This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.
Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.
Two months on, I’m wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I’m just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?
Hi,
I’m speaking on behalf of the admin team of Lemmy World - we feel like we have to step in here and give some feedback to the things being said in this thread and give our perspective.
About “Supporting nazi’s”:
So we support nazi’s because it took us ‘long’ to defederate from exploding heads? That’s straight up false. We were one of the first instances to defederate with them and advocated heavily to have them defederated on other instances. FYI Lemmy World as a whole is just over 2 months old and so is this post: https://lemmy.world/post/747912
There was an issue early on with the original moderator of the Lemmy World https://lemmy.world/c/conservative community which was handled instantly:
- The problematic moderator https://lemmy.world/u/OptionHome that was posting misinformation (and worse) was banned
- The https://lemmy.world/c/conservative community was given to other moderators.
- We asked people to stop bombaring the /c/conservative community with anti-conservative posts as to allow civil discourse. https://lemmy.world/post/149519
- The https://lemmy.world/c/maga community was also banned
We take a hard stance on extremism from both sides of the political spectrum, and we believe that civil discourse should always be the first option. We ban hate communities on sight no matter whose side they are on, and we work hard to resolve the hundreds of reports we receive each day. As of today, 3733 users were banned from Lemmy.World, and that number will probably have gone up by the time you read this comment. We follow-up on moderation teams if we see reports that stay open for too long and if communities are abandoned we actively look to replace the moderation team.
So we ask everyone to keep sending in reports when you see any post that breaks the Lemmy World rules which can be found here: https://lemmy.world/legal.
About Beehaw’s decision to defederate with us: Even though we don’t agree with it, we have always been supportive of Beehaw and their choice to defederate with us until the mod tools improve. Even when the question gets posted in our community we defended the decision: https://lemmy.world/post/895811.
But wether or not Beehaw will refederate with us is ofcourse 100% your decision.
We ban hate communities on sight no matter whose side they are on
Can you please give examples of liberal or left-leaning hate groups you have had to ban?
They banned Hexbear.
Lol they aren’t leftists
Nobody is, you’ll never find a true Scottsman.
Can you please give examples of liberal or left-leaning hate groups that even exist?
Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. Note the lack of response.
Here are my two cents as an outsider looking in. I spend ~15-30 mins a day on Lemmy (usually while doing other things), so I see a decent amount of content but I am not at the leading edge of posts. When I look at posts, I rarely, if ever see spam. For the most part there is civil conversations and those that attempt to derail them are downvoted and, in some cases, banned.
Does this mean that moderation isn’t a problem? No, I am but one user. However, it does indicate it is not a chronic issue. Personally I would like to see you guys refederate, as that could only increase the quality of discussions throughout the fediverse.
Thank you. And if you should see anything that goes against the Lemmy World rules (https://lemmy.world/legal) please report it.
From where I’m standing, I can’t really much has changed unfortunately… which really sucks…
Lemmy.world has grown substantially meanwhile the moderation tools have not improved at all. All I can say about the moderation tools is that we now know that the tools suck more than they used to.
Here’s a list of moderation problems that we have discovered since then:
- If a Berson is reported on another instance, we never get the report.
- If a mod is banned from the community they mod, they can still take mod actions
- If you get site-banned from Beehaw while you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from that instance and kbin can see your posts
- People from other instances can’t know who if someone is an admin on the instance they’re interacting with
- People from other instances can’t see when we use the shield function to signal we’re talking “officially / as a mod”
- The modlog is not chronological
- The modlog breaks if you ban someone for more than 4 digit days.
- A banned user’s description is still visible so if they link to a scat image in their description, it is still visible to moderators.
Despite these newly known problems, there have been exactly no improvement whatsoever to the moderation tools. It is honestly unsettling and terrifying.
I just finished writing a small book in a thread about federation on literature.cafe yesterday, the thrust of which is that moderation, not federation is the threadiverse’s killer feature, and when in doubt smaller instances shouldn’t federate with larger ones. This list makes a perfect post-script to my point. Do you mind if I crib it? I’m a big fan of what you’re doing here. I’d also love your feedback on my observations if you have time.
No, you are definitely right. There is a time and place for federation, it’s like a town deciding to incorporate with a larger region. If the town is too early in its infancy, the overall culture and debate will be drowned out by larger servers. But the risk of also not federating the town means that there is a chance of the community dying off. I’m thinking there should at least be a snaller period of considering the effects of opening up your server to the network, and consulting other instance admins about the idea.
Support. No one wants to hear about the negative stuff about their platform of choice, but it’s important to talk about it so it can improve.
JFC there are a lot of typos in your comment! No worries since most of it is discernible. I’m in agreement with all of these points regardless.
I think I corrected them - feel free to tell me more specifically if you still see some.
Berson
😁
Berson = Beehaw person.
And the plural is Beeple.
TIL
I hope the moderation tools improve! There are a few niche l.w communities I was looking for a few weeks ago
If a mod is banned from the community they mod, they can still take mod actions
Why not remove them as mod? I don’t understand why you would keep anyone in the mod team that has been banned from the community?
If you get site-banned from Beehaw while you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from that instance and kbin can see your posts
Yes that is a problem with Lemmy in general. But why this only seen as a problem for people from Lemmy World and sh.itjust.works?
The modlog is not chronological
We fix this by having enough admins to go through these reports as soon as possible.
The modlog breaks if you ban someone for more than 4 digit days.
Why ban for 9999 days if you can leave it empty and perma-ban?
Anyway, I agreed that there are a lot of issues that haven’t improved, but at least I heard that users will be able to block instances themselves soon so fingers crossed. But Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works very early on and in the meantime they are federated with instances that are as big as Lemmy.World was back then.
Why not remove them as mod? I don’t understand why you would keep anyone in the mod team that has been banned from the community?
Oversight - that simple.
Yes that is a problem with Lemmy in general. But why this only seen as a problem for people from Lemmy World and sh.itjust.works?
That is not actually a problem with Lemmy in general - community bans do block posting unlike site bans. As for why, well, it was done at that point in time because Lemmy.World and Sh.it just.works took a lot of moderation time - for one reason or another, bad actors liked to go there. I have no reason to believe this has changed now that .World is now many times bigger than it was.
Why ban for 9999 days if you can leave it empty and perma-ban?
Oversight or malice. You can break the modlog of everyone you’re federated with because of this - that is dangerous.
But Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works very early on and in the meantime they are federated with instances that are as big as Lemmy.World was back then.
Size doesn’t necessarily mean problems though. I think it’s probably a culture problem as the root cause but I don’t think .World wants to tackle that problem so all I can do is wait for better tools.
I really don’t get the “oversight” part of keeping someone who is banned from a community on the moderator team there. Can you give me an example how this would make sense?
The modlog breaking XXXX amount of days bug was reported to the devs by me btw. And it was fixed on 12/08: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2058
It just feels like you are looking for excuses to keep defederated while there is no actual problem that can not be handled by working together as admins. We’ve always said we are open to discuss actions but you’ve always said when the “when modtools are available”. Now it’s a culture problem - how are Lemmy World users different from lemm.ee, midwest.social, programming.dev or other instances? And what do you propose should be done to tackle these issues?
I really don’t get the “oversight” part of keeping someone who is banned from a community on the moderator team there. Can you give me an example how this would make sense?
Oversight as in, “I would never think this would not work so I commited a mistake”.
We’ve always said we are open to discuss actions but you’ve always said when the “when modtools are available”.
And I stand by that.
And what do you propose should be done to tackle these issues?
I generally think that Lemmy.world’s focus on growth while being the biggest instance results in a bad site culture but I still think this problem can be tamed on our side with better mod tools.
Despite these newly known problems, there have been exactly no improvement whatsoever to the moderation tools. It is honestly unsettling and terrifying.
It’s bewildering how the development team has ignored the problems with data not federating properly and the performance of the app.
Is it a problem of contributions (nobody made a PR adding those missing features so they don’t make it), technical challenge (those features would be hard to implement due to how Lemmy and federations work) or policy (whoever is maintaining of Lemmy does not want these features to happen)?
Some of these are likely not hard to fix but some of these are a bit more complicated like fixing the report system.
So it’d say it’s largely the former two though I’d like to mention that these issues appear to not be treated as critical problems by the main Lemmy developers so I believe this is also a policy problem.
I trust the admins. I was attracted to beehaw specifically because of the tight moderation. If they think they can keep to the same high standards and refederate, great. If not, oh well. I’d rather miss out on some content than expose myself to rude assholes, bigots, fascists etc
Completely agree! I trust the admins, they have proven that they know how to run a community that stays kind ❤️
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They’re pretty different for me. Beehaw is more community oriented - it reminds me of the smaller subs where you had regulars who talked about or gave advice on the content like vaporents. Kbin however is just as good for me, it just reminds me more of scrolling my hobby feed, whereas Beehaw honestly is a lot of news and politics on mine.
I have subbed to pretty much the first 30 pages of Magazines that I’m interested in on Kbin and it’s small but throughout the week it’s pretty varied. I actually haven’t gone through my subscriptions on Beehaw since not long after I made it, so it’s still pretty default. Like I said, it’s much more community chat based with news.
But I can probably change that just by adjusting my subscriptions on Beehaw, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet :) I like both for what they are, though I wish kbin had a little more activity. I’m also lucky, I haven’t personally seen any negativity whatsoever over there, but some people have reported issues which is disheartening.
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Lemmy.world feels the most Reddit-like in my experience. Beehaw felt… different even when I was browsing it from Lemmy.ca in April and the entire Lemmyverse as a whole had maybe a couple dozen posts a day. There were real neat and in-depth discussions by people who were capable of feeling and caring, and no propaganda spam that many instances had. We had a few bumps along the way but overall I’m still very happy about how things are.
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We handle our reports daily and urge our users to keep reporting anything that goes against our rules.
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…they seem to think they are the best instance and are better than everyone else…
So incredibly childish.
I replied somewhere else in this thread but we - the admins of lemmy world - have always been supportive of the beehaw decision to wait until better tools come along for moderation. We went through a few growing pains with LW but I’m happy to see how far we have come already and we keep working to make things better. Our legal page with the rulesets is actively being maintained and defines what we stand for: https://lemmy.world/legal.
lemmy.world is just hot garbage imo
I’m on Lemmy.world every day and I’ve never seen any of that. I don’t doubt it exists, but it’s definitely not a problem on any of the communities I’m subscribed to.
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I’m not jumping on you - I’m just pointing out lemmy.world isn’t a total write off. There are about 20k monthly active users on that instance and about 20k of those people are polite, reasonable people who post interesting content.
With any large community like that there’s always going to be some people who’re problematic, but either the moderators on lemmy.world are deleting them before I see them, or else it’s happening on communities I don’t subscribe to (probably a mix of both).
I think Beehaw should re-federate lemmy.world as soon as the moderation tools are better. In particular the cross-instance moderation issues should be sorted out. The key to a functioning fediverse is to ensure that everyone across instances can work together to tackle bad content. Many hands make light work.
I don’t really care about “growth”. Lemmy is a community not a corporation. What I care about is when someone starts an interesting discussion, are there “enough” people who take part in that discussion? I see threads on Beehaw (and even on Lemmy.World) that get zero replies. That sucks.
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No worries at all (PS: I just edited my comment, with a point I should have made originally).
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I would rather there be no discussion over a bunch of low quality shit posting and rage baiting tbh
I can only say that I spend less time on beehaw because there are communities on both of those instances I want to interact with. This isn’t really an argument to refederate because as an end user I can filter the noise and focus on the communities I want, but I know admins don’t have that luxury. It’s more of an impact statement. I like beehaw, and I don’t want to leave, but I do probably spend more time with my other account just because there’s more activity I’m interested in there. So I fully support whatever decision gets made and certainly support this community, but I can’t be the only user whos spending less time here than I otherwise might.
Yes it is. Yes it is.
If you really interact with the lemmy community you know they are very pro “freeze peach”, which means it comes with all the fascists, all the phobias, and the trolls.
I like Beehaw for what it is. Tight moderation.
Lemmy World is not a “free speech” platform.
Point 1 in the “Principles that Guide Us” section: https://lemmy.world/legal
ok…? But it is not my experience there and from the responses here they seem to agree with me.
A principle is not useful when it is not enforced.
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It is a “free speech” platform insomuch as it is intentionally making space for people with fundamentally conflicting beliefs.
There is no c/conservative on Beehaw, and many of us would not be here if there was. Extremism is not the only thing that is incompatible with my beliefs, and I get enough daily exposure to Neoliberal and Conservative viewpoints that I don’t want to deal with it when I’m relaxing. It’s why I haven’t had Facebook or Twitter in years.
Lemmy.world and Beehaw just have different goals.
I would like to note that sh.itjust.works hasn’t had unverified sign ups enabled for a while now. I have an account there too so it really doesn’t make much of a difference to me but I would like an updated stance from the admins here. The initial concerns they voiced don’t seem as relevant as they once were.
As for lemmy.world, it’s the biggest, and issues can arise from that, so that makes more sense to me.
My takeaway from this thread is that it makes sense to keep lemmy.world off the rolls, but maybe sh.itjust.works is safe to refederate? I just want to join their Patient Gamers community 😭
I think so. sh.itjust.works is no where near as big. And the admin there has always been very responsive and transparent whenever I had concerns. The patient gamers community is also very friendly.
Yes Lemmy World is the biggest but we take our reports serious and have teams working hard to keep it a friendly space. Again, keep reporting the posts that go against the site or community rules.
I do. I generally don’t have problems on lemmy.world communities. I’d just understand the hesitation to refederate. To me if that’s on the table I think it’d make sense to do one at a time, and if one has to be first it should be the smaller one.
Stay defederated. On top of all the great points already made, I don’t understand people demanding instances behave a certain way. If you don’t like the way this instance is handled go find another one.
Who’s demanding anything? Surely we can discuss it amongst ourselves as a community?
There is a lot of chatter that I’ve seen in other instances where Beehaw’s stance ranckled a number of folks.
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Nothing’s wrong with discussing things with the intent to make them better for everyone
Yes, instances can do whatever they want and users should seek instances that match their needs but:
- Per the thread OP linked, it’s suggested this could be temporary. “this is also not a permanent judgement” is my context in saying as such.
- The post did not feel demanding. Though perhaps you’re making a more general reference?
Edit: context
Edit2: Not intended as advocation for refederating. I’m content with the content available to me so I don’t have a strong opinion.
My understanding is admins of some of those communities actually agreed with the decision because of the lack of proper moderation tools to handle their new scale. Some are basically un-moderated as well.
Speaking for Lemmy World - we look for new moderators when we notice communities are un-moderated. We follow the reports closely and if we notice they aren’t picked up by that community’s moderators we reach out.
And yes, we were also told initially that it was because of a lack of moderation tools but now @Lionir@beehaw.org seems indicate a “cultural” difference. But we are left wondering what the difference with LW and the other instances they federate with are.
Having accounts on both instances, I can say the “cultural” difference is the moderation style, and user expectations:
- Lemmy World: Reddit-like rules, a huge influx of Reddit refugees who think every comment has to go against the parent one, free registration which makes it easy to create an account and go troll mode on federated instances.
- Beehaw: Very open-ended but at the same time strict “be nice” moderation with minimal rules, users who had to “write an essay” (sic) to create an account, a general non-Reddit culture of… well, being nice.
- Lemmygrad, Hexbear, Exploding heads, etc: I think the cultural differences are obvious there.
- Other instances: they have much smaller user bases than Lemmy World, so even when there are cultural differences (dbzer0, lemm.ee, etc), they are not overwhelming (yet) the mod team on Beehaw.
we look for new moderators when we notice communities are un-moderated
The problem is not just having moderators on LW, but moderating LW’s userbase on federated instances. Some number of LW’s users seem to be hostile towards Beehaw, and there is little LW can do about that other than banning their accounts, which I don’t think would be that much better for anyone.
users who had to “write an essay” (sic) to create an account, a general non-Reddit culture of… well, being nice.
Didn’t have to be an essay, it just had to be something that answered the 3 questions it asked about why you want to join beehaw.
Precisely. I think the “write an essay” has become kind of a meme among non-Beeple about Beehaw at this point; I first saw it on Reddit a couple months ago, kept seeing it on and off, and just today saw it again.
It was also in part what made me join: when I saw what it was all about, I was like “so… people who believe that thinking before answering is too much effort, won’t be here… nice…” 😄
The kind of people who keep calling it an essay are the exact kind of people I don’t want around anyway. Either it’s too much to ask of them to write a couple of sentences, or they haven’t even bothered to look and inform themselves before spitting their hot take. Neither personality is desirable lol
The kind of people who keep calling it an essay are the exact kind of people I don’t want around anyway.
The TLDR behavior and won’t click offsite links and references and want a constant stream of tiny little ideas. There was a time when Reddit wasn’t like that and it became the culture of TLDR and downvote-disagree.
Reddit could have single-handedly taken on clickbait in 2014 or earlier by people replacing news headlines with sincere earnest descriptions. But the clickbait became what people swam in.
My friend put some pretty simple stuff and got denied. Granted it may have been during a negative influx
Feel free to message me on Beehaw or email at support@beehaw.org, I’ll review the message and say why I might’ve denied it though I can’t answer for others.
For sure, I’ll let him know if he’s still interested :) he mostly uses the toot style so he’s mostly on mastodon these days, but always happy to share community!
Really more than anything he’s looking for Gundam and Gunpla communities
And yes, we were also told initially that it was because of a lack of moderation tools but now @Lionir@beehaw.org seems indicate a “cultural” difference. But we are left wondering what the difference with LW and the other instances they federate with are.
Yes, there are differences in site culture between Beehaw and Lemmy.world that make the need for moderation higher.
Appreciate the insight. I have heard many variations of what went down/what the reasoning was and it’s all sort of unclear to me to be honest. But ultimately I think if instances weren’t supposed to defederate, then the option wouldn’t exist. Mistake or not it’s their call!
But we are left wondering what the difference with LW and the other instances they federate with are.
Have you asked them?
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stay defederated. even now whenever I see some transphobic or hateful comment it’s because I accidentally browsed all
edit: apologies everyone!!! it’s called “Everything” 🤦 I’m sorry for the confusion I feel dumb now
All only shows content from instances that Beehaw is federated with, FYI.
And, it’s only communities someone on beehaw has specifically subscribed to. Communities from federated instances won’t show up in all if no one from beehaw has ever subscribed to them.
Hm, if someone subscribes to a federated community, and then unsubscribes, does it keep getting pulled in?
I’m not sure. Once the connection has been made I’d assume it stays but I haven’t verified.
Is there a way to see all the communities on your instances c/all?
Edit: Nvm it is at the top of the page.
I’m not sure actually, but that’s a good idea.
I found it. You have to press the communities tab at the top of your instance and press all
yeah my bad I looked and it’s actually called “Everything”
All on beehaw? Because if so those aren’t from the instances we’re talking about.
no all on sync. it shows like lemmy.ml and stuff. tbf idrk how this works
edit: I’m so sorry it’s actually called everything
That’s still “all”. Sync just calls it everything.
but that’s still beehaw
If you’re signed into Beehaw you won’t see lemmy.world content anywhere (including in all/everything).
If you sign with an account from somewhere else that “everything” feed will be different.
“Local” is communities only from your signed in instance. “All” will include posts from communities anyone from your instance has subscribed to (and they can only subscribe to communities from federated instances).
what? i never claimed to see lemmy.world I said other instances… it shows @lemmy.ml etc
How does that relate to staying defederated then? Or are you calling for more of it? I don’t care either way, just curious.
stay defederated. even now whenever I see some transphobic or hateful comment it’s because I accidentally browsed all
Do report if you see anything like this, it can help us block communities and talk to other admins to get those communities deleted.
I will !! ❤️
Thank you ❤
Count or discount my opinion as a non-Beehaw member as you will but…
I think the instances should do what they set out to do. Federate, defederate in line with the instance’s ideals.
I’m not on Beehaw, but I do like seeing its content. But I also like seeing (most) of the content on Lemmy World and sh.itjust.works; and I can get both from the instance I am on.
I feel torn on the issue. I spend 90% of my Lemmy time on here, but the growth feels much slower than many other communities. I’m mostly ok with that. Content is pretty good, but still not much chatter on many posts. I mainly go to World to post to !superbowl, but even with 10x the users as here I only just started getting decent up votes, and I don’t want to mod, so I don’t feel like starting it here and trying to build an audience again.
Lemmy is probably still going to be finding its legs for another year or 2, so keeping multiple logins is probably the best way to roll for now.
The amount of moderation actions from those instances were a lot higher than from elsewhere, specifically lemmy.world. With how lemmy.world is now after browsing it for ~5 mins I can confidently say that that would be the case again if we were to refederate
Honestly, I think it’s best that we stay the way we are here and not re-federate.
My experience after leaving all the toxicity of Reddit behind was that it was really a blessing to find a community where moderation actually mattered and made a difference in the culture of site. I did a lot of lurking on Lemmy even before leaving Reddit, enough to know it was not a place for me. I tried Kbin when I did finally leave Reddit, but did not like the experience there much, so eventually landed here.
While I can appreciate people’s concerns about the defederation, and in particular some of the stresses for the admins which are certainly really challenging, I think it would all be far more negative if at this stage the decision were to be reversed. Not every community needs to be “the biggest, baddest, baddy in the room” so to speak. I just get the impression the vision for Lemmy is something along those lines. No one seems to care about that here (that I can tell), they just care about having civil and open discussions which, more than anything else, feel safe. It’s why I stay and am glad to support it. If that changed, I would most likely move on and not return.
I really think this needs to be fixed by a system that allows for the user to decide on their own content federation.
I think communities should be able to block users and communities from seeing and interacting with their content, but the problem is that currently defederation means that the home instance can block what you see of other instances.
This can be fixed either by still allowing data to be sent out to severs but not in from them mostly. Or it can be fixed by making unified user accounts that can persist on multiple servers and therefore go around defederation.
Why do this? Because I guarantee there are users here like myself who wouldn’t mind viewing content on other servers and so instead we’d be forced to make and use another account. The less accounts per person, the better imo. Because creating many account discourages community and harms vetting processes.
i hear you, and that’s why i made this post. After reading through the replies though, I think it makes more sense for beehaw to stay defederated. The way it blocks us from using those communities is a little annoying, but i think it’s better if you think of it like each lemmy server is it’s own social media site that happens to have some ways of communicating with other sites, rather than thinking of all lemmy servers together as one site.
That’s really the spirit of the thing - you don’t get mad at Facebook because they don’t let you view and comment on reddit posts from facebook. Currently, the connection between Beehaw and Lemmy.World is mostly the same.
I value the principled approach and slower pace, the low tolerance for stirring. Moderation has such a huge effect on feel and the big ones never did enough to try to build healthy communities. Beehaw has mostly taken the sting out and I’d hate to see that lost.
