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.

  • lwaxana_katana@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I mean, you can create two accounts. I have my Beehaw account as well as my startrek.website account, for example. I use them both for different things, and they both have different vibes. I quite like it tbh.

      • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Does it, though? Federation is not aggregation. It’s a model of interaction in which a community can curate what other communities they interact with. It can be more nuanced with limiting, as mastodon does, but that’s not an option here yet. I think this is precisely what federation is at its core

        • chris.@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          agreed, as someone who’s used fediverse platforms for a few years & seen cases of large scale raiding as well as just general infestation between some normal & some pretty bad servers, defederation is one of the main pros of the fediverse. without effective moderation, a community like ours cannot exist for long, & the only way to effectively moderate a foreign server full of literal tens of thousands of users who abide to a completely different law is to cut them off. while having to make an alt can be slightly inconvenient to some, the only alternative for a popular server like ours is to count down until it becomes too large to effectively moderate

        • Hrafn Blóðbók@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I think this is an important point to consider. For a long time, I kept thinking that the fediverse was going to be the answer to the problem of keeping separate accounts on every site (because most places are isolated/walled-in networks). It took me years to accept that “one account everywhere” isn’t what the federation model is about.

          I wish there was such a thing, but that’s going to require portable identities/user accounts, and I don’t know why but that seems to be progressing at a snail’s pace with a bunch of stagnated RFCs everywhere (but please let me know if there is progress happening somewhere, I may be out of the loop). Once we have that, it’ll make the fediverse a lot more convenient, since then you should be able to log in to other instances with the same account.

          • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            I think that will be something that comes down the road, but for now, it seems like it’s more of an answer to the problem of website admins running their site in a way you don’t agree with. On the Fediverse you have more flexibility to pick administrators you agree with their management style or to host your community and decide yourself how you want things to be

            • Derproid@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              With defederation isn’t the fediverse no different from just separate bb forums we used to have that Reddir eventually killed them all off? Fediverse with too much defederation is just moving backwards and brings back the problems of the past.

            • Hrafn Blóðbók@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              Indeed, it’s an answer to the problem of people’s right to organise and govern their own communities. It’s not perfect since federation is literally interconnected (to various degrees) centralised instances, with each one controlled by one or a select few people that the community trusts, but it’s better than commercial platforms and closed protocols.

      • lwaxana_katana@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Sure, but maybe every instance doesn’t have to be tightly federated. There will be some instances where broad federation is their guiding principle, and some instances like Beehaw where their guiding principle is creating and maintaining a particular atmosphere.