There are a lot of tanky posts coming from lemmy.ml. Their whole purpose seems to be to troll and spread their bullshit far and wide. They are nearly as bad as the alt-right. They argue in bad faith and celebrate authoritarian oppression. The beehaw mods might want to consider defederating.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and opinions. I’ll bring this up to the other Beehaw admins and share this thread with them.
Seconded, or thirded, or whatever. I’ve only just realized that lemmy.ml posts are the reason I’ve kept a healthy distance from this place during the last couple of weeks. Is that instance like a testbed / launchpad for China’s latest trollbots?
Same, once I blocked it and hexbear lemmy went back to being a better version of reddit again. Substantially less shitpost and bad faith baiting.
You’d probably be better off going to an instance that defederates from those instances from the get-go.
I signed up before I understood lemmy. I was considering removed to the fediverse community about it. It’s pretty unintuitive how this all works to an outsider. Given beehaws philosophy I was considering migrating there because of this thread tbh. I will consider it tho cheers.
For what it’s worth, I have a couple accounts on Fediverse. I’m wolf_shadowheart on Kbin and SlrPnk.net, and the two of those act as the “unfiltered fediverse” and here on Beehaw is much more community discussion oriented. While our threads about specific brand new games or deep-cut niche content isn’t very full, we have lots of early-Internet question answer threads which are very nice.
Slrpnk.net isn’t defederated from much but I also use it the least. Note: The pnk.net community itself is great. It’s the wider fedi it’s attached too. There’s so much… trash? Lemmy.World may have the most users, but it has the least soul. They seem to be the redd-t equivalent of those communities, but with far fewer content posts and mostly comment posts (which I get, that’s me too.) and unfortunately as a result, these communities get heavily skewed by the type of guy on the left (the critic) while most of us are just on the right trying to enjoy stuff and maybe talk about some of the deeper implications.
Kbin is on the full opposite end with no moderation. I don’t really use blocking features, but goddamn if I have to do it to kill spam accounts. When it’s good, it’s nice and I use it in tandem with Beehaw. When it’s bad it’s really rough (just spam mostly) it gets really hard.
Anyway Tl;DR using multiple accounts isn’t a bad thing as it lets you experience multiple levels of curation. The way I use them, Beehaw is most curated, Kbin is second most curated, Slrpnk.net is least curated.
That’s actually a great suggestion. I thought of it as “I need to pick a new home to move to” but looks super simple on voyager to switch between accounts. I technically still have my kbin with the same user (and also see kbin in the modlog a lot lol). Thanks for the tips and suggestions!!
Happy to share :) Enjoy and hope to see you around, whatever you may decide!
Jesus that took me down a rabbit hole. I’ll likely see you in the new site/hopefully lemmy gets forked. What a disappointment the devs turned out to be.
The tech subs that I’m subbed to on that instance have seemed fine. Is it specific communities where this is occurring?
The tech subs often don’t go political.
Occasionally there will be posts on Lemmy development goals and those are where Tankies write Tankies stuff.
Might as well take this opportunity to point out that beehaw is still defederated from sh.itjust.works. I thought it was a bizarre decision at the time and the fact that it hasn’t been reassessed after all this time is even more baffling. Beehaw and SJW are two of the best moderated instances on Lemmy, and yet we aren’t federated with each other.
You can view the original announcement from beehaw here and the reaction from SJW here.
You’ll also note that beehaw has since refederated with lemmy.world.I have been informed that beehaw is still defederated from lemmy.world, my mistake.
Nearly a year later, it’s obvious that the decisions of beehaw admins during that critical period of time when redditors were first trying Lemmy were highly disruptive towards the development of the platform as a whole. The first level of disruption came from the direct fragmentation of communities caused by that defederation decision.
The second and more devastating impact was the impact on the perceptions of new users, who were given a manifestation of their worst fears about Lemmy and it’s federated structure. Many potential users were turned off Lemmy because they didn’t like the fact that they could suddenly be blocked off from major communities on other servers due to arbitrary admin decisions, and beehaw essentially provided the perfect example of that at a critical growth phase.
At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.
With regard to lemmy.ml, I think the main issue is that beehaw has disabled downvotes. The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers. But because beehaw doesn’t allow downvotes, has dwindled to a small userbase, and has isolated itself from other non-extremist servers (SJW), you have been left much more exposed to the tankie propaganda, with your only recourse being the nuclear option of defederation.
Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.
I don’t mean this to be an attack on the beehaw admins, because I think they have done a number of great things for Lemmy and the fediverse and I believe that our objectives are generally aligned. But I feel that I must express these frustrations, because as I have just explained, the actions of the beehaw admins also have direct consequences on fediverse users from other servers.
I think that beehaw admins, not dissimilarly to hexbear admins, tend to disregard how their actions impact the fediverse as a whole and focus solely on the proximate impact on their own userbase. This is a faulty mindset, because the fediverse is the ecosystem which we all share, and that ecosystem needs to be protected and maintained in order for all of the different organisms (instances) residing therein to thrive. Without our connection to the fediverse, all of our instances would simply wither away.
Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.
unless we’re compelled to, it is exceedingly unlikely we will upgrade. we are fully committed to moving off the platform so it just makes no sense to prioritize Lemmy updates.
with respect to refederation: we already polled that with both SJW and LW months ago and were given a very definitive no, do not refederate from our userbase. only 11% and 17% of our users were in favor of refederation respectively, and majorities were fine with continued defederation from both. our defederation policy was also strongly supported. (i believe this is the first time these numbers have been posted because they were so definitively in favor of the status quo.)
At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.
we’re not and have never been in this for numbers so this is immaterial to us–we’ve been quite public that we’d be fine having a community of a few dozen people, because that’s what we were before the Reddit fiasco. in any case: please understand that we are not responsible for the health of the Lemmy ecosystem. and even if we were (which we reject categorically) we have definitively been told to leave the platform because of our disagreements with the Lemmy developers. bettering this platform is no longer a priority for us in any way–and it is the general opinion of the team that we wasted a lot of time prioritizing that given the developer antipathy toward us. you can read more on that here if you’d like.
You should do what your users want. Growth in users for the sake of “line goes up” is a faulty attitude. Dozens of users sounds like a community of good faith users, very nice. You do you!
If I remember correctly, I definitely voted with the majority on this one, for what it’s worth.
I don’t agree with every moderator decision that’s been made, but there isn’t a site on the planet where I’m going to agree with every moderator decision, even if I’m running the damn thing. I do strongly agree though that bigger isn’t better, and that ‘that other one is bigger’ isn’t a compelling argument for re-federating.
I chime in with criticism often enough, so I figured I’d just poke my head in and say I think y’all are right on target with this one.
Thanks for the response. I didn’t realize that you had conducted polls about refederation, that’s good to hear. I’m familiar with the situation with the Lemmy developers.
I understand why you have chosen this course of action and I don’t mean to say you’re responsible for the health of Lemmy. I was just pointing out that from my perspective, a rising tide lifts all boats, and it’s helpful to have a network of similar communities because it makes each one stronger.
For instance, if someone on SJW complains about us being defederated from lemmygrad and hexbear, I can simply tell them to make an account on lemm.ee, thus allowing them to remain a part of any communities on SJW but also allowing them to have the experience they wanted. And lemm.ee also gets a new user out of it. When you don’t have those options, the disgruntled user is much more likely to stop using the platform entirely.
However, you obviously already have plenty of experience cultivating and maintaining a community, so I have faith that you will be able to continue to do so regardless of the extent of federation that you deem appropriate or which platform you use, and I wish you luck going forward.
My understanding is that a lot of the reasons for defederation stemmed from a fundamental lack of sufficient moderator tools. Tools that have not appeared and the lack of which has prompted Beehaw to consider moving to a different ActivityPub supporting platform in the fediverse.
Here is my view/reaction as a Beehaw user. I am not an admin or mod, just a regular user. I don’t want this to seem like an attack, but know ahead of time that I disagree with a lot of what you said.
Nearly a year later, it’s obvious that the decisions of beehaw admins during that critical period of time when redditors were first trying Lemmy were highly disruptive towards the development of the platform as a whole.
How so? It is not obvious to me, and some examples would be great.
The first level of disruption came from the direct fragmentation of communities caused by that defederation decision.
As a personal opinion, the communities Beehaw defederated from are communities I don’t want to interact with. This is not a net negative for me.
The second and more devastating impact was the impact on the perceptions of new users, who were given a manifestation of their worst fears about Lemmy and it’s federated structure. Many potential users were turned off Lemmy because they didn’t like the fact that they could suddenly be blocked off from major communities on other servers due to arbitrary admin decisions, and beehaw essentially provided the perfect example of that at a critical growth phase.
Do you have evidence of this? It is a pretty bold claim and if it is so impactful, there should be evidence. As side note, Beehaw’s goals (from a user perspective mind you, I am not speaking for the admins or mods) are not exponential user growth, but quality community. If users are turned off by the fact Beehaw is pro defederation with communities that are a large source of trolls or hate (not saying SJW is one of those), then Beehaw isn’t the right community anyhow.
With regard to lemmy.ml, I think the main issue is that beehaw has disabled downvotes. The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers.
I like the removal of the downvote. It makes for a more positive community, and because Beehaw has an active mod/admin team we don’t tend to have issues that are not taken care of fairly quickly.
The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers.
To me, the issue is that this relies on a lot of other large communities to moderate users, and more often than not that is more difficult than it sounds for the good ones, or non-existent in the crappy ones. Especially with the Lemmy devs resistant to adding good moderation tools.
But because beehaw doesn’t allow downvotes, has dwindled to a small userbase, and has isolated itself from other non-extremist servers (SJW),
Again, Beehaw’s focus is quality over quantity. Honestly this felt like it was meant to be an insult, but in the grand scheme of things doesn’t have much relevance to me
you have been left much more exposed to the tankie propaganda, with your only recourse being the nuclear option of defederation.
Defederation is the most extreme, but if so much bad stuff is coming from a single source that is not properly moderated, it seems like the most logical to me. I think this goes back to a lack of moderation tools and poor moderation in other instances, not to Beehaw’s relatively smaller user base or defederation from other instances.
Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works.
Does sh.itjust.works still have open sign ups? Then I don’t think a mistake was made nor should the admins refederate.
I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.
I am not privy to the inner workings of Beehaw, but I know they are focusing on moving to a new platform, so this seems like it would be a lot of wasted effort for the small team that is Beehaw.
I think that beehaw admins, not dissimilarly to hexbear admins, tend to disregard how their actions impact the fediverse as a whole and focus solely on the proximate impact on their own userbase.
This is a difference of philosophy (at least for Beehaw, hexbear is a different story/issue). Beehaw’s focus on it’s userbase is why I am here in the first place. The greater fediverse isn’t my concern, and it is not the admins responsibility.
This is a faulty mindset, because the fediverse is the ecosystem which we all share, and that ecosystem needs to be protected and maintained in order for all of the different organisms (instances) residing therein to thrive. Without our connection to the fediverse, all of our instances would simply wither away.
I think when Beehaw moves platforms, things may change. Better tools might allow for a more open relationship. That being said, Lemmy has been hostile to Beehaw (when they tried to reach out the Lemmy devs to petition for better mod tools, they were told in no uncertain terms they were welcome to GTFO). I know Lemmy isn’t the whole fediverse, but putting in a bunch of effort on a platform Beehaw is leaving seems silly.
Again, these are just my thoughts as a Beehaw user, but to me the issues you bring up are not issues for me at all, and in a lot of cases are actual boons.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to evangelize Lemmy on reddit, and one of the most common criticisms is the possibility of defederation and getting cut off from major communities. Most people who have been using Lemmy for a while understand that it’s way less of an issue than it sounds like, because there has to be a major reason for a defederation between servers and it doesn’t usually happen out of nowhere.
But in the case of Beehaw, it actually did happen quite abruptly, and it involved 3 of the largest servers at the time. We know that Lemmy slowly bled tens of thousands of users in the months following the reddit API exodus as users drifted back to reddit. Although it’s impossible to know how many of those users were annoyed by the defederation drama, I think it’s safe to say that the number wasn’t zero.
The steep decline in active users on Beehaw in the months following the decision is probably the best source of hard evidence supporting my claim.
The removal of downvotes is not something that I have any particular problem with, although I wouldn’t choose it for myself. I’m just pointing out that in this specific situation of wanting to mitigate tankie posts, the downvote is self-evidently an effective tool.
I think this goes back to a lack of moderation tools and poor moderation in other instances, not to Beehaw’s relatively smaller user base or defederation from other instances.
Can’t it be both? If certain moderation tools existed then you could use them to solve the problem. But they don’t exist, so other instances are currently using the strategies that I have mentioned in order to deal with the problem as best they can.
Sh.itjust.works does have open signups.
I totally understand and respect your perspective as a beehaw user, even as I obviously have a completely different perspective as someone who has never been a part of the beehaw community but instead has been observing from a distance.
Like I found Reddit’s far right problem annoying, I find the tankies and the libs on Lemmy to be frustrating, especially on meme pages for whatever reason. This instance does a good job at keeping the transphobes off but my personal preference would be to stop seeing crap posts defending the state, whatever it calls itself.
As someone who made an account there when first coming to the fediverse I can say man, what a bunch of assholes.
Just out of curiosity, could someone link an example of one of these posts? I don’t see them myself much but I think I may have just blocked the communities where it happens.
This is one of the lasts ones I saw https://lemmy.ml/post/15546627
… wow. On the one hand, this is quite heavily downvoted (by several lemmy.ml users too), so that’s something. On the other hand, it is a little concerning that multiple admins of lemmy.ml are among the upvoters on that post (yea yea I looked at the votes, let’s not pretend they’re private when they aren’t).
Also, check some of the removed comments (you can see them in the modlog). Like this comment that said this:
There is a massive difference between liking a concept or the implementation of that concept. Communism is an utopia, socialism is seen as the way to get there. Socialism did not proof to be viable in reality, with dictators claiming to set up communist states, while not setting up working socialist societies. The thing is that implementing such a society includes a massive restructuring of government and ownership of goods. Those measures have a very strong tendency to dissolve in civil wars and dictatorships. It is of course an option to label anyone who doesn’t want to give up resources an enemy of the class / state and imprison and torture them, but it does not create a stable society in which people actually choose to live, if they can decide on that. Shit is complex.
This was removed with the reason “Rule 1, 2”, which presumably refers to the “no bigotry” and “Be respectful, especially when disagreeing” site-wide rules on lemmy.ml. I mean, you can certainly disagree with the comment if you want, but it doesn’t contain any bigotry or disrespect if you ask me. This feels like political censoring on the part of the lemmy.ml admins. Not a great look.
I think there’s even someone from North Korea…
As a side note, I realized North Koreans would prefer to call their country DPRK because that’s the only proper Korea in their mind.
Wow… TIL there are actually people that believe North Korea is an amazing country.
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I’m considering leaving the fediverse altogether
I’ve had moments where I considered it too, because of all the tankies and propaganda, but I’m still here because I really want to see it succeed.
Unfortunately, I won’t even admit to anyone that I use it, let alone recommend it. I think from a rational outside perspective, the unfiltered Fediverse is an extremist echochamber. Some of the things that get said and heavily upvoted are wild.
I’ve had death threats multiple times from Hexbear users, and I’ve abandoned an account because Lemmy.ml users followed me around and downvoted everything I posted (which was mostly memes at the time).
We can’t expect people to deal with all of that when there’s already a relatively steep learning curve when joining. There’s no corporation running the show to fight propaganda, we have to deal with it, or the Fediverse is at risk of going the way of Voat.
I mean, sounds like you just need to go to an instance that defederates from those places. Lemm.ee doesn’t defederate a lot but it sounds like you’d prefer an instance that does.
That does nothing to solve the problem. I want to see the Fediverse succeed.
In order for the Fediverse to succeed, we need well-moderated instances that aren’t afraid of defederating from the badly moderated instances. As you say, you’ve had death threats from Hexbear users for instance. If the Fediverse is to succeed, we can’t have all users go through that, so we need a strong core of instances that defederates from such instances.
That means that we need users to choose to go to the well-moderated instances and that hopefully will not be a difficult choice.
So what I’m saying is that you going to a better moderated instance is not incompatible with the success of the Fediverse - in fact it is basically required for its success.
I’m on lemm.ee, in mobile, and can block instances.
Hamburger --> username --> settings --> blocks; scroll down to instances. I’m not using any app either, just the web “app” or w/e the tech term is.
the tech term is website
Beehaw seems to lack the option (can block users and communities, but not instances, is it a recent Lemmy setting that isn’t on the version on Beehaw?), then again Beehaw is very strict on who it federates with so i expect the worsening of that instance will inevitably lead to their defederation
Yeah beehaw is also a separate software implementation that is mostly compatible with lemmy but still distinct. I’d recommend switching to a lemmy instance with permissive federation and curating your blocklist yourself with the instance block feature. That’s why i picked lemm.ee, it has one of the more chill admin teams. In general as an anarchist i dislike the whole “rival fiefdoms” model of federation that lemmy has, would to make my own decisions. But it’s still better than reddit lol
beehaw is also a separate software implementation that is mostly compatible with lemmy but still distinct. I’d recommend switching to a lemmy instance
You’re mistaken; Beehaw does use Lemmy software for now. I think maybe you’re thinking of kbin/mbin instances, or maybe you heard about Beehaw planning to move off of Lemmy software and misunderstood.
Come over here to beehaw.org. We have nice admins.
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I saw your post that you downloaded Voyager.
I love Voyager, but if you already haven’t noticed, Voyager stopped supporting the version of Lemmy that beehaw uses. If you intend to stay on Lemmy, and/or use Voyager, then beehaw probably isn’t the best choice, since beehaw will not be updating Lemmy versions, and plans to eventually leave Lemmy.
That said, beehaw is a great community, just bear the above in mind before making such a switch. I will probably join another instance when beehaw’s lemmy instance closes down, but until then, I have great respect for beehaw’s team, the community they have built, and generally making this a safe place for it’s users, so I will likely stay until that switch happens.
