Beehaw “moderators” don’t have an issue with their user base checking out other communities. As is clearly obvious from the fact that they aren’t defederated from all other instances.
They do have an issue with droves of unvetted users from other instances trolling and harassing their community though. And the most effective way to deal with that currently is to defederate from the instances that the majority of those bad-faith users are coming from. The unfortunate (and unintentional) side effect is that Beehaw users won’t be able to interact with any of the users from those instances.
This is a situation born out of a combination of
- lack of manpower and moderation tools
- gaps in the configuration of inter-instance interactions
- the way the internet works
You can disagree with this decision and users are free to switch, but this meme is a poor caricature of the actual effects of Beehaw’s actions and (at least in my estimation) of their intentions.
The decision to defederate is less of an attack or an indictment against the other instances and more of a practical necessity for them to protect their community.
If the user base of the lemmy verse keeps growing I wouldn’t be surprised if either
- more granular control over the way instances interact with each other is implemented and the restrictions are softened or
- the amount of spammers and trolls reaches a level that forces more instances to vet their users and the defederation is lifted entirely or
- more powerful moderation tools show up and in combination with a greater number of people moderating makes the pre-screening of users unnecessary
I saw a wave of the harassing spam they were getting right before they defederated. One was a meme about lynching drag performers. Another was a picture of an erection that was posted in what looked like every feminist and trans friendly space, asking if it was bigger than the ones owned by the denizens of the communities. I’m sure it was just a small fraction of what they were dealing with as more shitty little hatemongers find their way to Lemmy, but I happened to catch it by sorting by new at exactly the wrong time. I can’t blame the Beehaw mods for not wanting to deal with the psychological toll that comes with manually moderating that kind of content.
I saw dick-pic spam.
There’s a lot of words we can use, but its a lot faster to just say they got harassed by the whole slew of NSFW-spam, porn-spam, harassers and such.
Sure, but a lot of users here are minimizing how bad it was, so I wanted to be specific about how explicitly hateful it was.
Yeah. I’m surprised by how hostile ordinary users have been at this point. Beehaw defedrated after the mods were swamped and most of the content they had to deal with was from these two instances.
I have accounts on both and I was just reading a discussion on beehaw where both the owners of lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had chimed in and everyone was talking about how to get federated back in the future after beehaw have had a chance to get more moderators and the influx of users stabilizes at the end of the month.
My only gripe is that all of my negative interactions at this point have been with people from lemmy.ml so why do they remain while the other two were defederated? But that might be just my experience.
I think shit and world got defederated because they don’t have that “why do you want to join” question on the sign up page, and so is easy to make spam accounts on.
Well sort of. They got defeated because it was users from those communities causing a large portion of incidents that needed moderation. Open sign-ups are fine if you have some other way to filter users.
Yeah I agree. They’ve been quite open about everything so far and their main issue was the modding implications of open sign up. The tools just don’t exist yet to manage it effectively and keep the kind of community they want, so it’s just easier to defederate for now until they do. They have a dialogue open with shit just works and said that the admin of lemmy.world hasn’t replied to their message, but that it’s fine if they don’t want to talk too.
I am a bit disappointed that inter-instance sniping has started so early though. I personally am on both instances and am going to try and treat both in good faith for now
Fortunately, @ruud made a comment https://beehaw.org/comment/298646. They should be working together soon.
Oh good that’s promising. Ultimately this platform generally is only going to work en masse if everyone tries to work with each other. I know they don’t have to necessarily, but it’s nice to get along
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No, the meme is accurate. The owners of beehaw are so obsessed with protecting their users from possible harassment that they are willing to put them in a prison with no communication with most of the outside world (lemmy.world has the most active users and sh.itjust.works is in top 5).
And the users on beehaw are free to create accounts on other instances if they want. Your prison metaphor is a bad one.
I’ll be honest: that’s a shitty way of handling this. Making 20 accounts to view content from 20 different instances that don’t want to cooperate with one another defeats the purpose of all of this. If that’s the plan, the Lemmyverse or whatever it’s called is dead on arrival.
The plan is to refederate after Lemmy moderation tools catch up to the needs of Beehaw.org.
Seems reasonable to me?
It’s just temporary, primarily due to lemmy having very poor moderation tools. Once moderation tools improves, beehaw mods should be able to handle refederating.
Just use small instances with good moderation policies.
They are restricting their users freedom. But yes the users are free to leave.
And they can leave beehaw on a full-time basis. Let the admins decide how they want to run their instances, and if users don’t like it, they can hop over to another. This is all a part of how decentralization is supposed to work. Of course it’s messy and inconsistent.
There are plenty of beehaw users who agreed with defederation. After all, they had to essentially write an essay to be allowed in at all. I’m not surprised there are users who are okay with defederating. And again, the ones who aren’t are free to make accounts on instances with open door policies, like shit or world. Beehaw admins probably prefer it that way anyway.
Did those users agree after the fact or were they asked first? If there was a vote and that’s what their users choose then I take back what I said. My impression was that there wasn’t any vote.
You seem to be thinking of instances like ISPs or something.
Instances are closer related to a house holding multiple parties in multiple rooms. People from other houses are welcome to join, but with the lack of moderation tools, if people from your house act like fools or assholes don’t be surprised when your house is collectively barred.
The only reason people are so upset is because they have misframed what Lemmy is in their heads as some libertarian wet dream with no authority whatever. There is an authority. It is each instance admin.
If I create an email service, a lot of people sign up to use it and after some time I tell them I will no longer deliver emails to gmail.com, would that be alright?
That happens all the time with spam mail servers which is exactly the same problem beehaw was having. If you set up an email service that hosts spam bots and do nothing about it then the other email services will start blocking it.
Beehaw was being spamed with dick pics and other shit that was actively malicious. They could ban those profiles but then those users just went and made new profiles on lemmy.world or one of the other instances with open signup. Right now Lemmy has limited moderation tools so the only way to perminantly “ban” those users is to defederate with the instances that keep hosting them. They plan to refederate with those instances once better tools are in place to perminantly block users like that.
It would be more similar to you blocking gmail.com from sending you messagess because thier users keep flooding your server with spam.
This happens every day. Unfortunately a small group of assholes ruined it for all of us until tools are available to deal with them.
I don’t know what kind of features they need, but I could have helped make the tools and I’m sure many other people would be willing to help if they only asked.
Isn’t this exactly how gmail treats a LOT of other email services? Email is a mess of spam and whitelists and is barely usable as a result, partially because there is no human moderation.
You might be right about that. I hate email. I was just giving an example of providing a service that people rely on, then when a problem occurs cutting it off from the outside world instead of trying to fix it.
Why would you do that?
Gmail users send a lot of hateful messages so I decide to cut off all communications with them.
I have a BeeHaw account and a lemmy.world account. I’m not imprisoned lol, it’s the Internet, not some.private island. Nothing’s stopping anyone from browsing or joining any of these communities
People’s freedoms were limited for no good reason. But you are right that they can leave. Users can leave Reddit too.
Freedoms were not limited. Any user can still go apply for a beehaw account if they want one. Any beehaw user can open an account on any other instance they want. People can still talk, people can still be heard.
No one is entitled to force others to listen to what they say. Beehaw’s owner pays for their server. It’s their own private instance. They can determine the rules that accounts that use or federate with their instance have to follow, and everyone has the freedom to associate with beehaw if they want.
Finally, beehaw isn’t a government, taking an action to limit the freedoms of their citizens. In most modern, western societies, that is between governments and their people. In nearly every similar structure, those people do not have the same “rights” in regards to private businesses or private organizations.
Don’t believe me? Go into a grocery store and start screaming obscenities at fellow customers and see how long it takes you to be forcibly removed and banned from the premises. And that won’t be your freedoms being limited, either. It will be that private business deciding that you’re not allowed to associate with them any longer.
This is no different. The people who run beehaw can choose how to run their space. It’s their money they pay for the service with. We don’t get to tell them how to spend it. Their users and donors have a say in it, and if their users and donors don’t like how the operators respond to their expectations, then they won’t have users and donors. That’s for them to decide.
People act like they’re entitled to an audience with beehaw users, and they simply aren’t. It’s that easy. You can’t just go into your neighbor’s house and demand they listen to what you have to say. They can, and will, boot your ass to the curb, or worse, as soon as they’re tired of listening. I’m not sure why this is so hard for some people to understand.
fucking exactly lmao
people from other instances seem to have felt entitled to Beehaw’s communities and are acting like something was stolen from them when they’d never owned it to begin with
They could also simply apply for an account on lemmy.world, if they wanted. I hear the bar is pretty low, and the users of beehaw were indirectly notified of this, too. And the inconvenience of having to create a second account is almost nonexistent.
Users are people capable of making their own choices. It they don’t like the moderation approach they can just make a new account elsewhere. You don’t get to tell them what they like.
Yes, how dare I criticize someone’s actions and the impact they have on our community.
It is literally their community. They host it. They moderate it.
“Lemmy” is not a community, it is a loose federation of instances that can choose not to federate with other instances.
Your outrage seems based on “HOW DARE THEY BLOCK US FROM OUR COMMUNITY”, but it was never yours. You were merely allowed to use it
It hurts both their users and us. The federation is now more divided for no good reason.
If they wanted to create a private community from the start that would be perfectly fine. But they let people sign up and create big communities that everyone else now relies on and then defederated. Isn’t that a bit irresponsible?
Isn’t it a bit irresponsible to let bigoted trolls post a lot of dick pics? Because that’s what was going on. You’re talking about [theoretical problems], but the mods of Beehaw made a (possibly flawed) call during an emerging situation to avoid a lot of [actually existing problems].
Are you saying that the only possible actions are to allow trolls or defederate? It seems to me that there are also other, better solutions. If their decision was flawed, we should be able to criticize it.
No, that is moderation.
These big communities were formed by people who may or may not have understood what federation means. This is the inherent implication that comes with subscribing to a community that is located on a separate instance. As long as the moderation tools are insufficient to stop rampant trolling, this is the only real reaction the instances have available If they are not willing to add a whole bunch of moderators.
Irresponsible is visiting other instances and not recognizing that what you post also reflects on your instance.
I see, you see Lemmy as being one big community, rather than separate communities that can interact with each other
so you see defederating as like locking away a part of the community, rather than a community deciding to lock up for a bit
The community didn’t decide this as far as I know. It was the owners who did it and informed their community after the fact. If there was some kind of vote and I missed it, let me know.
fucking lmao
as if they can’f make an account on another instance
y’all are just hurt because you think you’re being rejected and insulted by this, when they made it clear that it wasn’t personal or permanent
as if they can’f make an account on another instance
So that makes it right to cut people off from the outside world without asking them first? Do you want things like this to keep happening? Or should we maybe try other solutions first? Somehow other instances didn’t have to defederate, so maybe it’s not necessary?
nobody is cut off, holy shit
this is not as big of a deal as you’re making it
people can make new accounts on freer instances in seconds
Nothing wrong with that imo. If you don’t like it, just use another instance.
This system means people can foster their instances to be however they want, and that’s great!
Also, fyi, if you’re on lemmy.world, leave any beehaw comms you’ve joined and join alternate comms in other instances. The beehaw comms are going to be very empty on your end soon.
I also predict that their comms will die out in a few weeks, unless they federate again.
Still, interesting challenge to the whole federation concept, if it’s even possible for you to shape/customize a community of people, if you have to let anyone in from anywhere.
When I was registering to lemmy, BH was already big, I read their rules/concept and was thinking how would that even work (e.g. no downvotes) with federation.
Let’s see where it goes, but I would be happier if we all stay federated and build a big userbase, rather than fragmenting into small silos, and having 5 different versions of a topic-based community with a few K users each.
Is there an easy way to shift an account between instances? Or do you need to start from scratch with a new account on each instance?
Not any that I know of. Doesn’t matter much though; there’s no karma system here to worry about, and you only really need one account on an instance that isn’t controversial (like lemmy.world and lemm.ee, and really, most instances)
You can check if an instance is blocking any others by clicking ‘instances’ at the bottom of the page.
This beehaw thing is very rare. Just stay away from the instance and its comms for now until lemmy’s improved further to support this massive wave of users.
Is kbin a good place to set up shop? I don’t really understand the advantages/disadvantages of different instances. I made an account on lemmy.world first, but I remade my account on kbin a few hours later because I like the kbin interface a little more.
Also, if there’s no karma, what are the “reputation points” in my profile?
I prefer Kbin over Lemmy because it feels like old reddit, and the magazines are a lot more like checking my subreddits than others. It’s also not currently defederated with anything, but it’s worth noting that could change at any point. Kbin is the fastest growing of any of the instances atm,
At the end of the day, the whole fediverse thing means, within reason, it doesn’t really matter where you set up shop.
I’m also curious which will see more development. Kbin has a lower bar to entry because it’s PHP but I imagine there are others that have no interest in touching PHP unless I’m being paid for it. I’d have to learn Rust to help with Lemmy but I have heard really good things about it so I’m considering it.
Do magazines differ from lemmy communities? I have a Kbin account and I’d say they’re the same. kbin.social/m/gaming is the same thing as lemmy.world/c/gaming.
So the difference for me would only be the UI, which looks more like reddit than lemmy does right now but that can also change in the future.What kinda bugs me about Kbin atm are 3 things:
You can’t collapse comments (really hard for mobile usage)
You have no infinite scrolling
It’s less easy to spot in the feed if a magazine is from a lemmy instance or from kbin(not that it matters really but it’s still nice to know)The general look of the feed is better though with every thread having its own box. I’d also want a bit more separation of different threads on Lemmy aside from those thin and barely visible lines
Is kbin a good place to set up shop? I don’t really understand the advantages/disadvantages of different instances.
Sure! If you like that more. You can still join lemmy comms through it after all (and vice-versa!) Personally, I prefer lemmy because it’s closer to what reddit is/was
what are the “reputation points” in my profile?
Only a kbin thing afaik, doesn’t affect your profile on lemmy.
And this a prime example of why the multi-instance system is great. Don’t like one instance? Go to another one.
EDIT: I also wish to say that I feel both sides of the situation have merit. Yes, it sucks that we’ve been defederated, but in all fairness, there legitimately was an issue with abusive users causing havoc over on Beehaw.
Yeah I think Beehaw have a clear ethos and want to protect that. I think the misunderstanding is from the new people influxing into Lemmy/Kbin (me included) - they don’t have to be a part of the wider Fediverse. They’re big by the standards of Lemmy/Kbin when people arrived so people are suprised that they don’t seem to “want” a big influx - they were expecting them to embrace redditors and want to be the new reddit. They understandably want to be able to moderate their communities and that’s difficult with the current tools. They may also want to screen their users which may not be ultimately sustainable in a federate model.
Beehaw will continue and succeed in it’s aims but it’s probably not going to be a big player long term, but I don’t think it wants to be the mass choice. Lemmy.world and Fedia.io / kbin.social at the moment seem like more likely bets long term as they’re embracing the growth, and analogous communities to big familiar Reddit communities are being created which will be clear places to go for future influxes.
Let them do what they want. The communities you wanna check out will be available elsewhere with time.
What bothers me about this is that the administrators at sh.itjust.works, beehaw.org, and lemmy.world are all being adults about this.
While this Reddit-like stampede is already trying to create an us-vs-them environment.
It’s fine. The adults are adulting. Maybe a bit of Reddit deprogramming is all that is needed for people to become more reasonable.
Exactly! I’m new here (from Reddit) it’s very clear that some of us new ppl are getting confused as to why instances are having to defed and are getting upset at the admins.
We are the reason!
The admins are working hard with the extra traffic and increased exposure to content that may not have previously been welcome in their communities.
My fellow Reddit refugees, post and comment on the content you want to see, not the drama and the uncertainty right now. Find your ppl in the new communities and start sharing and conversing like the good old days on Reddit.
The Reddit deprogramming goes deep, for sure. I still find myself deleting comments here after typing them out because there is a 50/50 chance of getting abuse or arguments from someone for basically anything you post on that site.
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Great comment imo
I’m hoping that the overall lack of certain systemic encouragements from commercial socials that everyone has become horrifically used to interacting with will squash a lot of this kind of behavior over time. That is, the bullshit no longer serves the algo that doesn’t exist herre, and the lack of positive feedback will either cause them to change their ways or just leave.
I wonder if Lemmy’s upvote system overweights the first few upvotes the way Reddit did. That drove people to make high engagement posts since a sudden flurry of comments on a rage-bait post tended to slingshot stuff to the top reliably. If Lemmy doesn’t do that, it will help. The lack of eyeballs in Lemmyverse should discourage bots to some degree.
I’m hoping the same for Mastodon. A LOT of the behaviors that people have internalized come down to trying to game the algorithm with hot takes and such, but the limited virality of the Mastodon platform will hopefully discourage all their usual bullshit, or they’ll go.
I think the people who just want Reddit will return to it, at least for a while, since Lemmy was just their methadone and the heroin store is back open now. Me, I’ve been peeling away from both Reddit and Twitter for a long time so I’m ready to move on. There was a distinct culture on the Fediverse before all these sudden surges in users, hopefully once things settle that culture will get a chance to assert itself again.
The us vs them mentality is such a default human reaction, one that you have to actively battle in yourself.
I like the whole idea of federation and I think the more we use the platform the better and more tailored our experiences will be.
It’s a ground up, organic process, and we’re still figuring it out. I think things will naturally develop, because that is how this system is set up.
fr, I just failed that battle not that long ago lol.
I think between removing Reddit from my habits and the positive engagement here I’ll be ripe yet!
Yea I really like it here. I am suspicious of over positivity, but this feels good. So I’m rolling with it.
It is really interesting watching a new community bloom.
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Beehaw.org, a large powerful Lemmy server, has defederated from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works in response to a severe harassment campaign involving porn-spam and death threats.
This means beehaw.org users and communities are now cut off from Lemmy.world and vice versa.
The full details are a bit hard to follow, but the TL;DR: Beehaw.org wants a curated community and Lemmy.world doesn’t. Beehaw.org has a tougher sign up process while it’s basically free at Lemmy.world.
But that’s not a big deal or the real drama. People are all looking into the future. /R/piracy has moved into the Fediverse, as have pornographic servers. So now there are discussions on all sorts of topics and what should be or shouldn’t be federated.
That’s fine. The federization model works, but differently than what Redditors are used to. So I think people are confused about how things play out on the Lemmy-community.
undefined>Beehaw.org wants a curated community and Lemmy.world doesn’t. Beehaw.org has a tougher sign up process while it’s basically free at Lemmy.world.
To be fair beehaw seems very different from the joyous anarchic freedom we enjoy here (I’ve been on Lemmy for a week and feel more at home than I ever was on Reddit). No right to create new communities, registration needs approval…
maybe they’ll come back to the federation, maybe they’ll be their own thing. I hope for the former because there is some great content there too.
I’ve been part of super-tight, highly curated communities before. They’re nice in their own way and a fully different way of running a community than Reddit-style that most are used to.
I think for a lot of (former) Redditors, they come over here on Lemmy.world and see a tightly curated community like Beehaw.org and just get confused. Something like that was simply not possible in Reddit and runs counter to the way popular internet sites (not just Reddit, but Twitter, Facebook, etc. etc.) were run. But this is closer to the BBS days where recruitment was a phone-call and a secret code you found at the gym… back in those days, all communities were tightly curated and Reddit is the aberration.
In any case, Lemmy (and the Fediverse) allows the “freedom” group to interact with the “tight / curation” world, in a… tight controlled manner. Its alien, its unnatural to some, etc. etc. But hey, its Lemmy. That’s how we’re gonna roll.
Yeah, no problem with a super tight community on a forum. I’m part of places like that, they’re great, we really know each other, some of the people I met there are now some of my closest friends.
I just feel that for place(s) like here, everyone should have the right to choose what content they want (or not) to see in this fast growing network.
Reddit refugee here. I chose lemmy.world because it was easy to register on and haven’t had any issues. Losing beehaw will just mean people who want the reddit like experience will move to other instances. Having a great time so far.
That sounds so incredibly unappealing lol, I hope they enjoy it!
Eh. To each their own.
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Note that user@programming.dev still can access everything. So yeah, everything is working as expected, much to the surprise of the former Redditors who dont understand federation yet.
To be fair: this is a deeply philosophical issue of open vs closed, federated vs centralized, etc etc that people are touching upon. But this is Lemmy, over there is Reddit. Things will be different, especially how moderators and administrators act.
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To add more context, currently Lemmy doesn’t offer great moderation tools. So if a relatively open instance like lemmy.world interacts with beehaw, beehaw ability to shut down the ‘few bad apples’ coming from lemmy.world is rudimentary at best.
At a certain point, admins just can’t keep up and have to make a judgment call. Either accept that trolls and bad actors are going to get through or cut off the source of the infection, regardless of whether or not that impacts regular users.
Beehaw has already stated that they’re open to reconnecting once they have a better way of moderating and dealing with bad actors.
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If they are getting flooded by users of another instance who simply want to troll and they don’t have an effective way of then it’s hard to blame them for taking the action that they did.
The comments I’ve read were mostly about Beehaw users clicking on “All” on the main page and then getting upset that they see content they don’t like.
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It’s pretty easy to sum up. The admins on beehaw decided to break federation with a couple of other instances including lemmy.world. Their reasoning being that the open registration policies and relative lack of oversight in those instances were incompatible with the space they wanted to create on beehaw. What this means is that users from lemmy.world cannot interact with users on beehaw and vice versa.
The technical details of how all this works are a bit more complicated, but that’s the basic gist.
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As a lemmy.world user, will I still be able to lurk beehaw communities? Or will they not be updated on my instance? In other words, is defederation directional or static?
You won’t be able to see untill they refed.
In a way, but the details are complicated enough that I’m a little fuzzy on how it all plays out myself. As I understand it though lemmy.world users would be looking at the version of the beehaw community that is stored on lemmy.world. They can view and even interact with posts and communities as if nothing had changed. However, any content they generate would not leave lemmy.world. Additionally there are details regarding how certain communities start being hosted that I am unsure of.
the short of it is beehaw is a selective community that is fairly liberal and expect people to be respectful to each other. That is the alien concept of a lot of reddit refugees and hence beehaw has to leave the larger federation of lemmy/fediverse and that means you won’t be able to see their topics here (say lemmy.world). A lot of people seem to be mad that they’re doing it and saying angry things about it. There is a possibility when they get better mod tools they can return, but for now there is simply not enough mods to control the refugee trolls.
beehaw initially seemed like a nice good natured well rounded place but they got controlling and weird very quickly. never even let me in, i typed pretty good faith answers and haven’t heard shit ofc
Toxic positivity is absolutely a thing.
God I know people like that, the most normal social behavior gets interpreted as hostility and is met with aggression.
check out their modlog. they have way too many unnecesary bans or post removals. wasting energy instead of focusing on the real trolls.
How do I filter modlog to only show logs from given instance? I’ve entered modlog that is available at bottom of page on beehaw and also different instance and the modlog is quite similar with some beehaw entries not showing up on other and vice versa.
I assume the modlog is combined from all federated instances, so I can’t really tell what actions are made by beehaw unless it references community belonging to beehaw.
I’m surprised they didn’t just ask for more mod help.
Probably a lack of people with the same vision and trust as the admins
Beehaw was almost responsible for me not joining this service at all, got frustrated when I couldn’t log into my account a week after I made it and nearly gave up entirely.
Yup I had this experience too. I’ve read that their denial emails aren’t being sent out by their mail server, but it really felt like they just ghosted me.
I’m on the SDF instance. It’s a small instance that seems to Federate with all the big ones including Beehaw. It has manual approval but only asks one question and approval is within a day.
Also the host platform has been around since 1987.
SDF gang rise up. Love the historical aspect of the platform
There’s always a chance you might have unfortunately been overlooked from the sheer amount of applications the admins have to sort through daily. I had to resubmit my app twice to get through, same answers and all. Got approved in under 30 mins
Maybe they want to turn it into some kind of cult?
Dislike the meme, because I fully believe the beehaw decisions have solid, purely technical, grounds.
thats great! people think differently.
I’m hoping they re-federate soon after their technical gripes are ironed out. Seems like a promising community, but only time will tell.
https://beehaw.org/post/594843 It seems like there is work on it, but the lemmy.world owner does not respond to beehaw admins
It seems like there is work on it, but the lemmy.world owner does not respond to beehaw admins
Maybe you should have read all of what you linked: https://beehaw.org/comment/298646
tldr: Beehaw admin sent Ruud a statement but didn’t ask any question or ask for comment. Ruud read and acknowledged the statement but didn’t reply because there was no question to reply to. They’re now in a chat room with some other instance admins.
IMO quite some trouble when the easy solution is to just not subscribe to communities you don’t like.
Thanks for the correction, i read the post when it was made and only re read the post itself when linking. The problem as far as i understand it wasnt with communities people didnt like, but with trolls and harassment that is hardly controlled with a no barrier signup process. As long as the mod tools are not good enough to deal with that, beehaw.org has every reason to deal with this in a way that compromises content wise.
The very existence of that community boils down to people screaming the word “Tankie” at one another while trying to reproduce the most cringe corners of old Reddit.
Beehaw mods are just another group of power tripping nerds common to the social media space. These technical issues are all outgrowths of their desperate need to control discourse.
I swear I’ve never heard “tankie” before a week ago and now I’m on Lemmy I read it 50 times a day.
I still don’t understand what it means. From the context, I assume it’s bad to be one, but I have no idea why.
Tankie is a term invented by anti Stalinist Marxists in Britain used against the people who followed the marxist-leninist line and supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary where the USSR send in tanks to violently crush reformist uprisings. It has since been used as a pejorative for Stalinists and soviet-apologists, mainly by other leftists.
Let’s be real, it’s mostly used as a pejorative for “leftist I don’t like” these days.
now, why is this phrase so common on lemmy all of a sudden?
Because the main developers of Lemmy are concerningly biased. Luckily the project is open source but unfortunately it does appear that the lead developers are into defending the crimes of the CCP mainly through moderation on their own platform (which of course is their right). They strongly dislike discussion of CCP crimes on their platform and ban users.
I unfortunately don’t have the links but there are 3 threads you can pull on to kind of paint a picture of what the lead devs opinions are.
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His moderation tendencies on lemmy.ml.
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His GitHub compendium on communism and Marxism and how they didn’t necessarily fail.
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A breakdown of everything on Mastodon by what appears to be a slighted user. This is the personal vendetta they are talking about in the most recent blog posting.
Ironically enough I kind of dismissed the twitter drama as drama until I read the most recent article the dev team posted and their denial caught my eye. Especially how they said it wasn’t worth addressing. Didn’t sit right with me and I saw some others feeling the same way posting about it.
People are also pointing out that prior to the influx of users from Reddit the Lemmy ecosystem was ‘red’ in a sense but it’s largely been suppressed by the sudden popularity.
Do I think any of this matters? Honestly, yes I do.
Only because, of course, the lead developers opinions matter and will influence the features the project will incorporate as time goes on. A recent example that comes to mind is the PolyMC controversy where the lead dev went rogue and denounced LGBT or something. The team all quit and ported it over to Prism Launcher.
Instances like that can happen and come up. You never know what might happen. Anyways it’s not affecting anything right this moment so it might be a sit and watch scenario.
Grab some popcorn I guess.
Oh and for anyone curious I think socialism is awesome and I live in Canada so I’m not some kind of capitalist romanticizer. I think a mix works best but ultimately capitalism will collapse under its own weight. Especially if left unregulated.
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Tankies are usually characterised by their willingness to defend the use of tanks to crush civilians who speak out against authoritarian communist governments.
I feel this should have been part of my beloved “Trotskyist insults” stamp set I was gifted many years ago.
I mean that’s literally what they say in their sign up form, but a bit more self congratulatory, so it’s not really a surprise is it? They don’t want to deal with randos and reserve the right to kick anybody out for what they consider “asshole” behavior.
I see little proof for that yet. They behave like a small forum which reached its capacity.
You know you really nailed it when you hit that equal up/down ratio!
Coming from sh.itjust.works. It seems there is a pattern of some attacks to forcing defederating some lemmy instances. Those threads can be found on both sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world. There are several vocal users dominating those threads (some user even reaches 20+ comments written in the same thread). Those user whose complaining user has total against, and already hostile to the instance they dislike, and interact to the other instances with bad faith, provoking, and insulting those instance. I believe this is some sort of coordinated pattern to break fediverse into echo-chamber.
IMO, defederation should be used as last resort, because normal user, especially seeking small niches, will be affected the most. In case of beehaw, there are tons of factors that are justifiable. I wish this defederation drama is not become the defining feature on both lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
I believe individual user can block communities and users, plus block instance feature is in the works. I wish the people who starts those threads can just do that.
I wouldn’t be surprised if reddit is cooking some shit up on their end tbh.
Can you link to those threads? It’s my opinion that coordinated attacks like that should result in bans. Can you ban users from other instances on your instance?
Yes.
The problem is that sh.itjust.works has an open-registration policy. So when Beehaw.org banned a user, they just made user2@sh.itjust.works and then user3@sh.itjustworks (etc. etc.) and Beehaw.org kept getting flooded with dick-pic spam.
The underlying question is one of open-registration vs closed-registration. Furthermore, its compounded by the fact that Mastodon-like moderation tools don’t exist yet (Lemmy is much newer), so solutions from Mastodon don’t exist yet.
It sounds like Beehaw.org is pretty confident that Mastodon-like moderation tools will allow them to open back up.
It is still me just under different account. I decide seeing if the defederates posts settle before I reply to you.
On sh.itjust.works, This user creates several threads and comments to making wave hating on exploding-heads.com in last 24 hours and he is proud of the clout he generates. There are also several brigading kbin.social people replying to my comments as camoflaging as sh.itjust.works people; in my instance kbin.social people do not have their @ domain. I am correct on this one; there are several trolls try to abuse defederate feature disguised as community voice as they please.
In this instance I immediately see another post, that is posted in the same day here. However, this attempt immediately backtracked by the OP, so I think this is different than what happens on sh.itjust.works so I am wrong on this one.
Yep it’s definitely a grand conspiracy and totally not an inevitability in this type of system. Could I also get your opinion on the moon landings?
There is no moon.
Well actually the moon is a potato
not OP, but sure
they filmed the moon landing on the moon
all of that footage we have? Fake
they did travel to the moon but they faked all of the footage on site (the moon)
also Kubrick was there
Haha I like this. The footage is indeed from the moon but descriptive in some other fashion other than being outright fake?
the moon buggy on camera was a wooden replica but to get it on site (the moon), they had to build an actual moon lander and everything
They had some quality communites. Ah well, we can make them here with blackjack and hookers.
Most of them already have popular alternatives
what are the popular alternatives to blackjack and hookers? asking for a friend
I think it’s a fair point. They won’t be able to remain federated to many instances if their point of contention is open-enrollment.
I understand needing the Lemmy moderation tools to improve and that it’s temporary, but the damage to their own communities and users may not be temporary.
Their users will turn inward and end up preferring their own communities—which is fine. However it also means that non-beehaw users will shy away from those communities in favour of others, lest their home site get de-federated at some point for the same reasons. These effects combined means slow-to-grow, low-visibility communities in the fediverse, and increases the chance that their communities may dwindle if others of the same subject become pre-eminent outside of Beehaw.
In short, while I understand their reasons, I think that it risks making Beehaw.org permanently insular and ultimately much more similar to a non-fediverse website.
Exactly. The point of the fediverse is the federation. Without that, you have a simple online forum from the 2000s. Congratulations, your time machine worked
I think that is currently already in the process of happening. The reactions to the announcement from Beehaw users can generally be split into
23 categories:-
Support, we should keep our communities insular
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Neutral, I support whatever the admins decide
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Opposition, I’m leaving to an instance that isn’t insular
EDIT: Added neutral, because on reflection there were quite a few posts like that
This means they are already self-selecting for insularity, which means the resulting userbase is very likely to want this “temporary” solution to become a permanent one.
This isn’t necessarily an issue: if the userbase is happy with their insular nature and are comfortable with it, and it’s clearly signposted on the sign-up, then after some network healing where we build communities separate from Beehaw everybody gets what they want
It’s also not an either or. You can want to be part of Beehaw to have a close-knit home base while also singing up for other instances to bop around on.
Sup. I’m doing that. It’s working pretty well for me. I recommend it to anyone who wants to participate in the communities on beehaw but also wants the very permissive pattern, particularly if you have a favorite community here or on lemmy.world. I see plenty of people who are upset that they really liked a community on beehaw and now because their instance is defederated they can’t go there, but consider that that community was the way that it was because of decisions made about moderation
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I think their problem is open enrollment in combination with lack of moderation and mod tools to handle that. Defederation is not permanent, as Lemmy implements better mod and admin tools instances which have defederated to mitigate spam or trolls can start opening up more again.
Yeah, they basically make you write a cover letter. I don’t even write cover letters for jobs I want. Definitely not going to write one to be approved for an Internet forum.
all i had to do was write a sentence or two and i got approved instantly
What was the sentence
something like id like to join beehaw because it seems like a nice community and id like to be part of it
Carefully writing that down. You can delete your comment now. Thank you
if they want to hide in a lil hug box that is their perogative
I think it’s a healthy part of the growth of the Fediverse. Maybe it ends up being a good idea, maybe not. Hopefully everyone can keep an open mind and learn some lessons along the way both with successes and failures. Let’s be real, if this is what kills the Fediverse then the Fediverse was doomed from the start.
This is all early days and I’m just enjoying the ride. It’s really just refreshing that it’s not some VC backed mega corp making these decision.
I’ll be honest. I really do feel their argument about open registrations is a weak one. Reddit is effectively open registration. The only thing you need on Reddit is an email and then you’re in.
The moderation tools are a fair point. I really do feel like they really want to make in their eyes a safe space. Which is their perogative but not something I personally vibe with given how much they are deleting and removing. I’ve rarely had to step in as a moderator in the places I run, most people are behaving. One total person I had to ban and they were not from Lemmy.World.
You don’t even need an email address for Reddit
You have for a while now.
They’ve only been the most popular instance for like 3 days and the mods there are already power tripping.
Unfortunately, “Defederating” is the same as “Banning yourself from everybody else”, so I trust that people will vote with their (virtual) feet and move to instances with a more diverse set of federations.
They are not power tripping, if you’ve read their posts you’d know that they have a very concrete view of the story of community they want to build and unfortunately their manpower and moderation tools just don’t allow them to stick to it while staying federated with rapidly growing communities.
Which is why I’ll say it again and again, the fediverse might’ve been the wrong choice for building a community like they want
They only defederated temporarily from two instances. BeeHaw users still have access to the majority of other instances, including kbin. Not to mention they’re already working on a way to refederate with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Go on their page, they’ve been nothing but transparent and open to suggestion. This “drama” is pointless
I know that, my point is that they don’t have the tools to do anything other than defederation right now.
If any users from other instances than those two act in the same way and they happen to be from other big instances, they’d have to defederate those too, because they have no other tools available.
And they knew they won’t have other tools availalbe when they created their instance, so they should’ve created such a platform in a place where they actualy had the tools to run it like they want.Which would’ve been a classical forum in my view.
Like they want to have a community where they can proactively prevent people from posting offensive things.
That would be the ideal case for a forum where you have a manual registration proccess like they have now here. Because here their registration process doesn’t help when you can just comment from another instance.
I disagree. The advantage of the Fediverse is finding people who wanna cultivate a similar internet experience as you. I can still comment on Beehaw because I’m on a small well-moderated platform.
And had you been on an instance that was defederated you’d have to create another account to acces their community, just like a separate forum, which I exaplained in the other post would be the better choice.
Because it doesn’t make sense to have that kind of manual approval registration system aimed to only have specific users in the community that share their values, so they clearly want to crontrol who can and cannot post there… and then being on a plattform where users can just join another instance or even create an instance for their own and then post what they want on beehaw and the only way to prevent this would be proactively blocking all other instances and working with a whitelist instead.
Agreed
I can’t believe that people paying to host an instance want it to not get flooded
This is 1984 or something
No they just want to avoid the toxicity
The toxicity is coming from within the modchat.
