@lisko@sopuli.xyz’s comment is not visible at all on the Lemmy instance while to me my comment is not visible at all on the Beehaw instance, nothing is showing in modlog though so I assume it has not been removed.
Am I unaware of a mechanic of federation occurring here? Or is something bugged?
Oh as it turns out by scrolling down in modlog it turns out Beehaw banned me to prevent my participation over there, not because I ever broke any rules on Beehaw but because they just don’t like me acting completely within the rules over here on Lemmy. The modlog they wrote claims that I was reported for my behaviour on Beehaw but that is completely false, I have not had any activity there.
Very “free speech”? Banning people because you don’t like what they do on COMPLETELY DIFFERENT websites? This kind of behaviour really doesn’t seem like it’s good for the federation, I would not have broken any of their rules on their instance. Users should be free to act the way they wish to on any given instance and their behaviour on that instance should only be subject to the moderators of that instance, other parts of the federation taking action against users for actions on entirely different websites subject to entirely different moderation and rules will be quite harmful to the concept of federation.
You should either federate or not federate, and moderator action should be taken on the basis of how users behave when inside your jurisdiction, not within the jurisdiction of other instances.
EDIT: I have a follow up question
Why does the modlog of Beehaw differ to the modlog of Lemmy?
Lemmy 3d ago:
Beehaw 3d ago:
Why am I banned from asklemmy in this modlog but not the other modlog? It’s a lemmy.ml community.
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Right. I didn’t understand that. So that particular entry is them banning me from asklemmy specifically solely on their instance. So, for example, if they hadn’t banned me on their entire instance and that action was all that was taken then this response I made in asklemmy would only be visible to Lemmy.ml users but would be completely invisible to Beehaw users: https://lemmy.ml/post/443569/comment/263836
This is very confusing behaviour. And it is extremely easy to weaponise it in the reddit-clone format without several checks on how federation powers are actually used by instance owners. Everyone on Beehaw seeing that post from Beehaw is not actually getting all of the responses to that Lemmy post, they’re getting one curated by the admins of Beehaw.
This could be avoided by visibly displaying the total number of comments that an instance is hiding. “This thread has 23 comments, only 18 are being displayed by this federation.” This would at least tell users of an instance that they are not getting a full picture, right now it’s unclear and very easy to weaponise it to perform ideologically motivated curation without people even knowing that they are having comments hidden from them.
There is no hiding, the comments are completely blocked from federating. Effectively, they dont exist for that instance. And its always the case that admins have full control over their instance, the technology dictates this.
Oh and another thought that has just come to mind when it comes to targeted defederating of individuals, and not indicating to those people that they’ve been banned in this way.
When I made this comment about child pornography, I was already defederated by this instance.
Someone however upvoted that comment, so presumably they agreed. Does that person know I was defederated from that instance though? Or do they think that the Beehaw people could see that comment? Seeing a comment from one instance that you think other instances can see will cause people to upvote that comment instead of writing a comment of their own saying the same thing.
If I hadn’t commented at all, that upvoter may have written their own thing saying something similar to what I said but with visibility to the Beehaw people. But instead none of them saw that point, and are left with absolutely no counter-narrative to the idea of making CHILD PORN with AI and that being topic being even remotely up for fucking debate.
Upvotes/downvotes actively reduce repetitive content, making people upvote a comment that they agree with instead of saying the same thing. If they don’t know that comment is only visible on a specific instance and isn’t visible in instances that they might want to counter a point on, they won’t comment. Suppression of opposition occurs and has knock on effects in this way.
Right but as I said down here, that feels bad.
It’s inherently confusing. You think you’re posting to a “community” not to a copy of a post from a different community on another community, with the potential for any replies to that copy to be a completely and utterly pointless waste of time because they won’t actually be seen outside your own instance as the other instance has silently defederated you as an individual for actions you performed completely outside their instance in a completely different one.
This is functionally much worse than reddit. It’s quite difficult for an educated tech-literate person to wrap their head around, not impossible but it’s still quite mind-bending. If that’s the case it will be VERY confusing and impenetrable behaviour for a person less literate in these things. I don’t know about whether you’ve done much reddit modding nutomic, I don’t know much about you, but I do know Dessalines has because I’ve shared modteams with them and this mechanic is VERY abuseable by any instances that want to weaponise.
It’s quite noticeable in the small ecosystem when this stuff is occurring, with modlogs that don’t have many actions. That will not be the case in a larger federation of many instances. The larger the federation the more dangerous many of these mechanics become. The ability this gives one instance to participate in political discourse within a federation while actively shutting down the ability of specific instances participating is a large problem. If this project was started to begin with to prevent leftists from being deplatformed then this mechanic undermines that goal completely, I hate saying it but in the longterm this would develop into something that results in much more censorship of the left than currently exists on reddit and that to me seems like the opposite of the original goal of the project. I am concerned.
Lemmy is not Reddit, and it works differently. If you dont like it, you can go back there.
I… Don’t think that’s a helpful response? Weren’t users on this instance recently banned for saying “fuck off” and chastised as behaviour that instance owners should not be doing? This is functionally saying the same thing. Not that I support tone policing but it’s weirdly inconsistent with that stance.
I want Lemmy to succeed because I agreed with the principle that the left is getting deplatformed by corporate owners and, as such, would be better able to spread its wings if corporate owners were not the guardians of this social media.
The structure and mechanics of lemmy right now though lead to a longterm outcome that is worse for the left because it is in fact far more possible for rogue actors to succeed. I’m trying to constructively communicate that concern to you and “go back to reddit” makes it sound like you’re not listening or not willing to listen to the concern.
This is how I see this mechanic playing out in the longterm:
The reason I raise it is because the development of this problem will go like this:
Early on instances might be able to stop this malicious behaviour by not being so naive and instance owners demanding that other instance owners not play these games of fuckery with the mechanic. A mindset like with the federation council could develop but in an unwritten code sort of way for best-practice administration. Right now that’s not happening though and the wrecker instances are clearly wreaking havoc, most of the active users of lemmy can see it, all of lemmygrad can see it, and it’s even being recognised by hexbear users who are generally not currently cross-pollinating in the ecosystem but do discuss its issues. Some people with the ability to stop it are being blunderingly naive about the intentions of others and the behaviour occurring.
Assuming this does get under control and resolved early on because federated instances get their act together about this malicious behaviour. Growth happens and things go reasonably fine for quite a while.
A certain size threshold is reached where this approach of instance owners all knowing the history of Lemmy and being aware of its abuses starts to go away, too many instance owners exist for instance owners to all be collectively well educated on it all or to know one another, keeping people up to speed on best practices to avoid wrecker stuff and political and ideological manipulation becomes impossible.
Wrecker instances start to make a comeback and become a serious problem. Development realises that this isn’t going to work out and something needs to be done with the mechanics or the vision of the project will be bad in a “oh god it was harder for leftists to be deplatformed on reddit” kind of way.
5a. Mechanics get changed. MASSIVE outrage is incited at the change by the wrecker instances. They successfully manage to make several other naive liberal non-political instances believe them and join in on their shit. Absolutely huge shitshow ensues that turns into some really nasty stuff with the demand that the mechanic be returned and that features that previously existed shouldn’t be taken away. This becomes a real real problem at scale. Copycat projects spring up with dubious origins as an “alternative to lemmy”, exoduses are incited.
5b. Mechanics do not get changed. This ecosystem becomes a playground for ideological manipulation of content in a way that is completely invisible to users. Every single instance starts using the blocking tactics that are currently employed on twitter, but in a federated and complex way that causes enormous issues in this format.
Do you think I’m analysing this wrong? Genuine question. Is this not how you see it playing out and you see something else? What do you see playing out in the longterm with these mechanics?
Sorry but I dont have time to read all your ramblings.
Man nutomic I don’t know why you’re being like this. These are pretty fair concerns and we really should be hashing out theory of the future problems that will be faced as the population of users grows. I’ve been doing this online community lark for a very long time and have led communities from tens to hundreds up to millions of participants. I’ve done this in both hobbies like gaming and writing, I’ve done this professionally as a job in gaming itself (though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone), and I’ve done this in political communities as well. On different platforms (going all the way back to usenet) you get different unique problems for the platform, created by the mechanics of the platform, and these problems manifest themselves completely differently at different quantities of users because there are different levels of engagement and personalness that can be achieved by those attempting to marshal their communities over the course of their growth.
All of this stuff is absolutely worth theorycrafting and trying to get ahead of. I genuinely do not know why you are being hostile to me about it? Please explain what I did wrong here to inspire this attitude? I would like to avoid upsetting you in future.
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I am now yes, for the first time I think. I’m not aware of having commented there previously and can’t find a single one in my history. It’s feasible that one may have happened but I thought I had been quite careful. I’m pretty damn sure that this action was taken not because of anything I did over there.
Edit: Not true actually I’ve had a couple, “no AI created child pornography should not be allowed” response which should not remotely be controversial.
The other time I participated there was this one which also completely followed their rules. So yeah. Banned not for the behaviour on their instance but for outside of it. As you can see, very well behaved and careful.
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Yeah sorry about the edits, had to get that part right.
This seems… Straight up bad? It feels like if I had posted in /r/unitedkingdom and gotten banned by the mods of /r/gaming simply because they didn’t like what I posted over there in a space completely not run by them.
Should federations not be acceptant of something being outside their jurisdiction? And if they have a problem with the way another jurisdiction moderates then they should hash it out with that team or completely defederate?
Individualising defederation instead of collectivising it seems like a really bad idea. You can pretend to be an open instance in the spirit of sharing ideas via the concept of federation, taking the benefits of growth and cross-pollination, while individually defederating targeted individuals that you deem too effective.
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A collection of instances could start up a federation council with a set of guidelines, one of these guidelines could be “moderate within the jurisdiction of your instance and allow others to moderate within the jurisdiction of their instance” as well as “all instances of the federation must federate with all other members of the federation council” then federate under this agreement and refuse to federate with anyone that does not agree to the federation council and its terms of federation.
This would eliminate most games and make matters of disagreements between instances a matter of the federation council instead.
This isn’t how it feels as a user though. As a user, if I am responding to something that is posted to the lemmy.ml community I feel like I am posting to the lemmy.ml community. If another instance is federated to lemmy.ml that to me feels like consent to share lemmy.ml community content in return for the mutual exchange of lemmy.ml receiving lemmygrad content (or any other instance), under the understanding this cross pollination is cross pollination of userbases but also content itself which improves the reason to be on lemmy (content is why people are here) and is mutual growth at the same time.
As a user, if I comment on a lemmygrad.ml thread rehosted to here via federation, I expect the people at lemmygrad to see the comments I might make from here. I feel that I am posting to lemmygrad.ml via proxy of Lemmy. I don’t feel that I am posting to a copy of the lemmygrad.ml post rehosted on lemmy that may or may not also rehost what I post in the copy here, maybe, if they haven’t individually performed a targeted defederation of me.
I’m using lemmygrad as an example here because I want this to be about the mechanics of this function itself and how it feels as a user.
The ideal in my mind is that the communities themselves are jurisdictions of their own instances. Agreement between federated instances would be to not take action against users for their behaviour on other instances, and to maintain moderation within their own instance and at behaviour specifically within their own instance. If they don’t want like how another instance moderates they can hash it out with that instance via the federation backchannels or leave the federation entirely and not receive the benefits of the growth or cross pollination of ideas and content that comes with being part of the federation. That also just fundamentally makes more sense from a user experience perspective, that you are following the rules of whatever instance you are posting or commenting to, and the subrules of the community within that instance and won’t be subject to what feel like bizarre overreaches of jurisdiction or ideologically targeted silencing.
Moderation on the fediverse seems to be quite a fashionable topic those weeks 😄 See for example the latest thread in a serie of @roko 's
This post was really interesting, thanks for sharing it. It communicates basically the same problem I’m trying to communicate here, but it does so from the format of a different platform. Lemmy has unique issues with this format because of the reddit-clone nature of it compared to platforms that are twitter-clone and so on, which each get their own unique issues I assume.
Since the technical questions have been answered, I’d like to chip in on the social questions:
[spoiler'd for being less relevant] >Very “free speech”?
Where is this stemming from? Who are you quoting? As you can see on their front page, they explicitly have rules against even things as simple as being unfriendly. Which is suitable to their goal as a community, which isn’t being some free speech haven like wolfballs.com attempts to be. They never claimed to value free speech, that contradicts their site purpose.
This makes sense in federation, where your users are interacting with content on those different websites. Not every site’s users wants to see the same things, and if one serious site (similar to gtio.io ) is full of people who think a joker is derailing a community with insults and poor arguments, and another is a comedy site and doesn’t see that low effort stuff as an issue and enjoys it, they can both moderate that user the way that their community expects. Serious people don’t flood the joker with complaints or get annoyed, the comedy site get to enjoy their posts. It allows different sites to collaboratively use a community despite having different values and different moderation policies. If your answer is ‘just don’t federate’, then we’ll end up with far more unnecessary copies of communities over moderation differences and a huge lack of content and interaction.
I think I understand and recognize your point about how blocking you for what you said in a different context (a site with different rules and people!) is unfair, because that blocks you from Beehaw communities where you would have acted in line with their rules, because it’s on their site and not the other less strict site. And I agree. That said, I think the situation of you or me being forced to register a new Beehaw account to participate in Beehaw communities is a more usable solution than Beehaw having to just not federate with most communities because they want to ban some people that the other communities can tolerate. When you’re here, other communities’ users are still seeing your comments, and they should be able to say ‘our users kept reporting you, we don’t want to see your lemmy.ml account’s posts’.
I get that, but it feels bad because you’re just participating within the rules of another, entirely different space. You can’t know you’re breaking the rules of their space (if you’ve never been there). And suddenly you’re banned from there for activity that was performed in an entirely different space.
The activity I was banned from there for was me posting in a thread on lemmy.ml. Apparently Beehaw users replied to me and didn’t like the way I replied back annoyed and somewhat aggressively. Thus banned.
From my perspective that didn’t occur on Beehaw, it occurred on Lemmy.ml, where all of my activity occurred. This is the user experience end of it that feels “bad”. And you don’t even get any knowledge that this banning occurred. You just get silenced by an instance forever and that’s that. I responded to multiple threads expecting Beehaw users to be getting my comments after that ban with no knowledge I was wasting my time shouting into the void and that only lemmy.ml users or other parts of the federation would see those comments. It feels like shadowbanning but in a particularly unfair way for rules on federations that you might upset that you don’t even know exist and certainly don’t know the rules of before they get annoyed with your comment. This is the user-end problem, a user can not know what people far and wide they might upset with their comment, they can not know that their comment is appearing in a place where their comment might be subject to an entirely different set of rules. I mean, they can if they understand federation in the way that I do now, but the average person this is like talking in some extra-dimensional shit, it’s going to bend people’s minds entirely. Most people are going to be like “buhhh I only posted on here though why can I no longer reply to them?”.
Yeah which sounds great if you’re a member of the existing hegemony. Whether that’s liberalism or white, male, cis, straight, beneficiary of the patriarchy, able bodied, neurotypical and so on and so forth. If you are outside of the existing cultural, political and social hegemonies however what that represents to you as a person that will be considered an agitator by the hegemonies is… Suppression.
Yes that’s exactly what occurred. Banned from Beehaw before ever actually participating in a Beehaw thread. The issue is that when your respond to any given thread from a user perspective it feels like you’re posting within the jurisdiction of lemmy.ml, and then when you get slapped by somewhere completely different for your activity that you definitely didn’t feel like you were posting there… It feels quite bad, and it feels very confusing if you don’t particularly understand it, and it’s hidden so you may end up wasting your time participating in threads at a later time that you don’t even know you can’t participate in. Again, not particularly whinging about that. I’m raising the point that it feels bad because it’s a significant part of the user experience that is going to be how a very very large number of people end up learning how federation works. There may be ways to mitigate and improve on that user experience, particularly the issues with it feeling like shadowbanning, lack of visual communication, etc.
When hexbear federates this thread is going to happen again and someone else is going to end up asking the same questions and saying many of the same things I’m saying too. I’m also a little worried that how those threads and questions play out may have a significant impact on whether some people abandon the project entirely, I hope the devs can uhhh, be a bit more understanding about how their responses will cause people to judge the project itself. I don’t want people leaving Hexbear because they decide they don’t like a Lemmy dev or w/e and I don’t want to see Hexbear’s userbase fall prey to smart wreckers that realise any grumpy comments from the devs are an opportunity to rile up hundreds of community members into a drama frenzy aimed at causing issues. Most of my thinking is about getting ahead of potential problems.