This title seems intended to position this as some sort of infighting and I think is heavily editorialized - the thread title is<p><i>ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works</i><p>The actual reason is that the defederated servers have open enrollment and have grown large enough that the small fraction of their traffic that is abusive and requires moderator attention is dominating beehaw moderators attention.<p>This isnt a moral judgement - they just don't have the plungers or the juice required to deal with the sewage, so are defederating to protect their own time and attention until those instances get a chance to settle down.
The reasons for defederating:<p><pre><code> (...) 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</code></pre>
> the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances<p>This is a key dynamic. People are used to social media sites being kept livable thanks to a team of paid professionals and fancy ML tooling, often supported by volunteer labor. But here the volunteers are in charge and many of them have other things to do than deal with people's bullshit just to keep the user growth graph going up and to the right.
As if being a federated network wasn't enough of a hurdle for new users, now we have instances blocking each other already.<p>Lemmy has a great chance achieving what mastodon couldn't, because its the community that matters, not specific users, but with instance blocking each other, any hope of creating a community to rival reddit is going to be thrown out the window.
Honestly, isn't that fine ? It means that the community has control and not a singular company. Just important to never let any single instance get as big as a company.
I run my own instance of Mastodon just for myself - and am thinking of doing the same for Lemmy. I, of course, can do that because I have the skills - most don't, so they must rely on sites like these for their accounts.<p>I've been working on an alternative that is, ultimately, a standalone and lightweight ActivityPub server that handles only one account at a time. The idea would be to serve an account as - in essence - it's own container. If a person just wants to run an instance for themselves off an old laptop in their livingroom (which is how I run my Mastodon instance), they can do that themselves if they have the skills - which I would strive to be minimal.<p>But, if they needed to rely on someone like beehaw, they could sintead join a "collective" - a central site on one domain that handles all incoming and outgoing messaging, DDOS protection, CDN caching, and even blocklist handling (e.g. reading a <i>user's</i> blocklist and blocking at the outermost layer) then passes what gets through to the individual service running on the backend. A collective could apply a site-wide blocklist, but the users would be able to opt back in because, at the end of the day, they are the ones who are actually federating with these other instances - the collective is, in essence, a firewall or "management layer", akin to an APIM for APIs.<p>Obviously, I'm not done building this, but I'm going to try and accelerate my work once I get some paid work off my desk. Why wouldn't something like this work? If an account wants to stay connected to a problematic server for whatever their reasons, how would that impact the rest of the collective if federation is handled at the user level?<p>Or, perhaps a better question, what's wrong with handling federation at the user level? Should I not be able to follow any account or block any account I want? Why must this fall on the backs of the admins?
Is there simply a lack of intersection between folks who care about UX and those who care about distributed computing? (And haven’t been sucked into web3.)
I don't really know how this all works, but can't I (a hypothetical human) just create a user account on each disconnected sub-graph? Why is this significant?
The problem is that it's still a feudal system like Reddit's is, with power concentrated in the administrative nobility.<p>The only major difference with Reddit is that the latter has an additional, all-powerful layer of royalty that holds control over these lesser lords. Whereas Lemmy has them all fighting each other.<p>Either way, the peasantry just has to put up with whatever nonsense battling the ruling class involve themselves in.
I've just learned about lemmy today (so not exactly an expert...), but the fact this event is positioned as a negative seems like a harmful take.<p>This decision makes perfect sense. Beehaw requires applying to sign up with a sort of cover letter. If their community is more restrictive, they should only federate with similar-minded nodes.
I used federated services like Mastadon before its own "Eternal September" and it feels to me, subjectively obviously, as someone who was on the Internet when Gopher, Telnet, MUDs, and USENET were basically it (except email) that there's this new obsession with moderation and walling off networks.<p>Whatever happened to self-moderating? I have higher standards for my speech and on-line conduct than any TOS. Many others do too. Plus, I know how to use software that allows "kill-files" and won't use any that doesn't give me the ability to "moderate" others if I want by just filtering it.<p>Vetting? It's a global network. If you want vetting spin up a Linux on Linode or something and invite only,ssh only, and create a forum.
Well, signed up on lemmy.world today since it seemed large and specifically wanted to read communities on beehaw too.<p>Should have waited another 12 hours to get it confirmed that it's never going to pan out
This is the fate of any federated social, maybe now it is not a big problem and the feature is used properly to moderate spam, but soon it would probably end up like Mastodon, where you can have multiple accounts on different instances, but there are always some instances you cannot access because the moderators have banned a huge list of servers (usually for political reasons) where you have your account, not even .social/.online are safe, and let's not even talk about the biggest Japanese ones.
This is pretty interesting.<p>I'm wondering, if the current Reddit civil war between spez and the mods would be best handled by a similar arrangement. Create two federated, in a loose definition of the word, Reddits...one run by Reddit and mods spez approves, and one run by the same way its run now. Users could choose which version to use. Posts and comments come from the same source, but mod actions are unique to each version.<p>Not that Reddit would ever do that.
This is fine, that's the point of federation. Beehaw's stated goal is "Aspiring to be(e) a safe, friendly and diverse place." so it's understandable they would want to be more selective with who they federate with to create a "safe space" for those that want that kind of environment.
Well, this kills the idea of Lemmy before it even got the chance to be born.<p>Beehaw is the second largest instance by number of users - and LemmyWorld is the third.<p>Them defederating from each other effectively shards the network into two halves, making the whole thing useless.<p>Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
I really just don’t understand the lemmy and mastodon thing. It looks like the same interface even on different servers and can’t you just make an account on another server? It doesn’t really make sense and I don’t see why I should care
The Beehaw “about us” page is amazing. They elevate their favored ideology to “just being a good person”. Such self-blindness is quite entertaining.<p>… but also kinda creepy.