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 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 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 (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). 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.

  • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPM
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    1 year ago

    This decision was about users from other instances coming here and causing trouble, not beehaw users going elsewhere. The intent isn’t to keep users siloed in here.

    yeah to be clear: we don’t want this either! it sucks! but that’s how it is and we’re willing to ultimately bite that bullet and any potential consequences.

    • flamingarms@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Is there a way for us to see all the instances you have defederated from? As a new user, it’s really confusing that I can still go to a community and post a comment there without knowing that we’re defederated from them and they will never see it.

      • Cass.Forest@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        If you scroll all the way to the bottom, there’s a link that says Instances; it’ll show you every instance Beehaw has blocked.

      • Pigeon@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Oof, yeah, that doesn’t sound great.

        Apparently users from instances that don’t disable downvotes have a similar confusion when they look at beehaw content, too, because their instances show them downvote buttons and counts (local to their instance I guess?) that don’t actually get applied on beehaw in any way.

        • flamingarms@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Oh that’s interesting. So it’s not just a connection being made when it comes to federation; contributions are stored locally somehow too, maybe?

    • Yabai@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I just fail to see how this solves anything, people can easily sign up here or another non-blocked instance to troll.

      • Dee@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        people can easily sign up here or another non-blocked instance

        It requires approval to sign up here and a lot of the other instances Beehaw is federated with, because of that filter it will drastically cut down on trolls and make moderation much easier for the small team here.

        The beauty of the fediverse is that we can go make a lemmy.world account and enjoy all that content if we want. I have an account there already, and a kbin.social account because it’s temporarily defederated from just about everyone.

        • Pigeon@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          We need maybe a desktop client that can independently make it easy for each user to switch between accounts, like Jerboa apparently enables for android (and mlem for IOS, maybe?)

          • Gmr Leon@mstdn.social
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            1 year ago

            @Lowbird @Dee_Imaginarium On desktop you can be signed into different instances via different tabs, unless I’m misunderstanding you. Arguably a little clunky, but I do this with Mastodon to switch between a more moderated & focused instance, & a more general instance.

            I imagine some may end up approaching Lemmy similarly now with Beehaw’s decision (which I understand & honestly anticipated happening sooner).

            • Dee@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              Yeah, that’s what I do for now until better functionality is developed for switching in Lemmy. It’s not the best but still plenty workable for me.

      • Rentlar@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        The two blocked instances in particular allow signup without application. To sign up here you need to show you are of good character. Sure, other instances’ applications aren’t as rigorous but due to waiting periods it will still discourage people from making spam/troll accounts and evade user bans.

        One particular thing in the modlog I spotted was a username lgbtslayer from a now-defederated instance making a stupid and nasty post in the LGBTQ+ community on here. No self-respecting admin reviewing applications would allow a username with a clear meaning to be hurtful to others. Seems like the Beehaw admins are plugging this hole earlier rather than later before it becomes too much for the handful of them to handle.

        • Pigeon@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Yeah. It won’t prevent people from play-acting like they’re legitimately on board with beehaw’s philosophy to get in the door, but the number of people willing to go to that length will be a lot smaller. And if we were to get brigaded by some concerted effort to sneak trolls in the door, beehaw can close the door even more, temporarily.