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.
Well I was worried, but I can still access the communities I'm subscribed to from those instances so I can appreciate this more.
My biggest issue with Reddit has been the lack of nuanced discussion. Everything is just black or white. If we can keep that element out of this instance I'll be happy.
The posts and communities are frozen from the time the defederation took place onwards - only a "local" Beehaw copy remains.
Then why do I still see new beehaw community content in LW?![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/9f0d5519-2127-4c7a-8598-f767f09f7846.png)
Those posts were made by local users, and can only be seen by local users of your instance.
Compare it to the real thing https://beehaw.org/c/news
Ahh, that make sense now. Super confusing though. New users are going to think that content is coming from beehaw, but it’s not. Yikes.
For sure.
This is definitely a situation that could be handled better by the lemmy code.
So is this a defederation thing? I'm going to assume. Otherwise, what's the point of being federated if I sub to another community on another instance and only the people from my instance can see those comments? Or am I missing something?
Yeah, it's because of the de-federation.
A cached copy of the community exists on the remote instances, and users are able to engage with it.
It seems de-federation stops the updates, but doesn't remove remote copies of the communities. It's not really an ideal situation, as I'm sure many users don't realize they're not engaging with the real community.
Okay, cool. I appreciate the quick reply. I thought for half a second I didn't really understand all of this like I thought haha. That makes way more sense. Thanks again!
np.
I love how fast the discussion can be here. Near-instant.