this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Beehaw "moderators" don't have an issue with their user base checking out other communities. As is clearly obvious from the fact that they aren't defederated from all other instances.
They do have an issue with droves of unvetted users from other instances trolling and harassing their community though. And the most effective way to deal with that currently is to defederate from the instances that the majority of those bad-faith users are coming from. The unfortunate (and unintentional) side effect is that Beehaw users won't be able to interact with any of the users from those instances.
This is a situation born out of a combination of
You can disagree with this decision and users are free to switch, but this meme is a poor caricature of the actual effects of Beehaw's actions and (at least in my estimation) of their intentions.
The decision to defederate is less of an attack or an indictment against the other instances and more of a practical necessity for them to protect their community.
If the user base of the lemmy verse keeps growing I wouldn't be surprised if either
I saw a wave of the harassing spam they were getting right before they defederated. One was a meme about lynching drag performers. Another was a picture of an erection that was posted in what looked like every feminist and trans friendly space, asking if it was bigger than the ones owned by the denizens of the communities. I'm sure it was just a small fraction of what they were dealing with as more shitty little hatemongers find their way to Lemmy, but I happened to catch it by sorting by new at exactly the wrong time. I can't blame the Beehaw mods for not wanting to deal with the psychological toll that comes with manually moderating that kind of content.
I saw dick-pic spam.
There's a lot of words we can use, but its a lot faster to just say they got harassed by the whole slew of NSFW-spam, porn-spam, harassers and such.
Sure, but a lot of users here are minimizing how bad it was, so I wanted to be specific about how explicitly hateful it was.
Yeah. I'm surprised by how hostile ordinary users have been at this point. Beehaw defedrated after the mods were swamped and most of the content they had to deal with was from these two instances.
I have accounts on both and I was just reading a discussion on beehaw where both the owners of lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had chimed in and everyone was talking about how to get federated back in the future after beehaw have had a chance to get more moderators and the influx of users stabilizes at the end of the month.
My only gripe is that all of my negative interactions at this point have been with people from lemmy.ml so why do they remain while the other two were defederated? But that might be just my experience.
I think shit and world got defederated because they don't have that "why do you want to join" question on the sign up page, and so is easy to make spam accounts on.
Well sort of. They got defeated because it was users from those communities causing a large portion of incidents that needed moderation. Open sign-ups are fine if you have some other way to filter users.
No, the meme is accurate. The owners of beehaw are so obsessed with protecting their users from possible harassment that they are willing to put them in a prison with no communication with most of the outside world (lemmy.world has the most active users and sh.itjust.works is in top 5).
And the users on beehaw are free to create accounts on other instances if they want. Your prison metaphor is a bad one.
They are restricting their users freedom. But yes the users are free to leave.
And they can leave beehaw on a full-time basis. Let the admins decide how they want to run their instances, and if users don't like it, they can hop over to another. This is all a part of how decentralization is supposed to work. Of course it's messy and inconsistent.
There are plenty of beehaw users who agreed with defederation. After all, they had to essentially write an essay to be allowed in at all. I'm not surprised there are users who are okay with defederating. And again, the ones who aren't are free to make accounts on instances with open door policies, like shit or world. Beehaw admins probably prefer it that way anyway.
You seem to be thinking of instances like ISPs or something.
Instances are closer related to a house holding multiple parties in multiple rooms. People from other houses are welcome to join, but with the lack of moderation tools, if people from your house act like fools or assholes don't be surprised when your house is collectively barred.
The only reason people are so upset is because they have misframed what Lemmy is in their heads as some libertarian wet dream with no authority whatever. There is an authority. It is each instance admin.
If I create an email service, a lot of people sign up to use it and after some time I tell them I will no longer deliver emails to gmail.com, would that be alright?
That happens all the time with spam mail servers which is exactly the same problem beehaw was having. If you set up an email service that hosts spam bots and do nothing about it then the other email services will start blocking it.
Beehaw was being spamed with dick pics and other shit that was actively malicious. They could ban those profiles but then those users just went and made new profiles on lemmy.world or one of the other instances with open signup. Right now Lemmy has limited moderation tools so the only way to perminantly "ban" those users is to defederate with the instances that keep hosting them. They plan to refederate with those instances once better tools are in place to perminantly block users like that.
It would be more similar to you blocking gmail.com from sending you messagess because thier users keep flooding your server with spam.
This happens every day. Unfortunately a small group of assholes ruined it for all of us until tools are available to deal with them.
I don't know what kind of features they need, but I could have helped make the tools and I'm sure many other people would be willing to help if they only asked.
Isn't this exactly how gmail treats a LOT of other email services? Email is a mess of spam and whitelists and is barely usable as a result, partially because there is no human moderation.
You might be right about that. I hate email. I was just giving an example of providing a service that people rely on, then when a problem occurs cutting it off from the outside world instead of trying to fix it.
Why would you do that?
I'll be honest: that's a shitty way of handling this. Making 20 accounts to view content from 20 different instances that don't want to cooperate with one another defeats the purpose of all of this. If that's the plan, the Lemmyverse or whatever it's called is dead on arrival.
The plan is to refederate after Lemmy moderation tools catch up to the needs of Beehaw.org.
Seems reasonable to me?
It's just temporary, primarily due to lemmy having very poor moderation tools. Once moderation tools improves, beehaw mods should be able to handle refederating.
Just use small instances with good moderation policies.
I have a BeeHaw account and a lemmy.world account. I'm not imprisoned lol, it's the Internet, not some.private island. Nothing's stopping anyone from browsing or joining any of these communities
People's freedoms were limited for no good reason. But you are right that they can leave. Users can leave Reddit too.
Freedoms were not limited. Any user can still go apply for a beehaw account if they want one. Any beehaw user can open an account on any other instance they want. People can still talk, people can still be heard.
No one is entitled to force others to listen to what they say. Beehaw's owner pays for their server. It's their own private instance. They can determine the rules that accounts that use or federate with their instance have to follow, and everyone has the freedom to associate with beehaw if they want.
Finally, beehaw isn't a government, taking an action to limit the freedoms of their citizens. In most modern, western societies, that is between governments and their people. In nearly every similar structure, those people do not have the same "rights" in regards to private businesses or private organizations.
Don't believe me? Go into a grocery store and start screaming obscenities at fellow customers and see how long it takes you to be forcibly removed and banned from the premises. And that won't be your freedoms being limited, either. It will be that private business deciding that you're not allowed to associate with them any longer.
This is no different. The people who run beehaw can choose how to run their space. It's their money they pay for the service with. We don't get to tell them how to spend it. Their users and donors have a say in it, and if their users and donors don't like how the operators respond to their expectations, then they won't have users and donors. That's for them to decide.
People act like they're entitled to an audience with beehaw users, and they simply aren't. It's that easy. You can't just go into your neighbor's house and demand they listen to what you have to say. They can, and will, boot your ass to the curb, or worse, as soon as they're tired of listening. I'm not sure why this is so hard for some people to understand.
fucking exactly lmao
people from other instances seem to have felt entitled to Beehaw's communities and are acting like something was stolen from them when they'd never owned it to begin with
They could also simply apply for an account on lemmy.world, if they wanted. I hear the bar is pretty low, and the users of beehaw were indirectly notified of this, too. And the inconvenience of having to create a second account is almost nonexistent.
Users are people capable of making their own choices. It they don't like the moderation approach they can just make a new account elsewhere. You don't get to tell them what they like.
Yes, how dare I criticize someone's actions and the impact they have on our community.
It is literally their community. They host it. They moderate it.
"Lemmy" is not a community, it is a loose federation of instances that can choose not to federate with other instances.
Your outrage seems based on "HOW DARE THEY BLOCK US FROM OUR COMMUNITY", but it was never yours. You were merely allowed to use it
It hurts both their users and us. The federation is now more divided for no good reason.
If they wanted to create a private community from the start that would be perfectly fine. But they let people sign up and create big communities that everyone else now relies on and then defederated. Isn't that a bit irresponsible?
Isn't it a bit irresponsible to let bigoted trolls post a lot of dick pics? Because that's what was going on. You're talking about [theoretical problems], but the mods of Beehaw made a (possibly flawed) call during an emerging situation to avoid a lot of [actually existing problems].
No, that is moderation.
These big communities were formed by people who may or may not have understood what federation means. This is the inherent implication that comes with subscribing to a community that is located on a separate instance. As long as the moderation tools are insufficient to stop rampant trolling, this is the only real reaction the instances have available If they are not willing to add a whole bunch of moderators.
Irresponsible is visiting other instances and not recognizing that what you post also reflects on your instance.
I see, you see Lemmy as being one big community, rather than separate communities that can interact with each other
so you see defederating as like locking away a part of the community, rather than a community deciding to lock up for a bit
The community didn't decide this as far as I know. It was the owners who did it and informed their community after the fact. If there was some kind of vote and I missed it, let me know.
fucking lmao
as if they can'f make an account on another instance
y'all are just hurt because you think you're being rejected and insulted by this, when they made it clear that it wasn't personal or permanent
Yeah I agree. They've been quite open about everything so far and their main issue was the modding implications of open sign up. The tools just don't exist yet to manage it effectively and keep the kind of community they want, so it's just easier to defederate for now until they do. They have a dialogue open with shit just works and said that the admin of lemmy.world hasn't replied to their message, but that it's fine if they don't want to talk too.
I am a bit disappointed that inter-instance sniping has started so early though. I personally am on both instances and am going to try and treat both in good faith for now
Fortunately, @ruud made a comment https://beehaw.org/comment/298646. They should be working together soon.
Oh good that's promising. Ultimately this platform generally is only going to work en masse if everyone tries to work with each other. I know they don't have to necessarily, but it's nice to get along