hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one:
we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.
we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).
an unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.
aside from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:
- these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
- the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
- our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
- and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for
as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:
There’s a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it’s not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can’t even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.
Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.
and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.
this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.
thanks for using our site folks.
Firstly, I want to say I appreciate your dedication to creating a well moderated and maintained community.
However, I feel like this is an overall bad decision.
Essentially what I’m thinking is, how is this sustainable?
The amount of control that youre trying to achieve here is going to create an increasingly small and insular community. Also, there is a serious risk of burn out on the moderation end if you’re attempting to currate this much, the more this server grows the harder this is going to be to maintain.
With the type of platform that this is, we’re going to have a wide variety of people. A lot of them are just going to be bad people. Simply defederating won’t fix this, and it will also be a problem here even with manually approved sign ups.
If people want to, they will just lie to get in. Essentially your system right now relies on people not lying to you when they sign up. A targeted harassment campaign could easily overcome that.
What’s next? Are we going to deferate kbin.social and mastodon.social? Why don’t we just defederate every instance? Even the biggest social media platforms have a seriously hard time moderating content they actually don’t want on their platform. You can literally find porn on Youtube.
Tipping your hand on the scales this much is really stressful for a small team, and often doesn’t lead to the outcomes that you thought you wanted. I hope in the near future you refederate, but I understand if you don’t.
As someone who used to moderate default communities on Reddit, I can see how you can reach this conclusion. I agree with many of your points in that it isn’t possible to completely block attack vectors, but I don’t agree with the idea that we need to interact with a lot of “bad” people. I think the feeling that we need to interact with a lot of “bad” people comes from so much experience with bad platforms and the cultures that originate from these places. I think it’s also important to note that we are not here for growth at all costs. We do not intend to be at the scale of YouTube or anywhere close. In the end our experiment may be a failure, but I’d rather try something new than give up before I even try.
Just want to point out, in early Mastodon days - People did defederate from mastodon.social because the moderation tools were not good enough.
With time and with better moderation tools, we believe we will refederate.
Mastodon communities currently defederate from instances of over a certain size (including .social) because of how hard it is to moderate large instances, beehaw isn’t doing anything weird in this case.
I think you’ve got valid concerns here, and while it doesn’t completely address them I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Beehaw isn’t here to be the next reddit, and growth for the sake of growth isn’t the goal of this instance. Having a smaller scope and a more tightly knit community here is probably actually desirable, in the long run. Also, I don’t think there’s too much concern about people making fake applications to get in, as that’s a much higher effort (and thus lower volume) vector of attack for bad actors.
With respect to sustainability, we’ll hopefully get better moderation tools in the (near) future to solve these problems in a way besides total defederation, but at the moment lemmy doesn’t support that kind of granularity. As better tools become available, refederation is not off the table.
Growth for the sake of growth isn’t always bad. I think the problem with Reddit is that it’s growth for the sake of profit.
When we try to grow our communities it gives us wider influence over what a space looks like. Imagine if there is a cause a lot of users here want to promote and fight for, but they’re defederated from some of the biggest instances?
The ability to grow gives you a seat at the table, and also allows you to influence others. That’s essentially why people often centralize in one place on social media platforms.
I do understand your point of view though, I still disagree but respect it.
This may be a space in which I diverge from the other admins but the only space I am concerned about here is Beehaw itself. Having a seat at the Lemmy table is not important to me. Yes, it would afford us more attention when it comes to development and direction, but I am primarily concerned with creating a different kind of culture on the internet. The platform itself and the space that occupies are not important to me except as a vector to see if we can influence human behavior and find ways to promote positivity and kindness.
As you can see, I’m not on beehaw, but I think this is a perfectly reasonable stance. Building a diverse fediverse, where there is a place for everyone seems a laudible aim. That may be possible with broad federation, or in some instances it may require narrow or no federation. It’s all good.