This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
Some of y'all getting angry need to look at yourself in the mirror. The whole point of federation was to allow communities to do things like this if they want.
A lot of new people are going to see this mudslinging and rightfully turn around. Nobody is coming to Lemmy to see drama between instances.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it. The fact that federation has been the only discussion since the blackout is not good for the alternatives to reddit. My whole life is tech and if it's this distracting to me I can't imagine any remotely average user being interested. The fact that this was the perfect time to be part of an alternative but the whole experience has mostly just proven reddits "give it a week" response true.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.
That was never going to happen, not even in the best possible case.
Far left and far right are always going to split off. Do you want to be having discussions about race with neo nazis? I don't. Let them go to their own dark corner of the internet.
I thought the whole point of federation was that everything from every federated instance was connected and I only need one account to see every part of it.
No. If an instance hosts toxic communities then your instance can choose to defederate from it. You don't have to wait for the centralized authority to ban them. It's about being able to choose your admins and form a web of "good" communities.
I do think it's fair to criticize the decision to try to be one of the largest instances while only having four moderators. They should have accepted a place as a midsize instance with midsize communities in order to maintain their moderation goals. Or they could have worked to get more moderators. Blaming the defederated instances and mod tools seem disingenuous at best. That said mod tools undoubtedly need improvement.
To be fair, they said the reason they were defederating from those two instances in particular is because most of their moderation involved people from them. They didn't expand beehaw beyond what they could handle, the rest of lemmy expanded beyond what they could handle. If this really is just a temporary measure, which is also what they said, then I think it's pretty reasonable.
The admins have always been clear that they’re not trying to replace Reddit, and I’m quite sure they were not trying to be one of the largest instances.
If they weren’t trying to get large then how did that happen? Based on admin comments, beehaw was one of the more active instances when the first wave of migration happened; and a decent amount of the pre-first wave posts about lemmy I saw on Reddit were about how Beehaw was a good instance to join as it was defederated from lemmygrad.
I kinda expected that after seeing them purge some threads made by lemmy users. I have to imagine we kbin users are gonna get cut next lmao.
Well we are one of the largest instances out there with open signups...
Good riddance. I like the no-downvote style but overzealous mods just create their own pillow fort of the same 5 users regurgitating the same shit over and over.
Perhaps harsh but beehaw strikes me as the tumblr/progressive/sjw types that really wanna build their safe space. Which makes me wonder why they're federating at all lol.
I'm very glad that kbin seems to have a "let's get all the content and speak freely" sorta vibe going on right now. hopefully things stay that way.
I guess. That is the whole point right? If you like how a instance is run, you join them. And if any beehaw users don't like this direction it's taking, they can always make another account on Lemmy.
Fediverse allows for great potential of redundant, diverse, and flexible meta content consumption, but we the users are bearing some of that growing pain right now as this all grows and things get shuffled on the fly.
All this talk of defederation and blocklists makes me generally uneasy. I understand how it's easy to fall into. Nobody wants political extremists and criminals and bad actors and stuff on their instance, so it makes sense you might want to ban trollfactory dot xyz, nazihq dot us, and/or uncompromisingmarxist dot boats, or whatever.
But I think the stupidest shit I saw on reddit were the subreddits that would ban you for even posting on an ideologically competing subreddit, with no consideration for the message you'd written. This is worse than that because it's the opposite, and includes even reading the content.
Imagine if when you went to post on /r/RestaurantOwners, and its AutoMod had the power to then immediately ban you from even looking at /r/antiwork and /r/WorkReform. Imagine posting to /r/conservative to correct someone's error only to get permanently banned from viewing any "leftist" subs ever again. This is the vibe I get from this and as much as I want to avoid creating nodules of extremism and hatred, I want less to have people grabbing my head, taping my mouth, and averting my eyes from things they don't like when they don't even know what my thinking is.
I feel like widespread trigger happy banlists are the death of small instances, too. Maybe one small instance doesn't catch some newly registered asshole for a day or two but it's too late. The 16-hour a day lifestyle moderator on a massive instance who has gangstalking delusions over nebulous "trolls" has already blacklisted all 150 of your users permanently and listed your domain for defederation as officially owned by the Nazi party in a massive register shared by the top 100 largest instances. The number of times I've heard this story with small Mastodon instances is more than I care for.
You're not banned from looking at anything. Just go to their instance, abide by their signup rules and don't do the shit they defederated to avoid.
A very good take on the pros and cons of this kind of thing.
Personally as someone with an account on Beehaw I don’t think I’ll mind mostly. I’ve been pretty happy with the communities they have already made and been quite impressed with content amounts.
Let’s be honest, this federated forum/link-aggregator is in its infancy. Rexxit brought it into the lime light and just kind of put a magnifying glass on these sorts of growing pains.
I’d like to point out that most of the criticism I’ve seen has come from outside the community. I don’t feel like this will be a long term thing only. It’s really an attempt at trying to preserve the community brand and feeling for its members especially while things are still young.
this is interesting!
Certainly so. From a sort of... sociological point I'm wondering what the impacts are of major instances growing independent of each other. I feel like I can already feel it with kbin and lemmy both growing separately during the blackout. I'm wondering if the trend for major instances is going to be where each one has their own unique culture or if they will eventually homogenize.
Only real concern here, although I didn't participate during the mastodon surge last year, I heard that defederation became a bit of an issue with how common there. Granted, I feel like the impact is probably less here with the fact that you are interacting with topics rather than people.
I'm personally hoping for a unique culture, especially since we currently have quite a good one. Going solo is just going solo -- it's sad and kinda dumb, since it defeats the entire point of the fediverse, but if they're ok hanging out on a closed forum it's not like those haven't existed for decades.
I hadn't thought something like Mastodon would be able to defederate. Thinking about it, that would be far more disastrous for a platform aimed at following individuals to be able to do. The stress induced from having to choose an instance knowing they block other instances and being unable to even tell if that's a bad thing or not until you investigate each and every one anyway. Having to look up what your favorite people are on, if you're on Mastodon, so you can get news without leaving any of them out. What a mess.
They’re not going solo though. They are still connected to hundreds of other instances. Including Lemmy.ml, which is still the biggest instance.
Additionally, the Beehaw admins have said they're open to refederating with lemmy.world et al if/when Lemmy gets better moderation tools.
Defederation is inevitable, it will happen on kbin once rules are established, however less harsh measures can also be applied https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/#limit-server
Lemmy specifically hasn't implemented less harsh measures yet. This is a stop-gap action to cut off a trolling problem at its source. The beehaw admins say they will reevaluate when less drastic tools are available, e.g. allow beehaw users to interact with lemmy.world but not the other way around.
I'm not sure I 100% agree, personally, but beehaw's ethos is "be(e) nice" and if trolls are trolling, it can make it very hard for some people to open up and contribute. So I see where it's coming from.
The sad reality is that during the reddit blackout, people were pushing lemmy (specifically Beehaw) as the reddit replacement because yay decentralized, federated, fun!
For a lot of those reddit refugees the effort they put into making content and trying to make Beehaw their home is gone now.
They're not going to want to start all over at a new instance and rebuild yet again.
They're just going to go back to reddit
They should be running a standard forum software, but are already in too deep to fix the actual problem.
That’s fair, buuuuut why are the admins moderating comments? Why shouldn’t the moderators mod their communities and report problematic users to admins so those users can be blocked.
The admins are probably modding the communities because they probably created them but the proper solution should be to find mods, not just defederate
It’s not a permanent defederation, and it’s only with those two instances. There are still hundreds of other instances that they are still federated with.
No one on beehaw can create communities except the admins, with the promise that they will personally split the ones they have into more distinct topics as it becomes necessary. As such, that also makes them automatically the mods. It's one of the reasons I decided against it, as well as.... * gestures to headline. *
I was quite curious what removing the downvote button would do to foster actual discussion, since its use is frowned upon in my one remaining reddit kebble sub, and everyone who remains each week is shockingly cordial with one another. Pity to see beehaw crashing and burning so fast like this.
Is it crashing and burning if it aligns with their explicitly stated goals? Seems like they're sticking to their guns and having a well moderated community by doing this. Some people will want that, some won't. But if we want this federation thing to work, we can't start whining about instances making choices about what their users interact with. If anything I'm glad this is happening early so that people can see how the federation stuff will play out and get used to the idea.
Ultimately this is because beehaw allowed themselves to become one of the largest instances on the threadiverse with only FOUR mods. Any blame on the other instances/mod tools is deflection. This is poor management at it's core and is bad for the larger community. That said I would love to see more in the way of improved mod tools.