hey folks, here’s a quick update on our decision to defederate from sh.itjust.works! (and here’s sh.itjust.works’s side of this update)
we got in touch with the head admin over there, The Dude, and we had a pretty good chat about our concerns and reason for defederating. while immediate re-federation is just bluntly off the table with the rudimentary state of Lemmy’s moderation tools, we now have a pretty good idea of the roadmap to refederating with them. we think we’ll eventually be able to do this, although we don’t have a timetable on when yet.
we’re also now collaborating with him on how to move forward–and in the weeks and months to come we’ll be pushing to expedite the process of developing some of the necessary tools. this decision has really helped us make connections that can hopefully realize those tools both on the desktop side and in apps being developed for Lemmy. we’re also hoping to collaborate with other Lemmy administrators who have needs like our own, or just generally want more granular tools at their disposal.
we did also get in touch with the lemmy.world owner prior to defederating to share the concerns that prompted us to defederate[1]–but we have not received any communication from him since it was levied, so there’s no roadmap at all there as of now. we’re always open to reconsidering and collaborating to end the defederation with him, but for now the earliest i can give you is “when mod tools are in a better state”.
that’s all for now folks. if any new significant developments take place we’ll announce them as needed.
we’re only bringing this up now because it was just not useful information in the context of our announcement. it almost certainly would have been interpreted as some sort of callousness and/or brought unnecessary sectarianism and grief to him. at the end of the day he has his reasons and desires for running lemmy.world how he does, and we have ours for running Beehaw as we do. because of social and technological circumstances those are just incompatible right now, and that’s fine. ↩︎
Lol … tried commenting from my lemmy.world account but duhh that’s defederated…
This was my reply:
Hi there! Lemmy.world calling!
I read here that I’m unresponsive, but after a chat with one of your team, the last mesasge I got was:
"Sorry for the bad news especially after we’ve had such a good conversation but we have defederated. It was not an easy decision and I hope it doesn’t hurt our relations. It’s not personal, it’s just that our goals don’t work together, we wish it was possible to “limit” a la mastodon… I hope you understand "
I didn’t know that was a question… ;-)
I would very much like to get in touch with you, I have also been in touch with the sh.itjust.works admin. If there’s anything we could do to solve your concerns, let us know.
You can reach me on matrix @ruud:h-y-p-e-r.space or mail info@lemmy.world (But I’ll be asleep the next 8 hours hopefully, so I’ll be unresponsive)
Excellent! Paging @alyaza@beehaw.org , response from the lemmy.world admin :D
Man, i insist that this shitstorm should have happened a year or two in the future when Lemmy was a bit more developed :P
We’ve spun up a chat, added them and a few other instance admins. Yay, progress!
Yep, haha, it sure would be convenient if the world only ever threw challenges at us when we were well and fully prepared to deal with them! 🙃
Thank you for reaching out and being open to collaboration! I’m not an admin or mod, just a member of Beehaw, but I wish you continued success and luck with your endeavors running lemmy.world!
That’s my bad, I had kinda assumed you’d reply something so the silence was a bit unexpected. I apologize.
@Lionir@beehaw.org, @alyaza@beehaw.org I realize a three day old buried comment chain is not the best place for this, but seeing as how the fediverse is difficult to search, and as a moderator of a medium-sized community on lemmy.world where I have not personally seen any content needing moderation, I’m curious if there has been a public statement somewhere on Beehaw you can direct me to that explains the specific issues and reasoning behind defederating with with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works?
As of today, @ruudtest@feddit.nl has implemented a captcha on lemmy.world and sign ups are currently closed due to an influx of spam accounts being created, which he already banned as stated here: https://lemmy.world/post/293545.
Lastly, why have other large instances with similar growth and open registration like kbin.social and lemmy.ml been spared?
What I noticed and why your experience probably doesn’t match with ours is that people signed up lemmy.world to harass in other instances that are closed like ours and usually centered on LGBTQ+ communities. That might be a significant factor.
Here is the public statement we made about the issue a few days ago : https://beehaw.org/post/567170
As for why kbin.social and lemmy.ml were spare : I’ve not personally seen many reports from lemmy.ml and kbin.social was not even federated when we made this decision so it wasn’t on our mind.
The Dude abides
Why am I not surprised that the head mod for an instance called sh.itjust.works is called The Dude. lol
Mind if I do a J?
Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women!
Hahaha!
On a separate note, it is very interesting that the creator of Lemmy.world is non-responsive. That is concerning, seeing as how his instance is one of the biggest.
That is concerning, seeing as how his instance is one of the biggest.
he’s probably just busy, and we’re not going anywhere so as far as i’m concerned it’s not a big deal either way
That was my take. I imagine most of the admins/mods of the larger instances are very busy these last few days. It will shake itself out over time. The thing thats really interesting about the fediverse concept is that something like this can happen–for better or worse.
I personally appreciate the level of curation and moderation being done here. I looked at the blocked list and even some of the names just skeeve me out. I dont want to have to deal with that, and if the mods here can see lots of trolls or bad content coming from particular places, I like that they would take action to deal with it.
Shoutout to The Dude for being responsive and receptive, but I wouldn’t write off the lemmy.world admin yet.
It’s the end of a crazy week, his instance is just a few weeks old, and there are many things to do. I’m sure he’s busy and not intentionally ignoring beehaw.
I reached out to him on matrix and pointed him to this thread.
I guess I just don’t typically give people the benefit of the doubt, especially online. I need to work on that.
I blame reddit’s culture rot for that. A decade ago or more, reddit was an overall better place to be. It’s going to take time to shake that off.
But the admins here are doing an amazing job fostering an environment where having overwhelmingly good experiences is the norm!
As one of the biggest, it could be as simple as that they’re overwhelmed, and Beehaw refederation is not a top priority.
Why do you see it as concerning?
Well, it was pretty big news that Beehaw was defederating from them, and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to reply real quick to someone reaching out to you from Beehaw. You could just say “thanks, let’s talk about this when I’m not so busy” but to just ignore it seems weird to me.
I don’t think I’m the only person who won’t reply to an email until there is something actually productive to say.
I guess I’m just the weird guy who appreciates acknowledgment because without it I feel like I’m being ignored.
It’s rude to not to acknowledged, you are right and valid to feel that way.
I genuinely think Reddit lowered my expections of moderators so much over the years without me even realising, it’s great to come to a place like this where everyone on both sides sounds reasonable and competent at what they’re doing. Really excited to see how Lemmy and the Fediverse more generally develops.
deleted by creator
I’m really glad everyone seems to be on the same team here and there’s no bad blood between the mods.
It’s quite unfortunate that Rexxit happened before the platform was ready for it. Looking forward to refederating when the time comes.
I think rexxit is the catalyst to get the platform ready. I don’t think rexxit is a one and done thing. It’s gonna be more of a constant trickle, and lemmy is in a very good place to absorb more users. I browsed /r/all today, and saw many comments of people saying the frontpage sucks because there’s no content. Spez might like to pretend there’s no impact to reddit, but there’s certainly going to be a big impact at least in the near term.
Indeed, I think that ironically the pattern we’re seeing from Reddit is pretty much ideal for getting this platform up and running. They sent a moderate surge of users over here to shake things down and start contributing, and then on June 30 a much bigger surge may come this way to see what’s been built.
At the same time, Rexxit is getting more folks involved with Lemmy (both as users and developers). Lemmy’s already a 4-year-old project. I expect we’ll see it advance and mature a lot in the coming months from all the new attention.
No one is ever ready for the Reddit Inqui-- er, Invasion.
How can you be ready for something you don’t expect?
Expect the unexpected. Unexpect the… expected?
Im ready for a hot summer fling with an enchanting lover. However my expectation is that it will not happen.
Choose your own snarky reply:
- not with that attitude
- perhaps it’s still your density (with apologies to the writers of Back the the Future)
I dont see it that way. Software improvements can be pretty stagnant if there is a slow influx of new users. A good dose of new redditors will expose the main issues with the platform, and thats a good thing imo. Defederation is now on the spotlight for many users who were clueless about it, and that helps development since awareness can bring volunteer work onto said issues more quickly.
If anything it’s probably ultimately better (from this, specific perspective) that the Reddit blackout was only two days and only really drove 10k~100k over to try out Fediverse instances and not 100k~1m. In general I don’t think things are clear and digestible enough to start porting entire communities (even small ones), but I think with some stress testing and getting some QOL updates, apps, etc., we could be in that position in as little as a few weeks or months.
only really drove 10k~100k over to try out Fediverse instances
Even with open-signup instances available, I wonder what the backlog looks like elsewhere. I don’t think we can gauge the level of interest in alternatives four days after the larger Reddit community was faced with the blackout. Trends do not move in days in general.
We can’t forget that the third-party apps are still functional for a couple weeks still too.
I find the decisions made so far entirely understandable and I really appreciate the transparency and updates.
Have to say the same thing. I really appreciate the hard work the admins and mods are doing and support the decisions they have made.
The comment section of sh.itjust.works is much more understanding of the issue at hand than those from lemmy.world. Crazy how opposite they are. They do showcase a prominent disagreement with the beehaw mods actions, but nonetheless remain respectful in their opinions. At least compared to lemmy.world which stance was basically “lol they shot themselves in the foot”.
Just above you the lemmy.world admin answered, so things are advancing :D
Thats awesome. Glad i was wrong
It seems like the admin of lemmy.world is eager to work with our admins, but yeah, I also noticed the community response on sh.itjust.works was mostly “I get it. It’s not what I would want, but I get it” while the community response on lemmy.world was mostly “Fediverse ruined, day ruined, beehaw a bunch of fascist dictators.” Which is a little bit wild to me since sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world both have very similar moderation styles. I guess it just goes to show the difference a sidebar can make in setting a tone. sh.itjust.works has a very basic sidebar with some rules of the road, while lemmy.world has a sidebar that says the sidebar is TBD. I wonder, and this is purely speculation, how many people signed up for lemmy.world explicitly because they wanted to be a problem. sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world both have the same signup process, but then they picked lemmy.world because “Oh hey, there’s no rule against being a bigot (yet).” Me, I would have assumed that was just… Implied, but it’s truly fascinating that they have such different communities already, and I wonder anthropologically why that happened.
I think it’s a lot less nefarious. About every post or article about Lemmy that links to Lemmy instances has links to (in this order in almost every article I remember) lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and beehaw.org. Of these 3 only lemmy.world accepts new users without vetting. Lemmy.ml doesn’t accept new users at all and beehaw doesn’t really look that welcoming to someone who knows they might stir some shit up in the future and also getting into beehaw requires more effort. So with lemmy.world usually being the first on the list and additionally requires the least effort to join, this is where all the world and their uncle end up on. They just get the biggest unfiltered influx and with that the biggest amount of toxic people. (I want to make sure that I’m not calling lemmy.world users lazy or toxic or anything like or that this is their target audience. It’s just a fact fact that someone who can’t be bothered to do research and/or “write an essay” as someone called it, will most likely end up on lemmy.world)
Lemmy.world is free to ignore us, and we’re free to defederate from them. No corporate overlords are making the call. This is what the fediverse is all about. It’s not ideal, but few things are.
And with this kind of cooperation and outreach, the Fediverse will be that much better! Thank you to all parties involved for communicating and working together!
I appreciate the update and link. While it seems like most of the people on the thread there understand that it’s early days and this is more a reflection of kinks in Lemmy that need to be worked out than Beehaw being unreasonable, the exceptions to that underscore to a larger extent than the original defederation action why it needed to be taken.
There’s a lot of entitlement out there of the how-dare-people-who-put-in-time-and-money-into-a-passion-project-feel-they-have-the-right-to-any-level-of-control-over-said-project variety.
Thanks for keeping us updated!
It’s great how you’re keeping us in the loop. I was really disappointed when I heard about the de-federation of specifically sh.itjust.works because it has some really good communities that I was missing from Reddit. I’m also really excited about the idea of different communities having different homes, but defederating too quickly can break that concept, and instead lead to only really having reliable access to communities on your local instance.
That’s all to say this update has put my concerns to rest. I trust the admins on this site are doing their best to foster community with everyone possible, while also trying to keep the community here safe. I really appreciate the work you all are doing.
Hopefully you can link the Github issues created for the specific moderation tools you need, I’m excited to dig into the Lemmy codebase and hoping to contribute to the Beehaw community!
Honestly it’d be neat to have a local beehaw community for this dev related work, if one doesn’t exist already
Yeah the transparency of the mod team is the number one reason I love this instance so. Completely understood all of their decisions and how they came to them and I don’t think anyone can get mad about it, its a passion project for the fine folk that admin this instance its understandable you would take precautions. I mean if a certain instance is not moderating at all or only has a handful of people moderating that workload gets pushed off onto these guys when those instances interact here. And with them being open and transparent and willing to make changes as development unfolds, it makes me more confident in the whole project.
Here’s a post I did on the moderation tools we need : https://discuss.online/post/12787
Thanks for sharing. This is encouraging and hopeful news for the growing community.
Related to the topic of defederation, I saw a post on kbin about an issue with an instance called exploding-heads.com being full of right wing troll types. Has the mod team investigated this instance? Would rather we be out ahead of it before they start coming over here to create issues.
Would rather we be out ahead of it before they start coming over here to create issues.
we defederated with them already, so no worries on this front
I’m glad to hear that, thanks for being so proactive in keeping us safe.
