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ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works - Beehaw
beehaw.orghey folks, weāll 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. ā we have been concerned
with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy isāparticularly with
federation in mindābasically since it began. i have already related
[https://beehaw.org/post/520044?scrollToComments=true] how difficult dealing
with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four
Admins, and increasingly weāre being confronted with external vectors we have to
deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below). an
unfortunate reality weāve also found is we just donāt 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 donāt scale well. we have a list of
improvements weād like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and
federation if at all possibleābut weāre unanimous in the belief that we canāt
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 whatās mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by
and large, boils down to: - these two instancesā 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 donāt care about what our instance stands for as Gaywallet puts it,
in our discussion of whether to do this: > Thereās a lot of soft moderating that
happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But itās not just
that, thereās a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust
and support to open up, and itās really hard to trust and support whoās around
you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when
thereās more hostility around them. Theyāll even shut themselves off when
thereās fake nice behavior around. Thereās a lot of nuance in modding a
community like this and itās 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 canāt
even assess that for people who arenāt from our instance, so weāre walking a
tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isnāt
sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a
short timeframe. > > Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically arenāt 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 itās in effect. but we hope you can understand why weāre 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. in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and
interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, weāll reassess whether
we feel capable of refederating with these communities. thanks for using our
site folks.
I hope that this doesnāt lead to fracturing the way it apparently did on Mastodon, where every instance that federated with a set of known-bad instances was itself added to the list of āknown-badā instances that the main instances ought to de-federate from (or maybe it will have to be that way to keep out the trolls); to put it another way, I hope that whichever side ends up being the more useful one in this split (beehaw.org or lemmy.world & sh.itjust.works) is the one that midwest.social gets to keep federating with, if it comes to that, or else Iāll need to bother joining beehaw or sh.itjust.works directly.
(I forget whether I had to go through an involved process to register on midwest.social, but I know itās not one of the instances with open registration.)
As they defederate from instances they deem unwanted they will lose relevance from your point of view.
The way I see it if an instance isolates itself the communities inside that were relevant to many users will be replaced with others.
They suggested on some comments that they see federation as a plus, but they want a very specific type of community.
So far it just looks like there will be a couple of instances who defed from everyone else, not a large scale split. Reddit refugees are mostly average users, not radical leftists like those who left Twitter for Mastodon.