Skip Navigation
Beehaw Support @beehaw.org
coyotino [he/him] @beehaw.org

Is defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works still necessary?

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?

151 comments

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 spend most of the time on Kbin, sometimes lurking and sometimes commenting on different posts.

    I can't talk about sh.itjust.works because I rarely see content from that instance. Sometimes a meme, or sometimes a techie news post. But very rarely, as I said. If you stay federated or defederated with sh.itjust.works, I don't really care, because I don't really know that place or the content it's published there.

    However, I strongly prefer to stay defederated from lemmy.world. I really can't understand why an instance with the .world domain is so US-centric. I don't give a shit about Iowa, Idaho, Florida, Montana, Texas, California or whatever posts from related communites I see while browsing all on Kbin. Besides, being myself anti-nazi, anti-fascist and anti-tankie, I support when other instances defederate from far-right and far-left instances, but I don't understand why they defederate instantly from certain instances and take some time to defederate from other certain instances. It's sad, but lemmy.world is the most similar thing to reddit right now, and it seems that they want to monopolize everything, because there are communities on other instances, as well as on Kbin, that have few activity, if any, in favour of .world ones.

    And then there is a cryptic reply to a comment I made on another post.

    • Most of the admins are Europeans and the server is also hosted in Europe (currently).

      We defederated with both the extreme left and right instances. Which instance are you talking about?

      Everyone is free to start a community on our instance as long as they have active moderators and follow the rules

      • Most of the admins are Europeans and the server is also hosted in Europe (currently).

        Yes, and that's really confusing. I mean, I respect the fact about posting US news where they belong and news from other countries where they belong too (I don't like it, but I respect it). But while I browse all on Kbin, 90% of the content is about US, and I'm tired of blocking US communities every time they appear on my feed.

        We defederated with both the extreme left and right instances. Which instance are you talking about?

        Back in the day, some weeks or last month, or whenever it happened, I read some public disagreements about why lemmy.world didn't defederate exploding-heads when they defederated lemmygrad. Why so much time with the heads and no time with the grads.

        Everyone is free to start a community on our instance as long as they have active moderators and follow the rules

        Obviously. But again, while browsing all on Kbin, the only thing I see is content from lemmy.world, while content from similar communities on other instances, although being there, it's either invisible or at the very bottom. To the point I had to block that instance, so my feed will be enriched by other instances.

    • I really can’t understand why an instance with the .world domain is so US-centric.

      Honestly, I think it has a lot to do with a lot of the other popular lemmy instances being specifically oriented around a specific non-US country, so that those of us who are in the US felt deterred from joining the ones that explicitly included ".de" or ".ca" or ".ch" in their domain, with German/Canadian/Swiss stuff in the sidebar.

      • That's why I didn't joint them either. I mean, I could join lemmy.ca because, even being located and focused in Canada, English is used. But feddit.de or feddit.ch, well, I can't talk neither German nor Czech, so you're also right about that.

  • Given how unstable Lemmy's performance is, adding even more incoming activity is likely to cause more crashes and problems. And it isn't as if there are aren't 1200 other Lemmy instances out there who are showing content from Lemmy.world

    I remember when Beehaw's signup code in Lemmy was so broken that there was a huge backlog.

    It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot,

    That's helped with the crashes in recent weeks, less data, less crashing. Lemmy.world has over 9000 communities, moderating all those entrances is huge, and the SQL performance problems in Lemmy are aggravated by all that additional data.

151 comments