Interested to see what they mean by bad behavior? Also, what a terrible, dumb decision. Beehaw always seemed like it was ran by uptight former big subreddit mods.
This is the downside of federated sites like this. While one person can’t take the whole thing down, there’s lots of small groups that can do stuff like this. Beehaw has dome of the biggest communities, and a small group just shut them down for a lot of people. And you can’t sign up to their community, without a completely opaque sign up process that barely works.
They lay it out very clearly in their long-winded “philosophy of beehaw” post (which you must read prior to application): anyone being a jerk because of bigotry or because the people in charge don’t like them or are having a bad day or feel like exercising their power or they are not sufficiently singing along.
They lay it out very clearly in their long-winded “philosophy of beehaw” post (which you must read prior to application): anyone being a jerk because of bigotry or because the people in charge don’t like them or are having a bad day or feel like exercising their power or they are not sufficiently singing along.
It’s weird they are touting their sign up process.
I tried to sign up on Beehaw multiple times on multiple days and could never complete the process despite manually typing out answers to their inane questions several times. Some of the times it would just time out. When it would go through, I’d never get a response on my account.
So I ended up on lemmy.world.
And let’s be honest, it’s not like ChatGPT couldn’t generate responses to those questions. In a certain sense, maybe them self-quarentining is a good thing for this and other reasons. I guess that’s also part of the point of federation vs a single entity in control of everything.
that was me trying to get on lemmy.ln. someone recommended lemmy.world.
kind of disappointing to see, considering they had some very large communities across the feddiverse.
If they were trying to do something like tildes with the small, curated user base, they probably shouldn’t have federated at all. this is just going to hold community growth back for the other instances
I don’t get it, if i see a troll, i just block them and move on with life. Beehaw users have the ability to block things themselves no?
Yes, but admins want to maintain a certain kind of atmosphere in their instance. It can’t be completely up to the users.
Yeah unfortunately that by itself is not sustainable.
Like I get their point, but that is a whole lot of hand holding for people on the internet. The bouncer at the door analogy leans way too heavily on a group of folks I personally couldn’t be around. And I’m not a toxic person, that’s just not my crowd and I don’t want to walk on thin ice hoping what I say doesn’t trigger a ban or something idk
They either need a huge mod team with amazing tools, good AI, or to just stay unfederated.
Seems like beehaw is doing everything they can to isolate themselves from the community. They seem to have good intentions but they are way too uptight.
Less than an hour ago, I was reporting some pretty vile shit that was being spammed on some of their places I was subscribed to. It was a lot, all at the exact same time. If they are getting coordinated attacks like that regularly, I’m not sure I can really blame them for wanting to wait for the tools they need to keep it in check.
I saw the same thing, lots of slurs being thrown around. I blocked the individual users. I’m not on either instance so I can still see both
The stuff I saw was worse than just slurs. One was a meme about murdering drag performers. Really hateful shit.
Have these instances blocked the known shit lists yet? There are some well known block lists on mastodon that every admin should have here
Lemmy and Kbin should ship with these nazi block lists built in
Beehaw has good intentions, but I don’t know if those intentions are entirely compatible with the fundamental architecture of Lemmy.
They literally are because being able to defederate is part of the fundamental architecture of fediverse apps. And defederating from instances that are putting the kind of content into your community that you don’t want is… like, that ability is one of the core selling points of fediverse apps.
Yes, but in their post they wrote about how the large influx of users from other instances made their specific goals too hard to accomplish.
It wasn’t a philosophical difference with lemmy.world, which is a case that federation would have worked well with, it was simply that there were enough new users that they couldn’t maintain the tighter moderation that they want. And that’s fine, they have the right to administer their instance however they’d like, but if they are having trouble with new users from lemmy.world then they’re going to have trouble with any federation with enough cumulative users.
From a purely operational standpoint, rapid growth stresses a network service not only in its technical capacity, but also in the ability of the service’s operators to keep up with fighting fires. Engineering capacity to work on a service is itself a limiting factor on healthy growth.
If the tools aren’t yet there to mitigate a rapid growth in abuse problems, then it just makes sense for them to limit their exposure to the rapid-growth part of the network. It takes time to write those tools.
The main issue with an instance such as lemmy.world is that they don’t vet people at all. Beehawk manually approves their users, but that becomes kinda pointless when anyone can just create an account on lemmy.world and then go post on beehawk.
Writing a paragraph about why you want to join isn’t necessarily a great vetting process though
Yeah, but then is Beehaw just going to defederate with every instance that has open registration or limited vetting, past a certain user threshold?
That includes lots of instances. Kbin.social has open registration and is growing, for example.
At that point, is a federated social network really what served their goals?
I disagree with that assessment, and it doesn’t match with what they said in the post. 4 bullets justified the decision, all of which outlined philosophical differences to my eyes.
It’s true that in the future, they may have sufficient mod tools/capacity to overcome these philosophical differences with brute force. But at minimum, it is a union of both practical ability and philosophical differences that led to this decision and that is totally in line with the decentralized nature of the fediverse.
I don’t know if it was the right decision for them. Time will tell. But being able to make those decisions on their own judgment is crucial to the longterm health of the system. We’re two outsiders to Beehaw. I can’t speak for you, but personally, I chose not to register at Beehaw because I didn’t like the sound of a more curated safe space. I also chose not to register at Lemmy.world, because there are things about it that rubbed me the wrong way, too. That’s a crucial part of how the fediverse is supposed to work.
What about lemmy.world rubbed you the wrong way?
Hard to say since it’s totally subjective. I’m not in love with Lemmy as an ActivityPub service to start with. Devs have enough closet skeletons and the UX just seemed… not my style. Lemmy World, at least from the join list, had zero personality. It also expanded incredibly quickly, to the point that I truly am skeptical any kind of local moderation is going to be possible for a while. I have a feeling I am going to have to start filtering content from it myself – my front page is being absolutely assblasted with porn, stupid memes, and low-effort posts all coming in from LW already.
Long term? Probably not a big deal. But in these early days, it is a turnoff. LW is a firehose right now, and the mod tools available are not yet up to that task.
None of these issues are fundamental. They stem from poor planning from the mod team. You cannot moderate all of the largest communities with four mods for ALL communities.
*> *- -
they are way too uptight.
I don’t get why people have such a hard time seeing how hard effective moderation of 100’000s of people is… The people running lemmy aren’t companies or businesses, they are hobbyists… They do all the administration and moderation in their spare time… Taking care of the server cost is one thing, but moderation is no joke… Especially when the tools provided are also build by hobbyists who have been building this in their spare time as well…
And it’s better to act when you notice that you cannot effectively moderate when things are relatively harmless… Because what happens when trolls notice that they cannot moderate effectively and actually post harmful content, like threats, cp, etc?
Let them do it, they’ll be forgotten soon. They pulled that off with lemmygrad first citing hardcore communism as a reason, mmkay it’s understandable, and now they’re doing it with lemmy.world because… federation turned out to be something they didn’t really want? The moderation excuse is very weak, many would have volunteered to help the moderation scale.
The communities here and on lemmy.ml are cool. You can also find others on lemmyverse.net.
many would have volunteered to help the moderation scale.
Yeah, but that’s going to take time. Lemmy is in its infancy and these things need to be established at the outset.
I think this is going to produce some interesting results, which will likely help progress Lemmy as a whole.
One of the regular topics coming up is users not knowing which instance they should create a user on, and what the implications of being a user on a particular instance are. This change by the Beehaw is going to clarify some of the implications and help drive people towards one instance or another, or even to have multiple accounts on different instances.
I think this will increase the adoption of Beehaw for users that the Beehaw admins are looking for in their community, which benefits the Beehaw instance. Conversely, I think the more general communities on Beehaw that aren’t there specifically for the community Beehaw is trying to foster will likely migrate to the equivalent communities on other instances and settle there. While Beehaw was popular and federated it made sense to subscribe to technology@beehaw.org, but now it’s defederated I’d expect an equivalent community on a more permissive and widely federated instance to gain traction.
Right now it feels pretty disruptive. Arguably this occurring now with a relatively small number of users (thousands rather than millions) affected is preferable and will help shake out these issues, which will make it smoother for future users.
It will help Lemmy become more resilient. The tooling to help manage an instance defederating is also likely to be useful for instances going offline, or otherwise disconnecting from the fediverse. Better that that tooling is in place early.
Arguably this occurring now with a relatively small number of users (thousands rather than millions) affected is preferable and will help shake out these issues, which will make it smoother for future users.
I disagree, lemmy is seeing a temporary boost from all of us reddit refugees. We need content and a welcoming community for everyone to stay. This sort of infighting and politicking is going to come across as toxic and exactly the sort of thing redditors wanted to get away from.
If it were done later when the fediverse is bigger and more stable with enough critical mass of content, separating will affect more users but it will be least disruptive to the fediverse as a whole.
I can see your point and do agree that it’s disruptive now. It also exacerbates the difficulty of learning a new platform. Despite that though I think the early adopters are best equipped to cope with that. They’re already dealing with rough tooling and little documentation, official or social.
In terms of it happening when Lemmy, or even the fediverse as a whole, is bigger, if there aren’t tools and practices in place to manage it I think the impact would be significantly more detrimental. Without it happening in ‘the early days’ those tools and practices are a lot less likely to be developed.
We need content and a welcoming community for everyone to stay.
I think that idea is exactly what both Beehaw and lemmy.world are trying to do. I don’t know all the thinking of the instance admins, but from my observations I see Beehaw prioritising their community and lemmy.world prioritising federation and availability. I don’t see it as ‘infighting and politicking’, just co-existing view points for managing instances. To put it in terms of popular monolithic platforms, I’d imagine there would be a bit of a shakedown if 4chan, reddit, slashdot, digg, et al. started federating. I’ll not attempt to draw parallels between lemmy instances and other platforms, that’s above my pay grade :)
I imagine we’ll end up with a spectrum of instances with varying degrees of federation and permisiveness, and that the directory services that are popping up will continue to improve to help you find and instance that works for you.
I think one of the challenges with migration is that reddit doesn’t map one-to-one with Lemmy. With a monolithic platform, centralised admin can enforce the types of things I think your hoping for. On Lemmy I think inter-instance differences are inevitable, while on reddit the concepts didn’t exist for it to become possible. Working through how those are handled will result in Lemmy as a whole improving.
I’m pretty optimistic about it.
As a redditor it seems like scary infighting
As a lemmonereringer it seems intriguing, im interested where this goes and i will follow up on the development
As a drun,k im drunk👍
“subreddit drama” on steroids. The politics of federation might take substantial airtime in lemmy
Sounds like you had a fun evening!
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I know we can have multiple accounts (and I am sure apps will help the experience), but I almost signed up for Beehaw as it was big and chose here
I am glad I didn’t sign up and will probably unsubscribe to anything I was subbed to there as I can’t post, maybe I’ll signup so I can just in case there’s anything interesting…
I think it’ll take a little while to settle down, but I’d expect the communities to congregate on more permissive, well federated servers. In the short term I’m doing similar to you what you proposed, e.g. having accounts on various servers, but I expect the need for this to go away as things settle down. I already focus on a couple of instances more than others.
I do think that less permissive instances will still thrive though, although maybe not so much for general content. That may change as more granular controls and better tools emerge so it’s less of an ‘all or nothing’ approach to federating.
I see several comments talking about this being a wrong decision, or Beehaw needing to change its attitude etc. I think these opinions come from a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of federation. Federation is not about all the instances coming together to cater to our needs. It’s about each instance doing its own thing, and communities will form around the ones that cater to them. In other words, we don’t need Beehaw to budge on its decision, we need to build the community we want without Beehaw, while Beehaw caters to the users who aren’t in this with us.
As long as beehaw is only de-linking these instances rather than actually blocking them, doesn’t that still allow them to pull new posts and comments from beehaw? It’s like the no-participation mode that r/bestof uses.
Federation works in the opposite direction. It’s push-based rather than pull-based. To get posts from Beehaw, Beehaw has to actively push those posts to your instance. With this move, Beehaw is choosing to no longer push posts to lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
Oh well, I was subbed into a couple beehaw communities but wasn’t really active in them anyways.
i cannot control how things change :( i dislike how this instability feels… just gotta be patient and let things develop at their natural speed.
A regrettable but completely understandable action. I think this highlights the need for improved moderation tools in Lemmy. Right now the only available option is a sledgehammer of defederation which nobody is happy with. Instances absolutely have the right to protect their members in whatever ways they deem appropriate, this is the benefit of a decentralized platform, but we clearly need more granular options.
No I think improved moderation is the last thing we need. We need moderation, but moderation is supposed to be an in the background thing, not this end all be all dictatorship bullshit, submit or watch me ban you and censor you bullshit, like we saw Reddit turn into. I mean exhibit A, look how that’s turning out for them.
And the beauty of federation is that you can choose a instance of your liking.
I’m going to have to concur with this. I attempted to contribute to a number of subreddits over the past few years; some of my posts went up and got lots of up votes, so yay. On the other hand, posts in some other subs would immediately get rejected, and once I even got temporarily banned for my post. I had read and followed the sub rules to the best of my ability. I was left feeling like maybe the mods there just didn’t like my sense of humor, or something… it was really weird.
So yeah… to take a slight twist on an old saying: everything in moderation – including moderation.
this sucks, specially as someone that was ghosted (assume denied) on beehaw signup, I’m glad that instances such as lemmy.world exist where I have the chance to post before assuming I’m an undesirable.
FWIW the beehaw people only found out after a while that there was a bug in Lemmy that meant users wouldn’t get any notification of being denied. I’m not sure if that’s fixed yet, but I that’s a Lemmy shortcoming that applies/applied to all servers requiring approval.
Same here. But I found sdf which seems super cool. Maybe I’ll actually learn more than five vim commands now
@plumbercraic @lemmyworld But can you exit vim? That’s the real question😁
Sure thing - ctrl a, c, PS l grep vim, kill - 9 pid
Or something 🙃
[esc]: !sudo kill -9 $(pgrep vim)
Huh. Didnt know about pgrep
You just summed up my last 30 years of Linux. To be completely honest I knew vaguely of it but I’ve never used it before. My first inclination was to use killall, but something about its force command isn’t quite -9 and it refused to terminate the parent application.
I know I’m late to the discussion but why is lemmy.world showing up on beehaw instances? The refederated?
I think the general perspective on beehaw needs to change. There’s no way they can realistically continue to maintain the largest communities on the threadiverse with only four mods and this is exactly why they should have never let themselves get in that position in the first place.
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If you care about these sorts of things, Allowlist and Blocklist are the preferred terms these days.
Yeah whitelist feels like the best option for them and the larger threadiverse community.
I think a whitelist is worse. While it gives them more control, it also essentially shuts out smaller instances and can lead to the existing instances becoming entrenched and hard to replace. I’m also not sure if would be a good move ‘politically’ for the admins. People are going to treat whatever is whitelisted as being endorsed by them.
The main advantage that I see is that they will almost certainly fall out of favor with the majority of the larger threadiverse community. They cannot continue to operate all of the largest communities with a mod team of 4 but seemingly have no plans to change it. They need to be ok with changing their stated relation to the larger threadiverse or they will be doing real damage to the larger community.
Allowing instances to use a whitelist instead of a blacklist is actually a really bad idea. It makes the default not being federated with anything, which makes it far easier to create centralized isolated silos that it’s hard to move off of while staying in contact with, and in general would just destroy the interconnected nature of the fediverse
You see, the thing is if they add more mods then they water down their absolute power.
I really don’t think it’s a power grab thing. Just a lack of forethought.
Mod heavy people always talk about this supposedly huge influx of trolls, toxicity, spam that they have to moderate, but I just don’t see it. I’m not sure that I have seen even a single post that obviously needed to be moderated this week. Maybe I’m just not looking in the right communities?
The modlog is public at /modlog/ on the server if you’re interested enough to review it.
approx 25% of the banned posts are deserved
i think they’re anticipating it.
also, there’s a false accusation there. i had to register my email with lemmy world
There are a few other commenters on this post that mention seeing mass spamming of slurs and a meme about killing drag performers. I see no reason to doubt the explanation given by the mods. Of course trolls would target beehaw, because that community made such a big deal of being nice and positive. It’s just a shitty situation all around.
If more instances had down voting, we could self moderate in that way.
