hey folks, here’s a quick update on our decision to defederate from sh.itjust.works! (and here’s sh.itjust.works’s side of this update)
we got in touch with the head admin over there, The Dude, and we had a pretty good chat about our concerns and reason for defederating. while immediate re-federation is just bluntly off the table with the rudimentary state of Lemmy’s moderation tools, we now have a pretty good idea of the roadmap to refederating with them. we think we’ll eventually be able to do this, although we don’t have a timetable on when yet.
we’re also now collaborating with him on how to move forward–and in the weeks and months to come we’ll be pushing to expedite the process of developing some of the necessary tools. this decision has really helped us make connections that can hopefully realize those tools both on the desktop side and in apps being developed for Lemmy. we’re also hoping to collaborate with other Lemmy administrators who have needs like our own, or just generally want more granular tools at their disposal.
we did also get in touch with the lemmy.world owner prior to defederating to share the concerns that prompted us to defederate[1]–but we have not received any communication from him since it was levied, so there’s no roadmap at all there as of now. we’re always open to reconsidering and collaborating to end the defederation with him, but for now the earliest i can give you is “when mod tools are in a better state”.
that’s all for now folks. if any new significant developments take place we’ll announce them as needed.
we’re only bringing this up now because it was just not useful information in the context of our announcement. it almost certainly would have been interpreted as some sort of callousness and/or brought unnecessary sectarianism and grief to him. at the end of the day he has his reasons and desires for running lemmy.world how he does, and we have ours for running Beehaw as we do. because of social and technological circumstances those are just incompatible right now, and that’s fine. ↩︎
Lol … tried commenting from my lemmy.world account but duhh that’s defederated… This is @ruud@lemmy.world
This was my reply:
Hi there! Lemmy.world calling!
I read here that I’m unresponsive, but after a chat with one of your team, the last mesasge I got was:
"Sorry for the bad news especially after we’ve had such a good conversation but we have defederated. It was not an easy decision and I hope it doesn’t hurt our relations. It’s not personal, it’s just that our goals don’t work together, we wish it was possible to “limit” a la mastodon… I hope you understand "
I didn’t know that was a question… ;-)
I would very much like to get in touch with you, I have also been in touch with the sh.itjust.works admin. If there’s anything we could do to solve your concerns, let us know.
You can reach me on matrix @ruud:h-y-p-e-r.space or mail info@lemmy.world (But I’ll be asleep the next 8 hours hopefully, so I’ll be unresponsive)
That’s my bad, I had kinda assumed you’d reply something so the silence was a bit unexpected. I apologize.
@Lionir@beehaw.org, @alyaza@beehaw.org I realize a three day old buried comment chain is not the best place for this, but seeing as how the fediverse is difficult to search, and as a moderator of a medium-sized community on lemmy.world where I have not personally seen any content needing moderation, I’m curious if there has been a public statement somewhere on Beehaw you can direct me to that explains the specific issues and reasoning behind defederating with with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works?
As of today, @ruudtest@feddit.nl has implemented a captcha on lemmy.world and sign ups are currently closed due to an influx of spam accounts being created, which he already banned as stated here: https://lemmy.world/post/293545.
Lastly, why have other large instances with similar growth and open registration like kbin.social and lemmy.ml been spared?
What I noticed and why your experience probably doesn’t match with ours is that people signed up lemmy.world to harass in other instances that are closed like ours and usually centered on LGBTQ+ communities. That might be a significant factor.
Here is the public statement we made about the issue a few days ago : https://beehaw.org/post/567170
As for why kbin.social and lemmy.ml were spare : I’ve not personally seen many reports from lemmy.ml and kbin.social was not even federated when we made this decision so it wasn’t on our mind.
Excellent! Paging @alyaza@beehaw.org , response from the lemmy.world admin :D
Man, i insist that this shitstorm should have happened a year or two in the future when Lemmy was a bit more developed :P
We’ve spun up a chat, added them and a few other instance admins. Yay, progress!
Yep, haha, it sure would be convenient if the world only ever threw challenges at us when we were well and fully prepared to deal with them! 🙃
Thank you for reaching out and being open to collaboration! I’m not an admin or mod, just a member of Beehaw, but I wish you continued success and luck with your endeavors running lemmy.world!
deleted by creator
I genuinely think Reddit lowered my expections of moderators so much over the years without me even realising, it’s great to come to a place like this where everyone on both sides sounds reasonable and competent at what they’re doing. Really excited to see how Lemmy and the Fediverse more generally develops.
been thinking about this comment all day, you put into words what I was feeling too. I’m very grateful for the warm community experience and discussion. I agree with all the directions taken so far and overall feel hopeful to see what the future holds here.
Really love the transparency and communication. It’s a breath of fresh air, honestly.
very well said. It’s been a really eye opening experience to how good a community can be. From the admins to the users, it’s been smooth.
I find the content and discussion to be much more intimate and worthwhile than what was on reddit.
Hear, hear! I’ve actually experienced a general decrease in anxiety (personally) and everything! It’s fantastic!
It’s nice to be with nice people.
The Dude abides
Why am I not surprised that the head mod for an instance called sh.itjust.works is called The Dude. lol
Mind if I do a J?
Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women!
I don’t like your jerkoff attitude. I don’t like your jerkoff face. I don’t like your jerkoff name. And I don’t like you, jerkoff
This and exactly this ^
Hahaha!
On a separate note, it is very interesting that the creator of Lemmy.world is non-responsive. That is concerning, seeing as how his instance is one of the biggest.
That is concerning, seeing as how his instance is one of the biggest.
he’s probably just busy, and we’re not going anywhere so as far as i’m concerned it’s not a big deal either way
That was my take. I imagine most of the admins/mods of the larger instances are very busy these last few days. It will shake itself out over time. The thing thats really interesting about the fediverse concept is that something like this can happen–for better or worse.
I personally appreciate the level of curation and moderation being done here. I looked at the blocked list and even some of the names just skeeve me out. I dont want to have to deal with that, and if the mods here can see lots of trolls or bad content coming from particular places, I like that they would take action to deal with it.
Shoutout to The Dude for being responsive and receptive, but I wouldn’t write off the lemmy.world admin yet.
It’s the end of a crazy week, his instance is just a few weeks old, and there are many things to do. I’m sure he’s busy and not intentionally ignoring beehaw.
I reached out to him on matrix and pointed him to this thread.
I guess I just don’t typically give people the benefit of the doubt, especially online. I need to work on that.
I blame reddit’s culture rot for that. A decade ago or more, reddit was an overall better place to be. It’s going to take time to shake that off.
But the admins here are doing an amazing job fostering an environment where having overwhelmingly good experiences is the norm!
Yeah, I agree. Reddit was great when it first started out. I love what the Beehaw folks are doing.
As one of the biggest, it could be as simple as that they’re overwhelmed, and Beehaw refederation is not a top priority.
Why do you see it as concerning?
Well, it was pretty big news that Beehaw was defederating from them, and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to reply real quick to someone reaching out to you from Beehaw. You could just say “thanks, let’s talk about this when I’m not so busy” but to just ignore it seems weird to me.
I don’t think I’m the only person who won’t reply to an email until there is something actually productive to say.
I guess I’m just the weird guy who appreciates acknowledgment because without it I feel like I’m being ignored.
It’s rude to not to acknowledged, you are right and valid to feel that way.
The replies to the post by the sh.itjust.works admin are fascinating. Admin’s post is calming, reasonable, minimises outrage and indicates ways forward which will improve the platform. Win win win, with some temporary inconvenience. So of course others are forgetting all of that and inventing things to get upset about. How do we (collectively) unlearn this habit? I learned by observing it in action and reading others’ writing about it. Maybe someone will learn something from reading this. Tiny drop in the vast ocean but I don’t know how to scale it. We need to figure it out though.
People need to learn that the point of the fediverse isn’t clustering, but distributed governance. Everyone can have the fediverse experience they want by picking a server that self-governs and federates with other servers the way they want. The idea isn’t to distribute load (though it is a nice benefit), the idea is that Beehaw can be very friendly, sh.itjust.works can be very permissive, lemmygrad can be very tanky, and exploding-heads can be very supportive of American-style conservatives. What people are upset about is that the system works haha
The comment section of sh.itjust.works is much more understanding of the issue at hand than those from lemmy.world. Crazy how opposite they are. They do showcase a prominent disagreement with the beehaw mods actions, but nonetheless remain respectful in their opinions. At least compared to lemmy.world which stance was basically “lol they shot themselves in the foot”.
Just above you the lemmy.world admin answered, so things are advancing :D
Thats awesome. Glad i was wrong
It seems like the admin of lemmy.world is eager to work with our admins, but yeah, I also noticed the community response on sh.itjust.works was mostly “I get it. It’s not what I would want, but I get it” while the community response on lemmy.world was mostly “Fediverse ruined, day ruined, beehaw a bunch of fascist dictators.” Which is a little bit wild to me since sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world both have very similar moderation styles. I guess it just goes to show the difference a sidebar can make in setting a tone. sh.itjust.works has a very basic sidebar with some rules of the road, while lemmy.world has a sidebar that says the sidebar is TBD. I wonder, and this is purely speculation, how many people signed up for lemmy.world explicitly because they wanted to be a problem. sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world both have the same signup process, but then they picked lemmy.world because “Oh hey, there’s no rule against being a bigot (yet).” Me, I would have assumed that was just… Implied, but it’s truly fascinating that they have such different communities already, and I wonder anthropologically why that happened.
this is honestly not a bad theory. when there’s a lack of gatekeeping and a lack of specified rules, online spaces seem to overwhelmingly tend toward being more reactionary and more permissive of bad social behavior because there’s no deterrent for it (and by the time there is one, often the culture is set and really hard to undo).
I think it’s a lot less nefarious. About every post or article about Lemmy that links to Lemmy instances has links to (in this order in almost every article I remember) lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and beehaw.org. Of these 3 only lemmy.world accepts new users without vetting. Lemmy.ml doesn’t accept new users at all and beehaw doesn’t really look that welcoming to someone who knows they might stir some shit up in the future and also getting into beehaw requires more effort. So with lemmy.world usually being the first on the list and additionally requires the least effort to join, this is where all the world and their uncle end up on. They just get the biggest unfiltered influx and with that the biggest amount of toxic people. (I want to make sure that I’m not calling lemmy.world users lazy or toxic or anything like or that this is their target audience. It’s just a fact fact that someone who can’t be bothered to do research and/or “write an essay” as someone called it, will most likely end up on lemmy.world)
A lot of that can also be said about sh.itjust.works, which is the fascination I have in this. There’s communal divergence between sh.irjust.works and lemmy.world that I would not have immediately anticipated
The main difference between these two instances as I see it is that lemmy.world gets a whole lot more media coverage, attention and direct links than sh.itjust.works. You have to do research or visit join-lemmy.org to find a link to sh.itjust.works and then their tagline starting with “A bilingual (EN/FR) general-purpose instance located in eastern Canada! Powered by 99% renewal energy!” might just keep some uniformed (as in how this federation-thingy works) non-canadians from joining (yes, I left out the second part of the tagline, assuming most people who’d be put off by the beginning wouldn’t read any further).
That’s interesting! I wasn’t aware of any media coverage. Where should I be looking for that?
I used “meadia coverage” in a very broad sense here (as in online articles by magazines, blogposts and such)…
- https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-alternatives-lemmy-3335429/ mentiones lemmy.world way before any other
- https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances while not media gets linked rather often an has lemmy.world, beehaw and feddit on top of the “all instances” list
- https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/ for example links to awesome lemmy instances
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software) again not media but in the same ballpark, lists lemmy.ml and lemmy.world
I honestly didn’t keep track I just noticed this during the last few days that if there were instanced that were mentioned or linked it was usually these three, but it might also be confimation bias.
I find the decisions made so far entirely understandable and I really appreciate the transparency and updates.
Have to say the same thing. I really appreciate the hard work the admins and mods are doing and support the decisions they have made.
Reading this and the other admins replies has given me a proper little boost this morning. Thank you for the transparency, it won’t always be good news like this but I value it anyway
I also read the comments. Glad we’ve defederated. Seems like there are plenty of people over there with really bad ideas and they’re scouring the internet for people to poke them with.
Thanks for the update!
While exploring kbin I’ve been checking out lemmy world a bit and there’s a surprising level of toxicity towards beehaw going on. From a vocal minority of course but some have seem to have taken the degeneration as personal slight and some are just aggressive towards beehaw on a general term.
A lot of people seem to understand the reasons and even if they don’t agree with it they’re at least understanding.
The toxic minority is hard to grasp though.
Then again, I suppose the ones that caused the issues in the first place are among that group.
Amazing how fast tribalism takes form
Sad isn’t it? :(
It is, but why not embrace the good aspects of it while at the same time working to overcome the bad?
The way I see it, beehaw is doing a solid for their “tribe” by holding to account those that are being nasty. This is one of the best things a tribe can do; work towards justice. Plus, this whole event is leading to collaboration with The Dude to make the fediverse better, right?
Very true. It’s too easy to get dragged along with negativity… I need to focus on the positive!
I understand the decisions made but I would be pretty annoyed if I had a lemmy.world or a sh.itjust.works account and I’ll explain why below.
Looking on https://browse.feddit.de/ Beehaw has the largest communities for Gaming, Technology, Chat, News, Programming, Politics and Music (and probably more). These are staple communities that the majority of users will be subscribed to one or more.
Those users now need to make a decision, they either make a new account on Beehaw (or another instance that isn’t defederated by Beehaw) so they can continue to browse those communities, or they instead keep their accounts on lemmy.world / sh.itjust.works and join smaller and less active communities to replace the Beehaw ones.
Unfortunately trolls can create a load of accounts in instance ABC and spam Beehaw until Beehaw defederate instance ABC until there are no large instances left.
It’s good that Beehaw are looking to refederate with both instances, but I imagine that the majority of people expressing their opinions thought defederation was a final decision.
I think there may also be a bit of a defensive reaction in that without the full context, there’s sort of an implication that Beehaw admin thinks everyone on these other two instances are just terrible people. Couple that with Beehaw’s…erm…opinionated language, and it’s a recipe for hurt feelings.
I’ve seen some comments mentioning that it feels like guilt by association, and it seems somewhat reasonable to take that personally – especially as people are still wrapping their heads around how federation works and how blunt the mod tools are at this stage.
I also think there’s maybe some harsh feelings over the idea that Beehaw’s ideal state is Beehaw users being able to comment on other instances but not the other way around. There’s some sentiment I’ve seen that this amounts to Beehaw taking the big communities for itself and hanging everyone else out to dry. I don’t really think that’s Beehaw’s intention, but when the big conversations appear to be happning behind closed doors, it makes sense that some feathers would be ruffled.
And last, I’ve seen some users commenting that the only reason the two defederated instances got users is because the signups are open and anyone who was put off by Beehaw’s registration either can’t use words effectively or was born to antagonize Beehaw’s users. I really don’t think that antagonistic view other other instances’ users is helpful, and it’s definitely making the situation on the ground worse. For example, the reason I didn’t register with Beehaw is that I just couldn’t think of any actual reason I wanted in there versus anywhere else – I just wanted to be where the people were, so I could use a social platform to talk to strangers, and the way Beehaw’s reg page is worded, it sounds like this would likely not be a good enough reason to be allowed to participate there. So I just went somewhere else that seemed more interested in having me around.
So i guess for anyone who bothers to read this, please don’t lump all users from the defederated instances under a banner of “degenerates” or whatever. They seem to really be taking it to heart, and I think it’s more hurt feelings than actual antagonism for anyone who didn’t personally harrass anyone.
Plenty of them make it clear that they very much wants the decision to be final and for beehaw to die off.
But yeah, there are always going to be trolls online I suppose.
I’m really glad everyone seems to be on the same team here and there’s no bad blood between the mods.
And with this kind of cooperation and outreach, the Fediverse will be that much better! Thank you to all parties involved for communicating and working together!
In my application here I cited the decision to de-fed from them as why I chose to sign up for beehaw. I was looking through shitjustworks and was absolutely not liking how it seemed to be absorbing some of the worst “libertarianism and rationalism are my excuse to insult people” types from reddit. I’ll be interested to see whether their admins succeed in wrangling their ‘hives’.
This is in the nature of the domain name. If you name your site “shit just works” you can’t be surprised if you build a bubble for idiots in the first wave of registrations.
I’m not bashing on the site or their Admins.i say that out of own experience over the last 25+ years on the internet and some exp in hosting forums and all that myself.
Fun fact. Your take just made me sign up there too.
I actually seek different perspectives and don’t quite agree with any particular place that is very “ideologically packeted” like most tend to. Where “they insult” and “we don’t, because if they feel insulted is because of Reality and how right we are”.
I’m new to all this fediverse and I’m curious to see how different niche interests develop and if we can actually form the usefulness that Reddit threads could have or if it’s a unique and different usefulness…
Sometimes I wanna see what everyone else sees. That’s why I also have an account on another instance. But sometimes I don’t want the risk of seeing people question my right to exist (how often on reddit do I come across someone who’s “just asking questions”). That’s why I’m here. So glad reddit is dead now bc we’re all here instead.
I’d word it as, you don’t want the risk of other people writing a specific opinion on a specific topic that you don’t agree with.
Because the whole “right to exist” thing is very relative and dependent on framing.
It’s very common that criticism of X is taken as “you are -ism” or if you’re not voting exactly how I tell you to then you are denying my rights to exist. There’s lot of nuance In conversations of “where does my rights end and yours start” but the typical thing I see is “I want there to be no discussion about this, only axiom A”.
Reddit is not dead, only time will tell what happens with but I’d say Reddit is pretty much like what you talk about, with some slight variations on niche places.
There have been open calls to “eradicate transgenderism”, along with a nearly endless amount of anti-trans legislation in many parts of the world. Their rhetoric frequently borders on genocidal. It is 100% about our right to exist.
We’re not some hypothetical to have a pleasant debate over tea about, we are real people with real lives being directly harmed by real policy. Some of us are tired of being nice about it.
There’s a difference between having an opinion I don’t agree with and comparing being trans to “wanting to be peppa pig”. And then when I rightfully get offended and angry they lose their fucking minds bc I dared insult them. It’s happened many times, and yes, this is based on a real example from reddit. (tw: transphobia obviously)
I don’t know why you would share that link thinking it reflects what you initially said.
I will avoid continuing this conversation because I don’t think it will get anywhere but to me, it’s clear who is bullying whom and who misrepresents opinions as “denying your right to exist” and allows no debate.
It’s easy to think being righteous does not make you a bully but that’s exactly how mobs operate, by thinking their righteous ends justify the means.
I’m ok if Beehaw bans transphobia from their instance.
Only if that rule is accurately defined. It’s definitely not occuring in the link provided unless you consider “getting bullied and disagreeing with other user” transphobia.
I’m not going to engage with the other user anymore. They want freedom to insult and censor because “they’re righteous”. It’s not an attitude that’s specific to one group, mind you, but it’s definitely an enlightening interaction in the context of this thread.
Authortiarianism doesn’t sit well with me and I consider it an absolute no but I’m playing by the instance rules. I don’t think they are but it is what it is.
We’ll see how this space develops. Individual users are not relevant, anyway, but the aggregate.
just fucking defend the reactionaries why don’t you. Bet you’re the type who sees nazis committing genocide, and minorities fighting back, and says “man why can’t both sides stop fighting???” Enough with the fucking respectability politics already. In an uncivil age, y’all motherfucker’s calls for “civility” are just a device to squash all protest so you can get your way, not actually an argument made in good faith.
Hey, well, I’m blocking you so I don’t have to see this bullshit again.
Sometimes I do wish for a downvote.
It’s quite unfortunate that Rexxit happened before the platform was ready for it. Looking forward to refederating when the time comes.
I think rexxit is the catalyst to get the platform ready. I don’t think rexxit is a one and done thing. It’s gonna be more of a constant trickle, and lemmy is in a very good place to absorb more users. I browsed /r/all today, and saw many comments of people saying the frontpage sucks because there’s no content. Spez might like to pretend there’s no impact to reddit, but there’s certainly going to be a big impact at least in the near term.
Indeed, I think that ironically the pattern we’re seeing from Reddit is pretty much ideal for getting this platform up and running. They sent a moderate surge of users over here to shake things down and start contributing, and then on June 30 a much bigger surge may come this way to see what’s been built.
No one is ever ready for the Reddit Inqui-- er, Invasion.
How can you be ready for something you don’t expect?
Expect the unexpected. Unexpect the… expected?
Im ready for a hot summer fling with an enchanting lover. However my expectation is that it will not happen.
Choose your own snarky reply:
- not with that attitude
- perhaps it’s still your density (with apologies to the writers of Back the the Future)
At the same time, Rexxit is getting more folks involved with Lemmy (both as users and developers). Lemmy’s already a 4-year-old project. I expect we’ll see it advance and mature a lot in the coming months from all the new attention.
I dont see it that way. Software improvements can be pretty stagnant if there is a slow influx of new users. A good dose of new redditors will expose the main issues with the platform, and thats a good thing imo. Defederation is now on the spotlight for many users who were clueless about it, and that helps development since awareness can bring volunteer work onto said issues more quickly.
If anything it’s probably ultimately better (from this, specific perspective) that the Reddit blackout was only two days and only really drove 10k~100k over to try out Fediverse instances and not 100k~1m. In general I don’t think things are clear and digestible enough to start porting entire communities (even small ones), but I think with some stress testing and getting some QOL updates, apps, etc., we could be in that position in as little as a few weeks or months.
only really drove 10k~100k over to try out Fediverse instances
Even with open-signup instances available, I wonder what the backlog looks like elsewhere. I don’t think we can gauge the level of interest in alternatives four days after the larger Reddit community was faced with the blackout. Trends do not move in days in general.
We can’t forget that the third-party apps are still functional for a couple weeks still too.
Related to the topic of defederation, I saw a post on kbin about an issue with an instance called exploding-heads.com being full of right wing troll types. Has the mod team investigated this instance? Would rather we be out ahead of it before they start coming over here to create issues.
Would rather we be out ahead of it before they start coming over here to create issues.
we defederated with them already, so no worries on this front
I’m glad to hear that, thanks for being so proactive in keeping us safe.
Just as a note, but you can check which instances a Lemmy instance is federated with by hopping on the
/instanceslist, eg. https://beehaw.org/instances (the link is on the bottom of every page)
