Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
It’s important to note that the admins of beehaw are not happy about this solution, either. And they hope to refederate once they have better tools and enough mods / admins to deal with it.
They point wasn’t to shadowban, that was a side effect. The point was to protect their member–who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance–from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that. Nobody’s happy with the situation, but it’s the best they could do under the circumstances with the resources they have.
I also don’t think it’s wrong for instances to have their own strong rules and preferences. This is one of the GOOD things about the Fediverse. The software features and how people use lemmy will catch up eventually.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
That’s true for just the duplication problem, but the defederation / shadow banning issue is not one that reddit has and is pretty confusing and poor user experience for new users coming in.
And this is why the fediverse will never work out - if I gamble wrong and set up shop on an instance that gets in a pissing match with other ones, I either have to make an account elsewhere (and then have to do it again later the next time two instances defederate each other) or live with only seeing some of my subscribed content.
There are already conversations about Nomadic Identities and what that would look like. Until that is done, I agree with you that there are going to be some issues, such as this. The fact that this is on their radar is very promising.
this is why i plan to host my own federated instance - no pissing matches can be had, and i can federate with any larger ones that i like/pick up steam.
And it’s extra shitty because Beehaw has the largest technology community in the fediverse, so if you want to access it you better make sure you’re a member of one of their ‘blessed’ federated friends.
largest tech community in the fediverse
TIL. I assumed between lemmy.world, programming.dev, infosec.pub I’d had my tech feed basically covered
I think it has positives. and the negatives can be adressed with new features like a federated identity . something that could allow you to keep accounts on multiple servers combining subscriptions deduping content and letting you control what user to use to interact.
This splintering of communities can be a drawback, but it can also be a blessing. Instead of having one account where I do all my social media things, I’ve been categorizing the types of social media I enjoy and creating an account for each category, on the instance that feels closest to that type of media. It’s kind of nice because I know exactly what kind of content subscriptions I’m going to see when I switch to each account. It’s also nice to be able to comment on things and know that people who look at my history will see comments on similar topics. Someone’s opinion on my comments about politics, for example, won’t be colored by my recent comments about extraterrestrials in a different community.
There is some risk of being part of a community that might disappear someday, or become something you don’t like, but that’s a risk present in all social media. As another commenter mentioned, the advantage here is that you can set up your own instance where you can control your own data. It’s actually going to be beneficial that a lot of people do this, so that the fediverse as a whole can handle everyone’s traffic without operation costs ballooning beyond control for any individual instance.
But a consequence of this is the creation of many small communities about the same topics, spread across many instances. I think we will need to create some method of federating many communities across many instances in a categorical way. For example, if I want to see all communities about cooking across all instances, there would need to be some decentralized method of tagging communities by topic. That way you don’t have to decide which community is most representative of what you want to see. And there could be many tags for each community, so if I want to see only videos about only cooking, where only vegan food is shown, there may be a community that ranks high in all those tags.
Instead of subscribing to the community itself, you would just subscribe to the tag, creating a virtual subscription to all the contained communities. You’d be able to see all the communities for your selected topic(s) across the whole lemmyverse. And if you see a community that you think does not belong to something that it’s been tagged with, you can unsubscribe it from the tag so it doesn’t show in that list for you. If more people do the same, that community would fall in ranking on that tag list until eventually it is taken off. But if people upvote content from that community more than communities higher in the ranking, that community would rise in the tag list.
I’m not sure if others would be interested in a system like this, but in my mind, it is the kind of thing we need to have rich curated content at low cost. Okay, I’m done now.
I don’t really like this approach because it’s not personally customizable and wouldn’t be very straightforward. I’d prefer something similar to multireddits where I can make a collection of similar communities.
With the platform at the size that it is currently, I’m inclined to agree with you. But I think in the future, lemmy may become large enough that having a public tagging system would be useful.
Ideally, the two preferences can coexist. The multireddit equivalent would just be a private tag, exclusive to your account. But you could make it public, either anonymously or posted to your account, e.g. tag@pyrojoe@lemmy.world.
Then, all the public tags can be merged at will, so if I make a new account and want to see all communities about birds, I can select the bird tag. If I want to make edits to the tag list without affecting the public tag, I would even have the ability to copy the public tag to my own private tag and prune the communities I don’t like without decreasing their public rankings.
I think this would provide flexible levels of functionality to those who want it, but there may also be hidden consequences of this method that I’m currently missing.
No. This is just a problem that hasn’t been solved yet! It will be in time haha.
Head back to Reddit the way you came then, friend.
No, discussion is welcome here. Even mine, even yours.
It’s getting pretty tiring to see people feeling entitled to have access to any and all communities of the Fediverse, if the people paying for the running cost of the Beehaw instance wants to defederate (for whatever reason, “good” or “bad”), that’s their prerogative.
If you really want access to their content, apply to join, otherwise sign up to any of the dozens of lemmy instances federated to the rest of the fediverse.
One of the great things about the Fediverse in general is choice, user and instance admin can choose how they want to interact, and are not beholden to a company or group which can take any arbitrary decisions they want.
TLDR : Instance admin are entitled to how they want to run it, you’re not.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
I signed up through sh.itjust.works - was this a bad idea? Only opened my account 2 days ago so learning the ropes.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
I’m criticizing people criticizing people for criticizing people who criticize people who criticize…
You’re just as tiring as the people you’re criticizing.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Wow so much misinformed hostility against Beehaw here. The mod tools for Lemmy are currently limited and they just want to protect their community from trolls and spam. There’s no conspiracy here to break federation.
True, but unsubbed from them when it happened because I don’t want to see communities I can’t interact with.
Why add to the problem and have frustration with wanting to discuss something you are blocked from?
They have every right to protect themselves against spam. But that said, ever since they defederated, their activity and user numbers are down.
Agree that they have every right to handle their instance however they want. I also have the right to not interact with them while they are blocking the instance I call home.
Eh, there were a few posts about this on lemmy.world when it happened. People went through beehaw’s modlog and could only find a handful of actions taken against both communities.
Seems they just want to have their own little bubble.
Yep, I applied to join when I was fresh and it asks about how active applicants are. I was honest and said I wasn’t the most active person but that I did participate in the subs that I used the most. Was trying to be honest and didn’t see any red flags with that. They still denied me, so fuck beehaw
Safe spaces are pretty much that. I would actually like to join beehaw if I ever need to switch to an instance for my own sanity. I left reddit but it’s followed us here so I think a more curated experience would be nice.
That is unless they’re nazis, fascists, authoritarian or any other kind of violent extremist faction. I’m sick of having no faith in humanity because of all these backwards ideologies being “expressed”. To quote Costanza, these pretzels are making me thirsty.
I also don’t like how beehaw has downvotes disabled. I get not wanting there to be brigading, or negativity, but being able to downvote a troll, or a post that is blatantly providing misinformation (purposefully or not), is invaluable.
I think there’s value in it. The underlying idea is that if someone is wrong, even if blatantly so, you have to take the effort to explain why. On reddit, the downvote button was just as often used as a community cudgel against dissenting opinion, even when the opinion was 1) genuinely harmless but unpopular, 2) well reasoned and supported by evidence but something that went against the mob mentality, or 3) just something that people didn’t understand and their gut reaction to it was negative.
this is completely reasonable, they own the instance and should be able to do whatever they want with it.
This is a bit of a bummer since I’m interested in a lot of the beehaw communities. Should users just make separate accounts to interact with beehaw communities?
I’ve tried a couple times to create an account there and been denied.
Yes.
I use a separate account for Beehaw but ever since they defederated I haven’t seen as much activity on there.
Sounds like a double-edged sword. High admittance rate may mean spammier as well as trollier content, but low admissions and blacklisting other instances means people will move their stuff to where they expect more people to see it.
Just create an account with an instance that federates with both.
Any recommendations for an instance that’s unlikely to get defederated in the future?
That would be pretty hard to predict, but you can easily pick an instance that’s on both beehaw and lemmy.world
Is there a page where we can see which instances are ban-crazy and which ones actually federate and communicate?
That would be awesome
It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but still: https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ (might be slow to load).
I disagree with this. A more nuanced take is that you should consider any beehaw communities read only unless refederation happens. The defederation was not out of ill will, it was about self preservation in a growing ecosystem and the reasons were clearly communicated and a path to refederation was left open. Read only posts are still valuable, and even though there is a more complex mechanism at play than true “read only” understanding that you can view is better than just blocking them in reverse. We are all friends here, and I think in the long run refederation will happen as this platform matures.
I’m basically a read only user anyway so hah!
Yeah I would agree with this. It’s good to know for anyone new coming in but should be taken in good faith unless and until a reason crops up to change that. Not seen anything like that so far.
It would be nice if Lemmy let you know if you were browsing a thread from a defederated instance. Like a flair in the title or something, So you can read but you know your comment will only be seen by users on your instance.
deleted by creator
The Beehaw instance has defederated from the Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works instances. Each instance is responsible for sending updates to other instances. Defederation means that no outgoing updates are sent and no incoming updates are honored.
deleted by creator
Can there atleast be a way to let users outside of beehaw see posts and comments but not participate, rather than completely detaching and leaving a void of content?
Can you help me understand exactly how this will affect me? I actually have accounts on both lemmy.world and beehaw.org (I signed up for both when I initially found Lemmy and was trying to figure the whole thing out).
If I’m on my lemmy.world account, will I no longer be able to browse beehaw communities? On the flip side, if I’m on my beehaw.org account, will I no longer be able to browse lemmy.world communities?
Am I understanding things correctly? If that’s the case, then is the only solution to flip back and forth between the two accounts depending on which server the community I’m wanting to browse is on?
Basically. You can browse them with the opposite account but you can’t interact.
So it’s like getting banned from a subreddit, except you can’t even browse with the same account after being banned?
Yes browse. No post.
Also - fwiw - they are likely to refederate in the future. I subscribe to beehaw communities, cuz we can still see them, just can’t talk to them.
For instances that are mostly for discussion, its pretty pointless to stay subscribed.
Unless you’re ok lurking and just reading. I used to rarely contribute to ask reddit, but I would read a ton of those threads
Disclaimer: pretty new to Lemmy a federation (older than this account though).
From what I gather, defederation is supposed to be a function of this whole system, but intended to cut off whole instances that refuse to moderate or are active cesspools. In saying that, I don’t understand Beehaw cutting off two of the other biggest instances. I know they have a weird mentality over there of no downvotes and saw some odd conversations condemning someone’s political views while admitting to not know the person at all (dafuq?).
It seems to me it would make more sense to block a single community rather than the whole instance.
Maybe they want a walled garden, but as new people come in and want as much content as possible to show that this is a better venue than Reddit, to me they give off the wrong message.
Am I mistaken somehow? Anyone able to enlighten me?
I could just log in to BeeHaw…
If they let you in, sure.
Or just ignore them and let become less popular and soon enough the important communities will move away or be replaced. I really dislike how many influence communities are in such a one dimensional instance, luckily I have already seen a few of those moving over to .world or elsewhere and I can’t wait!
I like to have people with all sorts of backgrounds and opinions in my instance, not just everyone with the same black and white viewpoint!
Yeah, it’s a hard balance to follow. Of course you want full, natural diversity of people and opinions in a group. But hateful right wing toxicity is also way overrepresented online, and has to be moderated against if you don’t want a niche online platform to turn into 4chan or whatever
Yeah. Beehaw is trying to make an echo chamber and it’s best to stray away from that approach.
Why?
