I've read the post: my take on it is that there's not enough moderation tools, and the only one that really works against servers with open registration is defederation.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I know this is an unpopular move for many Fediverse users including Beehaw. I support this move by the Beehaw admins because they are overworked enough managing the site, they don't have the energy to be constantly chasing trolls spamming accounts posting harmful posts and messages onto their community.
They have a stated ethos, and they should do whatever necessary to be able to keep up with the growing user base. Of course it will stunt their growth but between pursuing growth and keeping the vibe on that instance, they choose the vibe and I respect that decision.
Kinda glad I chose a lower key instance in terms of ideology and size (lemmy.ca). But it would be nice to have a single log in associated with the full fediverse.
You can do this already though (unless I’m misunderstanding you). I’m on one account (this one) and I’m subbed to communities on multiple different instances. It’s my single log in associated with as much of the fediverse as Lemmy can access.
Nah, I'm referring to one account (think like FB login or Google log in, but not awful) that accesses all the Lemmy instances without being on any particular instance. This means that users are independent of instances but still access the fediverse. Then instances block individual users if needed, users block instances if needed, but instances are still decentralized and owned by smaller groups than giant companies like Reddit, preventing a company from monopolizing things. It also removes the whole account migration thing. Could be as simple as one mega instance that hosts only accounts and all other instances host content.
It also removes the confusion. Right now I'm kat on lemmy.ca, but there could be kat@ any other instance and you'd never really know unless you memorized my instance handle.
An interesting idea. I just wonder because the whole thing about Lemmy is decentralization and if I understand your idea, it would sort of be a centralization which sorta goes against the whole thing?
I mean it would still be decentralized in most ways that matter. Nobody would own the hosting of instances except the small groups or individuals that do, so if a surpressive party ever tried to control the narrative on a large instance with multiple communities, users could just focus on other instances that aren't like that. Likewise, it would greatly simplify the moderation needs of other instances (in some ways) - instances would focus on blocking harmful users, but they wouldn't have to worry about potentially replicating content from harmful instances. Sign up is also simplified, preventing the "where do I go" confusion.
It could also marry the different fediverse hangouts in different ways. Think about YouTube - they have a place for the main feed, they have a place for shorts, and those two places don't even really give the same vibe. A good fediverse app could have different views between Mastodon, Lemmy, Tumblr (they're either federated or plan to be), etc but one account that has a single access point for all of those. Sliding between the views gives you something like Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, etc. Instead of 12 handles, YouTubers give 1.
There are pitfalls - who owns the big account instance? What if the owners of it somehow abuse their power over the community, can we create another account instance and link it up, good as new? How hard is it to screen individual users from the perspective of an individual instance owner or group? Do we want to have our activity linked across multiple different places on the internet - after all, Mastodon is more real identity meaning, but Lemmy is more anonymous like Reddit. Who funds the mega instance? Is there incentive to pay for smaller instances if they don't hold your account as well? Will the big instances just... Own all the data eventually anyway (this could happen even without one login)?
I think the only way it could work is from some strange non profit Wikipedia type setup where it's completely FOSS and nobody can ever have ownership to monetize or exploit the user base. Thing is, I'm not a tech person at all. I see shit like Linux as an absolute miracle and completely fail to understand how that even works (people collaborating on a project that's totally free in most cases). I'm just kinda shooting the breeze and trying to think of how things could work possibly, but these ideas are probably bad for reasons I didn't even realize.
I think the main issue we run into with the concept of a user account server is that banning needs to be an ability that someone somewhere has. If someone starts posting some highly illegal content we need a way to ban them. But then invariably giving someone that power is exactly what centralization is. Separating that one user server into multiple leads to other awkward outcomes as I posted elsewhere in this thread. Namely, you end up back where we started where certain instances ban certain user servers that are known to host problematic people.
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From what (admittedly little) I know about the fediverse I can't see this being a good decision for Bee's long term growth. I respect their stance but I simply think there isn't enough content for small groups to sustain yet. Reddit thrives on a newsfeed style experience, if there's nothing to scroll people won't stay. The only reason I'm here is because I can scroll everything in all, which is how I found this post, for example.
I agree. The all new feed with federation is the only thing that has enough content for me as well. I could see users moving away from all the involved servers or maybe just beehaw. There are still a lot of instances that link with beehaw, lemmy.world and shitjustworks so you can see everything.
Worth noting though that if this causes a migration away from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works it'll just lead to another instance growing to the size that beehaw.org seems ready to defederate from. It seems their primary issue is those instances not requiring any kind of moderation for signups and I would argue that's one of the factors that creates larger instances.
It almost certainly is, since it's a lot easier to create an account if you don't have to justify why you want the account made, and you also don't have to wait several hours for the moderators to approve your account.
You can just click a few times and go.
I mean, "long term growth" isn't desirable. Growth isn't sustainable. If they have a critical mass of community, then there is nothing that says they need to grow until they destroy themselves.
Long term growth is necessary to keep any online community alive. Not necessarily accelerating growth. But if a community has less members coming in than the ones who leave over time it will eventually die, no matter what platform it's on.
Replacing membership wouldn't be growth. Failing to replace membership would be negative growth.
Edit: Suffice to say that insufficient growth is NOT a problem any major instance is dealing with right now, and the reasons given for defederation are potentially transient situations
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I just signed up a new account after having started with Beehaw. I joined them because they were growing and seemed to have a good attitude about the whole thing.
This is pretty sad to see as, like you, I think this is going to hurt them in the long run. I could be wrong though. This whole thing is new territory.
I just deleted my beehaw account and I'm sticking with kbin.social for now.
Does this mean that I need to run my own Lemmy to federate from all the sources I'm interested in, if I want content from beehaw and lemmy.world and a.n.other.example.org if they are not federated together?
If I do create my own, do I have to persuade those servers to accept my federation?
So much I don't understand. Wait... I think I get it: if lemmy.ca federates with all these places, I see it all and can interact with it? Are the federated/defederated lists openly available somewhere?
Yes! If you look at the bottom of any instance, there's an "Instances" button that will show you which instances are allowed/blocked. You shouldn't need to create your own server if you can find an instance federated to all the ones you'd like. Defederation seems to be the exception to the rule, though beehaw.org has a larger blocked list than I've seen on other instances. In their defense, some of the sites they've blocked look pretty horrible...
As for making your own instance, I'm afraid I don't know what the process is to federate with other instances...
That is so cool, thank you! I would never have thought to click on any of those links
Yes! Modlog is also a really useful link. It has opened my eyes to the moderating habits of different instances. I learned to keep away from lemmy.ml (all the allegations of tankies seem to be true there), but lemmy.ca (which I see you're also a member of) seems really solid. I trust /u/smorks.
Wow. Just Wow. So much information. These two tools tell me more about an instance than the 'blurb'.
Any idea if kbin has something similar? There is a link to the Modlog, but I can't seem to find a link to an overview of the instances it federates with.
I tried digging around for you, but I didn't have too much luck. I see their moderation log, but the most promising thing I could find for an instance list is:
Statistics -> General -> Below the statistic listing the total number of posts, there's a triangle Fediverse symbol on the left side of the screen. Clicking on that drops down an empty menu titled "Instances". I suspect that that's where you'd find the list if it were there. Perhaps Kbin hasn't implemented it yet.
This kerfuffle is not only hurting Beehaw, but also Lemmy as a whole, and even Kbin. Before Kbin's cloudflare stuff, my Fediverse news feed experience was fantastic. Being able to read, post, and comment from anywhere is a really neat feature, and I've since found that I can post to Lemmy communities from Mastodon. Now we're back to splitting everything up again.
Hot take: I think Fediverse won't truly take off until logins are decoupled from instances. Get rid of the unique logins per-server and it won't matter where you go, how active a server is, or who has a grudge against you for whatever reason. You'll lose access to a space, sure, but you won't have to move to another server and create yet another account on someone else's server with no guarantee that you can remove or export your data...
A universal login system would be either:
An absolute nightmare of security
Or just a centralized service with extra steps.
The fix to the issue here is just implementing account migration.
I wonder how separating logins from instances would work from a programming standpoint. People's accounts need to be hosted on servers somewhere, so it raises some really interesting questions when the topic of defederation and drama like this comes up. For example, the Beehaw admins are running a server somewhere. If we decouple accounts from instances, then my assumption is that we're randomly assigning accounts to servers. So that leads to the possibility of the Beehaw admins hosting an avowed fascist on their server by the design of Lemmy as a whole. I'm sure they would probably take issue with that. Beyond that, who has the control to ban spam/abusive/illegal accounts from the platform as a whole? If someone is going around posting child porn or something else illegal, surely we need to have a way to remove them from all of Lemmy. If it's the server owner where the account was assigned then that raises some really weird questions about their control.
Another theoretical structure for this would be having two types of servers - user servers and community servers. Then users can still choose their server admin, but it would be divorced from any restrictions a community server puts up against other servers. But then what happens when an avowed fascist creates their own user server and won't ban troubling accounts? Then that raises questions of whether a community can ban a user server, which kind of brings us back to square one...
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It won't take off yet because it is still in it's infancy.
Don't expect this to be a full on Reddit replacement or Reddit like experience because Reddit has existed for 15 years or so.
Things will grow, mature and get better the more people use the platform.
Either that, or allow a really easy fediverse wide migration ability. What's wrong with KBin and CloudFlare?
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The closest thing to login being decouple is hosting your own instance.
Decisions like this only hurt Fediverse as general. They become like Reddit where wrong opinion can get you banned, which is main reason for Reddit being shit. If they continue to blacklist instances just because they're not locked down for the sake of someone not saying N-word, they will eventually become just normal forums (and probably dead).
Safe spaces don't even exist in real life and people should just stop trying to censor everyone. They're too sensitive for everything and should finally learn to ignore all insults, etc.
Usual trend is that unmoderated platforms turn into 4chan /b/ and /pol/ clones, which is toxic to regular users. I agree with being able to discuss any idea on a platform in a civil way, but I don't really see the reason for allowing slurs used agains people.
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Well, they explained why they did it; and considering that Beehaw's stated ethos is to be a safe place for minorities, it only makes logical sense that they'd defederate more strictly for the time being to get their bearings
I think the mods have expressed that this was more of a decision driven by the lack of efficient modding tools as of the moment. Of course, also taking into consideration that they really do want to stay true to their ethos in the first place. I personally feel better interacting within Beehaw because the community is headed in a healthier direction as opposed to just being another reddit dupe/reddit refugee camp
That's valid. The news worries me in terms of Lemmy's growth and success, but simultaneously it's exactly what the Fediverse was designed for. Communities are able to determine what their boundaries are. I guess my issue is that Beehaw had the largest communities for many different topics and now they've cut the second largest instance off from those communities. In the long run what that means is that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works are probably going to recreate those communities themselves. Since those are going to end up invariably being larger communities, it means beehaw's versions of those communities are probably going to empty out and become ghost towns comparatively.
Possibly and that’s the beauty of it. People will stay for different reasons and it seems that the standard of good-faith interactions on Beehaw will make a certain demographic stay. It’s not so difficult to exist in two different instances anyway especially because those two that you mentioned have open registration. We’ll just have to see how it goes moving forward
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Whenever I hear about such decisions, I fear we might end up with a "netsplit" like event in the Fediverse at one point.
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Sure, they're allowed to do that. It's their community. I haven't seen any issues myself in lemmy.world, it's been pretty welcoming to me so far.
I have to say, the sociology of this is kinda fascinating. It's like we're all part of different countries and the nationalism is already starting to crop up.
I think some instances have a stronger sense of "nationalism" than others. Beehaw is one of those. I think us over here on Kbin also have a strong Kbin bias lol. Not sure how yall Lemmy folk feel.
I initially registered there, thinking it would be a more moderate instance compared to Lemmy and their controversial admins. Never ended up hearing back in regards to an approval or even disapproval. Ended up on kbin since then. This will be worse for beehaw than Lemmy or other instances that stay federated, because now users there have to really think if that's truly what they were looking for, especially if they came from Reddit.
Yep as someone who also has an account on Beehaw, it was never trying to become a Reddit replacement, the admins there have made dozens of posts in Chat describing their goals and aspirations of their instance. I liken it to more of a cozy corner of the internet.
That won't work if users sign up for multiple new accounts on pages with open-signups in order to troll and post hateful messages on their instance.
Yeah, they weren't expecting the influx or better put they were unprepared for the obvious. If they just wanted to use the Lemmy code but be a more closed community, they should have stayed entirely unfederated from the start. This middle-of-the-road "we federate just with some instances" isn't gonna cut it long term. You can't have the cake and eat it too.
Never ended up hearing back in regards to an approval or even disapproval.
You may have been approved and never notified. The process for that is rough.
About open registration: we had a debate about that too, but actually decided closed registration didn't make that much sense because anyone can just go register on another instance and participate in our communities, so what was the point of gatekeeping registrations?
And ultimately that's a very broad problem with the fediverse. Yes, you can curate your own local community all you want, but if you accept content and comments from the other parts of the fediverse, it's actually a bigger moderation problem than something centralized. And there's a liability problem: even if you police your own communities well, someone could subscribe to something unsavory across the web and you're technically "hosting" it.
Federation isn't easy to get right. Ultimately it makes moderation less scalable, not more, because every little instance has to moderate the whole fediverse.
Does anyone know if the admins at Beehaw tried discussing the problem with their counterparts at the other instances? (I'd search the comments to that post for an answer, but I don't think there's a good way to do that yet.)
One more reason to start a personal instance I suppose.
Update: I received this answer from the Beehaw admin.
Generally they would and it seems those users have been banned already from their home instance also.
There was a couple of incidents that I think prompted this, users with bigoted names from one of the open-signup servers putting up stupid troll posts on Beehaw's Feminism and LGBTQ+ pages. Banning said user would probably just cause them to create a new account and continue trolling so they probably wanted to curb that problem from the source rather than having to remove and ban reactively every time, especially bc they are a small team.
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