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.
This simply solidifies my opinion that I've had all along that Beehaw is a trash instance full of sensitive censor-happy ninnies and I hope they all resolve the issues they are having to eventually be finally free from trolls and assholes in their humble & beautiful walled-garden paradise echo chamber. All the best for them.
Isn't the whole point of the fediverse that you get to create and craft your experience for your community? There's a really good reason defederating is a feature. I don't get it, Beehaw decides to use the features of federation so now we: firstly become tribalistic (them vs us), and secondly decide to get angry? Like it or not, this is what you signed up for when you wanted federation.
I don't see the point of getting angry like this, and really don't see how this negativity being conducive to a thriving community. Some new people are going to explore fediverse, see tribalistic mudslinging among instances, and say "not for me."
I'd say respect their decision and move on, if it's not for you it's not for you.
Yeah, they're saying "look, we only have four mods, have a highly targeted type of community we are trying to build, and have had to disproportionately moderate users from these instances" which seems reasonable on it's face.
That's kind of the beauty of Lemmy/Kbin right? You can spin up an instance with whatever rules you want. I think people are reacting to the fact that during the Reddit exodus Beehaw kind of looked like a "default" general instance, including me.
But that's a misreading on our part, not them going back on that.
Its both a value add and a negative. For those more focused on their own community (Like beehaw) it's an obvious positive. But for many users, losing access to certain communities on your own instance of choice is going to be a negative. I personally don't blame Beehaw for favoring the former. I think improved moderation tools and more granular federation would at least make the move less of a blow to users.
Absolutely. It’s disappointing that this person read a post made by the Beehaw admins that was written with nuance and grace, and then decided to respond with vitriol. That’s exactly the kind of attitude that is so prolific on Reddit, and I am happy to leave it behind. Thank you for your reasoned reply.
OP, I encourage you in the future to choose grace.
This kind of post right here is the gold standard for why I chose Kbin over other instances. Well reasoned, free of vitriol, and looking to build a new culture outside of the one a lot of us left behind on Reddit.
100% - the beauty of the fedivers is that everybody can chose to federatre OR NOT!
If people wanne follow beehaw they can switch server or even go to some other fedivers project and follow from there.
Yeah I don't feel quite as harshly but as soon as I saw they didn't allow downvotes I knew their philosophy wasn't for me. Too bad about losing their gaming group though.
After reading that post, I'm actually pretty glad they're leaving.
That's been my view too. There's definitely a need for moderation, but I've been on the internet for quite some time and the vibe from Beehaw is very much concerning. Any time I've seen a community run like that, it always always ends up feeling like an echochamber run by a dictator. I want an internet that's mostly wholesome, not a "happy fun camp where there's all smiles and you had better not frown!"
You are now banned from beehaw.org
I wonder if there's a Pyongyang community.
...Come to think of it, Lemmygrad probably has one. But I'm not going over there to look.
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 got the same sense. Authoritarianism runs on both sides of the political spectrum.
While their FAQ touted an emphasis on empathy, the heavy flowery language while also making a point to refuse to have written rules at all somehow gave me a feeling of double-speak. The idea is nice, but now you're open to being banned because they felt like it, and you can't even explain how you weren't breaking the rules if no rules exist. Refusing to allow anyone but themselves to create communities backs up the authoritarian streak. Not interested. I assume if they don't, I'll eventually be banned there anyway. I really like debate and I really dislike dictatorships.
At least if one of the largest instances out there goes full Korea, it will leave other instances a chance to be noticed in their wake. It sounds salty, but I'm still getting used to what federation means for a platform and when we were still initially federating my entire feed was utterly nothing but beehaw. I am salty. I want as much variety as I can get.
there are already users over there asking this very question lol
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.
They should be running a standard forum software, but are already in too deep to fix the actual problem.
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.
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 can’t scale. They will die.
Or they'll just be a smallish instance building the kind of community they want to build. There's nothing wrong with knowing what you want to be and not trying to be more.
Ostensibly they don't wish to scale at the expense of the quality of their community.
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.