Like many of you, I woke up this morning to discover that our instance, along with lemmy.world, had been unexpectedly added to the beehaw block list. Although this development initially caught me off guard, the administrators at beehaw made an announcement shedding light on their decision.
The primary concern raised was our instance's policy of open registration. Given my belief that the fediverse is still navigating its early stages, I believe that for it to mature, gain traction, and encourage adoption, it is crucial for instances to offer an uncomplicated and direct route for newcomers to join and participate. This was one of the reason I decided to launch this instance. However, I do acknowledge that this inclusive approach brings its unique challenges, including the potential for toxicity and trolls. Despite these hurdles, I maintain the conviction that our collective strength as a community can overcome these issues.
After this happened, the beehaw admins and I had a good chat about their decision. While our stances on registration policies might diverge, we realized that our ultimate goals are aligned: we both strive to foster communities that thrive in an atmosphere of safety and respect, where users can passionately engage in discussions and feel a sense of belonging.
Although the probability of an immediate reversal are slim given the current circumstances, I believe we have managed to identify common ground. It's evident that, even in separation, we can unite to contribute positively to the broader fediverse community.
In the coming weeks or months, we plan to collaborate with other lemmy instance administrators to suggest enhancements and modifications to the lemmy project. Primarily, our proposals will concentrate on devising tools and features that empower us, as instance administrators, to moderate our platforms effectively.
In the meantime, while I understand may not be ideal for everyone, users who choose to participate on the beehaw instance will be required to register a separate account on their instance.
Thank you all for continuing to make this community great!
Brief explanation of how defederation works.
Basically Beehaw and all its communities and users are now blocking everyone from this server. We can't post to their communities and they can't see anything that we post on third party communities either.
However, this server has not defederated Beehaw. Therefore, we can still see their users commenting on third party communities, and we can even reply to them, they just won't see our reply, although neutral parties will.
Both Beehaw and sh.itjust.works are still able to contribute significant activity to Lemmy as a whole, just not directly to each other for now. Let's all be diligent on reporting and banning trolls quickly so we can maintain the collegial atmosphere here.
i joined the fediverse to shitpost, but more importantly to create a new community.
beehaw's actions are VERY bad for the fediverse. for any social network to succeed it needs USERS. and when you have an entrenched giant, you need all the help you can get. federation is great but it also means a more spread out community which makes it hard for any one instance to succeed. what beehaw is doing is just chopping the legs off the fediverse right when it's finding its footing.
also to an outsider, the fediverse is already confusing enough. now we can to deal with the whole "oh you can join this server and not that" and "if you join here, you can see them but they can't see you" nonsense. closed registrations turn away people, this sort of chaos also turns away people.
i'm personally blocking all beehaw servers. i appreciate moderation is hard, and sad that trolls are coming in so early. but moderation is a solvable problem. instead of opening applications for more mods, they decided to go the cowardly route.
I get that we need more users. But allowing the communities who were here first to get torn apart is not how you do that. The beehaw users have already shown the ability to grow communities from scratch. That's exactly the kind of people we want here.
But they also need to be given space to build those communities. This is essentially the core concept of Lemmy, that federation allows you to have large high activity communities coexisting in peace with small niche communities. You get to have both things on the same platform, because instances that come into conflict can defederate without having any impact on the network as a whole.
There are many bigger reasons that the platform is confusing, the beehaw situation doesn't even move the needle. If anything, I think the defederation has helped many people start to understand how cool the federated structure can be.
I understand you're frustrated they couldn't just moderate the problem away, but seriously man, don't be so dramatic. Beehaw is cutting the legs off the fediverse? Bro if the fediverse fails it won't be due to the actions of beehaw, I can tell you that much.
This might be good for some folks to read here to get a better feel of what Beehaw positions themselves as and their thinking:
(What is Beehaw?)[https://beehaw.org/post/107014]
(Behaw is a community)[https://beehaw.org/post/140733]
(A few thoughts on Beehaw's design)[https://beehaw.org/post/439918]
Edit: My assumption is that the links will open in your browser. If this isn't the case maybe I can stick these posts in a pastebin or something, lemmy know ;)
I'm personally disappointed but don't fault them. MY thinking is along The Dude's - ease of participation is key, with all of the risks that entails - but that's why I'm here rather than elsewhere.
Something I don't think a lot of people quite get yet - this is the DIY web. Different people take different approaches to community building, some very carefully and meticulously, and others not so much. And that's good - cool, even, IMO. Clashes are going to happen, but that's ok.
So you can pick another instance, or spin your own, but I'd rather people come from a place of participation rather than consumption on Lemmy writ large. One of the bigger instances defederated from us? Well shit, guess we're gonna have to make some content ourselves.
Post often, comment often, call fellow sh.it.heads (and other folks too) out if they're acting like shitheads. Be a positive presence in the Fediverse. Make some friends. The rest will sort itself out in time.
I'm stealing this.
But seriously, great comment. You are demonstrating the correct attitude for this journey. Teamwork makes the dream work people, we can't do it alone.
Like this guy from exploding-heads starts off "we need users [...] you need all the help you can get" and based on that theory he concludes "I'm blocking all beehaw servers". Is it just me or is that chain of logic somewhat flawed? If we need users why are you blocking 12,000 of them?
Lol, it's yours my friend!
I appreciate the kind response.
I don't know why you'd expect solid logic from someone on the Neo-nazi instance.
At least for my client software links are [ text ] ( URL ) but I understand the confusion, as I am almost certain it is the other way around, just like you typed it, in some other software I have used recently.
This is my big thought as well. Having a larger and more interconnected fediverse is all well and good, but letting people join and then cause problems isn't going to do anything but drive new users away - especially if those trolls all congregate in communities that used to be among the more appealing parts of the fediverse. I can't really fault the Beehaw mods for taking a temporarily heavy-handed approach in the middle of a user influx. Better that than being overrun and lose the primary selling point of the instance.
To gain users, users need to find a space that matches what they want. If you want a 4chan style environment, beehaw.org is not for you. If you want a beehaw.org style environment, then maybe it's a GREAT place to be. It's getting angry at users for wanting different things from the experience that will reduce the number of users, not that some spaces are different from others
There was already a community blocked from this very node and lemmy.world as well because they are VERY enthusiastic of tanks and were flooding other communities.
I don't see that much tragedy and drama coming out for that so .. eh, hard to take these kind of comments seriously, especially when they show to not have even understood how the federation works.
What I don't understand is why we can't see me posts and comments read only on Beehaw. I can see it by going to their (public) website, why can't I see it from here?
Because they don't let us download from them right now.
So I guess a solution coild be having different switches for getting/sending data to an instance. So in this case beehaw could block receiving updates from sh.itjust.works but not block sending updates to sh.itjust.works. That way we could all still see the content from there while on sh.itjust.works just not interact with it. This could be displayed in the UI by having the comment box and all interaction buttons that would send an update disabled.
There might be an issue on GitHub you could comment on to suggest this. It's the lack of flexibility in the mod tools that are currently available that's leading to this “on / off" style of federation
The moderation tools are pretty rudimentary at the moment. I think the popular Mastodon forks allow for read-only de-federating. Lemmy's software is just not very mature yet.
The moderation tools will come. De-federation is meant to be a nuclear option, with proper moderation tools it would be easy for instances to coordinate moderator actions (like, in this case, banning users from their home instance rather than having moderators run around deleting their posts). The overhead for moderation is too high and the tools are being created on the fly. Part of the excitement of being on the frontier of social networking 😎