the links will open in your browser. If this isn’t the case maybe I can stick these posts in a pastebin or something, lemmy know ;)
I’m personally disappointed but don’t fault them. MY thinking is along The Dude’s - ease of participation is key, with all of the risks that entails - but that’s why I’m here rather than elsewhere.
Something I don’t think a lot of people quite get yet - this is the DIY web. Different people take different approaches to community building, some very carefully and meticulously, and others not so much. And that’s good - cool, even, IMO. Clashes are going to happen, but that’s ok.
So you can pick another instance, or spin your own, but I’d rather people come from a place of participation rather than consumption on Lemmy writ large. One of the bigger instances defederated from us? Well shit, guess we’re gonna have to make some content ourselves.
Post often, comment often, call fellow sh.it.heads (and other folks too) out if they’re acting like shitheads. Be a positive presence in the Fediverse. Make some friends. The rest will sort itself out in time.
At least for my client software links are [ text ] ( URL ) but I understand the confusion, as I am almost certain it is the other way around, just like you typed it, in some other software I have used recently.
lemmy know ;)
I’m stealing this.
But seriously, great comment. You are demonstrating the correct attitude for this journey. Teamwork makes the dream work people, we can’t do it alone.
Like this guy from exploding-heads starts off “we need users […] you need all the help you can get” and based on that theory he concludes “I’m blocking all beehaw servers”. Is it just me or is that chain of logic somewhat flawed? If we need users why are you blocking 12,000 of them?
I don’t know why you’d expect solid logic from someone on the Neo-nazi instance.
There was already a community blocked from this very node and lemmy.world as well because they are VERY enthusiastic of tanks and were flooding other communities.
I don’t see that much tragedy and drama coming out for that so … eh, hard to take these kind of comments seriously, especially when they show to not have even understood how the federation works.
What I don’t understand is why we can’t see me posts and comments read only on Beehaw. I can see it by going to their (public) website, why can’t I see it from here?
Because they don’t let us download from them right now.
So I guess a solution coild be having different switches for getting/sending data to an instance. So in this case beehaw could block receiving updates from sh.itjust.works but not block sending updates to sh.itjust.works. That way we could all still see the content from there while on sh.itjust.works just not interact with it. This could be displayed in the UI by having the comment box and all interaction buttons that would send an update disabled.
There might be an issue on GitHub you could comment on to suggest this. It’s the lack of flexibility in the mod tools that are currently available that’s leading to this “on / off" style of federation
Defederating both sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world was such an asinine decision that I honestly hope Beehaw just dies. They are doing a disservice to the entire lemmy community. They just siloed their users. They did not poll them for that decision. I hope most of their users leave them.
I would also be for removing Beehaw from join-lemmy.org. They are using lemmy software, indeed, but they are not really using the lemmy community, not the most of it at least. Someone who joins Beehaw may notice that the community is significantly smaller than they had hoped and go back to other alternatives, which is obviously a bad outcome. We need users.
At the very least there should be a warning that this instance blocks content from other popular instances…
I’m all for them running their instance however they want. It’s not what I want and that just means I’ll be avoiding them.
Like OP said, the long term goals of both instances are aligned.
Federation and defederation are just part of how the fediverse works. Don’t think of the fediverse as a reddit-like network that should always stick together and grow as one userbase. Rather, the focus should be on growing smaller communities that put their interests and users first (just like Beehaw did), while exchanging information with other communities where it benefits them both. If one instance doesn’t work for a particular user, they can always leave and join another one. That’s the beauty of it.
This. We don’t all need to be one big happy family… Federated does not mean a single site decentralized. It also doesn’t mean isolated.
There’s a million flavors of in between they the fediverse let’s us explore, and hopefully instances will rise and fall as we find what builds the best communities. Some will over-moderate, some will be totally unrestricted, some will be safe spaces and echo chambers who carefully manage what users are exposed to, some will vet their users carefully, and most will probably be open to whatever their users ask for
The goal is that instances become all sorts of different places, and users can freely move if they like somewhere else better
I’m happy to see that the first 2 lemmy instances I’ve joined are run by nice people. Sometimes it feels like there’s a shortage of nice, but not today.
That’s a bummer. I get it (somewhat), but I’m not really fan of that type of gatekeeping by beehaw. On the positive side, it makes me really appreciate this instance/community and makes me want to interact more on here instead. So I’m looking forward to that.
Yeah. They value heavy moderation as a way to sanitize their community. Fine if that’s what they want but this has quickly taught me that instance isn’t for me. Too authoritarian in my view.
I’m impressed with how The Dude seems to be handling things here.
I’m not really seeing it as gatekeeping. It’s a small mod team that woke up this week to a big chunk of reddit knocking on the door.
It strikes me as reasonable to want to pause for a minute and see what the actual new user numbers will look like on the other side of the blackout.
That is understandable. But there is also the other side: When people joined Beehaw, it was under the assumption that they would be joining the lemmy community, the fediverse. Now, they unilaterally decided to silo themselves, without polling their users, without giving any heads up and without requesting more moderators… Lets not kid ourselves, we need users, the more the better. Sure, we do not need the alt-righters and the nazis and all, but we need users. We need more content in the communities. Beehaw had a significant user base, the third biggest in the Lemmy-verse I think. They just decided to block the biggest (lemmy.world). That essentially broke the userbase in 2. That is a disservice to the whole “unreddit” movement. Absolutely pathetic in my view.
I honestly hope Beehaw users leave Beehaw and join us in Lemmy (as in community, not software). I would also agree with removing Beehaw from join-lemmy. They are using Lemmy software, but they are not really using the Lemmy community. At the very least, there should be a notice regarding that in join-lemmy.
Now, I was unaware that this was a unilateral decision, without input from their users, which renders my comment sorta moot.
You’ve changed my mind. Δ
I hear ya. I don’t know the first thing about what goes into running a big instance like that, so I’m willing to keep an open mind. But I really like this instance for its open approach. It fits with my understanding of how the fediverse would work, especially when some of the bigger instances were (at least initially) encouraging people to not all sign up on the same instance to balance the load of new users. By defederating, it kind of negates that aspect. People are going to need to sign up on multiple instances or just go straight to the big ones to ensure access to those communities.
But with everything being so new, I get it. It’ll be interesting to see how things evolve as the fediverse grows/ages. I do hope the block list gets reconsidered soon enough though.
@Wit changed my mind with their comment. I wasn’t thinking about it from the users’ side.
Wrong person haha, I think you meant @wit :)
Ok I just realized that @ tags don’t display the user’s instance unless you click on them and that’s super confusing, why in the world did they design it like that
That announcement from beehaw was how I found and subscribed to this instance lol
Serious question: What is the alternative to open registration? Invite-only? What is the expectation?
Seems a bit kneejerk to defederate, that’s employing the nuclear option as the first step. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for dialog.
Manual admin approval for every signup.
Why? What would you even check?
It’s not like you can interview the person and check their ID, etc. - it’s just meaningless bureaucracy that stifles growth.
From what I understand, it’s ‘did this human read what we’re about here and respond in a way that demonstrates they know what they’re signing onto’?
At minimum, it weeds out folks who don’t take the time to write a couple sentences, and kinda acts like a crappy lock on a door. If someone’s determined to start some nonsense, it’s not hard to get in and try. But a lot of folks will try the door once, see it doesn’t open right away, and fuck off. They don’t want growth for growth’s sake, so the fact that this stifles growth to a degree isn’t a concern.
But yeah, I agree it doesn’t scale very well.
That does not seem sustainable.
It can be with a larger admin/mod team.
Maybe, but it doesn’t do much to prevent trolls. Since registration is anonymous a human doesn’t have any information on if they should approve the account or not approve the account. At most they have an IP address which is trivial to change.
It doesn’t really affect me, I don’t use their communities but it sucks for their users who are cut off from two of the fastest growing servers. By de-federating they’re essentially unplugging from the rest of the Fediverse, which is the entire point of using ActivityPub in the first place. If they’re not federating then they’re not different than Reddit or any other single-server community.
I understand the worry about trolls and whatnot, but dealing with that is the moderation team’s job in any community. No amount of registration restriction can prevent that outside of requiring a real government issued ID and manual identification checks.
It seems like a kneejerk reaction, I think it’ll be damaging to their community in the long-term as users just swap instances in order to be able to interact with the greater community.
Beehaw has questions when you sign up. You have to explain why you want to be a member and how your addition to the community would be a positive one. Is a spammer or troll really going to spend the time writing up a few paragraphs so they can spam or troll just to get banned and have to do it all over again?
Professional spammers might use a LLM bot to generate a reply, I suppose, but it still takes time and effort. When they inevitably get banned, they’ll have to try again with a new response to these questions. Replies which don’t sound exactly like the one they used last time.
a LLM bot
You answered the question. It’s trivial to generate human-like writing at any scale you’d like. Maybe the admins will catch some maybe not. It doesn’t matter one bit to the python script that is just churning them out. You can’t know who is posting spam or who is real until they start posting.
The amount of members in the community determine how valuable accounts are. Once the community is of a certain size where it is profitable to spam then there will be services that bulk sell accounts. You can buy Reddit accounts or Facebook accounts or Twitter accounts with all levels of karma or post history. The more annoying it is to make an account the more valuable the accounts will be on the bulk market.
Unless the community remains tiny they’ll be targeted just like anybody else.
I really get where they are coming from and it’s an unfortunate aspect of things that when you try to be open it can allow for so many negative consequences. However I will say for my own part I tried signing up for beehaw initially and my application was never approved. I am not a bot or a toxic person so I still need a community even if beehaw won’t accept my application for reasons I can’t understand.
It’s tough. The platform has minimal tools, at least from my limited mod permissions, or maybe anyone’s? Lemmy itself needs to mature the code-base to enable more granular and distributed functionality.
I’ve tried joining a few times but it always just hangs. I think there might be something wrong with registration.
Love this. There is absolutely no need to feel hate towards each other, I can definitely see both sides of the argument as valid concerns. Each instance has their own way of curating a community, but as long as the end goal is the same and communications are open, we all win. For now let’s just focus on making this instance a better place to be, the day we all reunite as one will come eventually.
Love this. This is the beauty of federation.
It’s an organic and messy beginning, but the good should ‘bubble up’ leaving the detritus to rot in the bowels of the community listings.
Better moderation tools are always welcome. I’m sure that is 90% of the problem, but it is just a software problem and it will be resolved.
I think there should be standards of moderation (simple things like average time to answer a report) that instances should have to adhere to in order to ensure the moderation:community ratio remains at a level to prevent the worst abuses.
I know I’m kind of late to this party, but it seems to be a good time to take a moment to say, if no one else has, that there are apps out there like Jerboa, that allow you to keep track of multiple Lemmy accounts quite easily. :)
Typing this on Jerboa. If you’ve used any third party reddit app then it’ll feel perfectly familiar. A little bare bones at the moment, but totally fine.
Just downloaded Jebora yesterday and I’m really liking it. I initially tried the lemmy.ml website as my first steps into the fediverse, but was sort of confused on how it all linked together. Jebora was a big help for me in finding instances to follow and just generally making my user experience better overall.
So I second this recommendation.
https://github.com/dessalines/jerboa
Link for the lazy
It’s also on the app store.
Same with the iOS app.
Play Store link for the lazy.
OMG I just flashed back to that “add account” bit on the sidebar…🤯
I hadn’t processed that it meant I could run more than one account from the same app. How cool!
Oh, so the person who posted their tiny penis on the feminism community actually admitted to it? Fascinating. They do know their post lasted like two minutes, right? I was more impressed with Beehaw’s moderation team acting so fast than I was with their quick shot.
this happened? >_>
@anthoniix pooky trolled some fiminatzis, beehaw had a midlifechrisis and then unfederated. that’s it really. why that took a 5 page magnus opus i don’t know.
wait is that what happened? beehaw defederated over one user/post?
There would have been more and there were probably more such posts. These kind of safe spaces inevitably attract trolls looking for the wrong kind of attention.
Yup that’s probably the case. But I’m a bit surprised if they were that quick and drastic over a single post. The way they made it sound was as if there was a ton of people engaging in a way they didn’t approve. not that there was just one troll.
I find their reaction understandable. In my experience, even one bad post can cause dramatic shifts in user demographics, so if you don’t take a heavy-handed approach it can really end up having lasting negative effects on the server.
Yeah it’s understandable given their goal. I’m just surprised is all.
So I don’t know what solutions you have discussed with the other instance admins, and I actually know little about how it all works currently, but I had a thought about this for the fediverse as a whole: the admins/moderators of a user’s home instance should be moderating/responsible for that user’s engagement with communities on other instances.
Right now if Person A creates Instance A and a community on that instance becomes really popular fediverse-wide, Person A is stuck in the lurch of dealing with all of the engagement from everywhere else in the fediverse. If Instance A has 10 users or 100000 users, they still have to deal with x-thousands of users from all over the fediverse. More than likely they’ll just want to defederate, especially if they are small. At the same time, if Person B creates Instance B that invites trolls (on purpose or not) it seems that they have little say in what their own users do on Instance A’s community. In fact, as you pointed out, Person B might not even know that a user from their instance is trolling Instance A.
Instead, if mods on Instance A take any action against the user on their instance, mods on the user’s home instance (AKA Instance B) should immediately and automatically be notified. Then the moderators from Instance B will need to respond how they see fit with the user. If they don’t see a problem, maybe they do nothing (e.g. the two instances have different philosophies.) But if they do see an issue, they then have the opportunity to respond in whatever way makes sense. Then, between the two instances, if the actions taken on either side seem appropriate, the two instances can continue to get along (i.e. federate). If they disagree in some way (maybe Instance B thinks Instance A is too draconian or maybe Instance A thinks Instance B is too lax) they can part ways (i.e. defederate).
As an extension to this, it could help Instance B from being a source of brigading. If they suddenly see a bunch of reports coming in from Instance A they would be able to take action on their own side to stop it, either through temporarily defederating or some other mechanism.
All in all the purpose would be to give both instances the chance to deal with the issues before defederating; hopefully alleviating some of the pressure off of Instance A, and giving Instance B the opportunity to show whether they should be trusted (or not) in general.
This could be taken a step further and their could be trusted and untrusted federations. Trusted federations work like normal and untrusted federations require mods from the user’s home instance to moderate all engagement before it actually posts to the remote instance. This puts a burden on the home instance, but that’s actually the point. If you’re willing to grow to large numbers and federate widely, then you need to be willing to moderate your users’ content, rather than imposing your users on everyone else (until they defederate.)
Edit to add: I should mention that I very much appreciate this instance and that I was able to easily create an account, and, I was disappointed by the defederation as it seems like the kind of thing that will kill Lemmy from scaling to something mainstream. I don’t think that’s what the creators of Lemmy want though, anyway.
I like your idea but …who would really want to bother?
It sounds like potentially parenting any/all of your users.
The alternative is to become a platform where people go to register in order to be assholes. If the user population of your instance is too big for the moderation team then close registrations until the workload is small enough.
