I don't know whether or not this was the right decision for beehaw, although I certainly sympathize with them having staffing and mod tool issues. Modding any forum is a thankless and tiring job, and I'm sure in it's super early state Lemmy doesn't exactly have a mature suite of tools to work with.

I am very interested in the community reaction here though. There seems to be a shared assumption that instance creation in the Fediverse means an open exchange of users and content (outside of bad actor or extreme instances), and most instances should only be distributing technical burden and otherwise be almost just an aesthetic in the larger Fediverse.

This despite the user philosophy in the Fediverse being 'go where you want, interact with who your want', and federation tools meaning that philosophy applies to instances as well. And if you want meaningful differences between communities and instances, this has to be so - there has to be a strong ability to self-regulate, up to and including the ability to defederate from incompatible instances.

I think it'll be very interesting to see how the Fediverse develops. A wider Fediverse composed of sets of federated instances which aren't federated with other sets is possible. A largely open Fediverse with limited walled off instances is also possible. I know right now the latter is probably preferred to encourage growth, but in the long run? (these are not the only conceivable arrangements either, but this post is long enough already)

Seems like there should be a notice when a community is just a copy that isn't being updated anymore, to encourage people to abandon it and use one that is updated across instances. Or discourage them from subscribing to it.

I feel like this is a bad decision under the current circumstances, but also this shows the problems when one instance holds too large a portion of the user base and why we want to decentralize in the first place.

Defederation is a big decision that should not be taken lightly. You are effectively silencing an entire group of people from your group and when it’s a group as large as these two instances there is a lot of collateral damage.

However, we need more instances that are as well run as Lemmy.world if we want to truly be decentralized but I guess that is easier said than done.

I feel like the mods at bee haw are just putting a band aid on the problem because the “trolls” are going to keep coming as long as Lemmy is growing. They can just as easily come from any instance. Defederation is not a replacement for good moderation.

Either way, I hope that as Lemmy matures we get more and more well run instances so we don’t have to rely on a small group of instances and hope they can get along.

To be honest, as time went by and a few of my subreddits I frequented started to get brigaded by transphobes and fascist bawbags (Scotland and unitedkingdom subs are a great example of this) I stopped participating altogether in them.

I found the casualuk sub and that became pretty much the only place I’d comment/post. It felt like a much closer-knit community and I’d much rather have that than a massive community that may not feel as “homely” if that makes sense.

EDIT - I replied to the wrong post, I've not had a coffee yet.

This is so over complicated, but I like it lol.

This is an incredibly selfish, dipshit move. They’re trying to prioritise the growth of their own instance at the expense of Lemmy and the Fediverse as a whole, at a time when we should all be banded together to accept the massive influx of departing Redditors.

Amazing post with great info, thank you! There literally nothing in UI to let people know this is how it works tho and relies on words of mouth sharing. Communities essentially look exactly the same but like there's been no activity unless lemmy.world users post in it so you have to be able to guess posts are on a defederated instance or be hypervigilant in checking usernames if you haven't seen any posts about it, or are a new user in a week when this is t discussed as frequently. This is a huge oversight tbh and leaves me feeling a little uneasy. With more questions.

For example the LGBTQ community hosted on beehaw. Hypothetically say all of us genuine users who are aware of this unsubscribe because we find other communities that allow us to participate with a wider community. The shell community is still there, using beehaw branding, looks like a legit LGBTQ space but is now exclusively populated by trolls and unfortunate users who have missed announcements that this has happened. Nothing in the UI informs anyone posting or commenting there that it is not the true instance, and therefore no longer moderated by the owners.

Unaware user who already subscribed before the defederation posts a topic they want to discuss in a few weeks time, and suddenly they're flooded with highly upvoted troll responses That post ends up on the lemmy.world local/all page and is broadcast to other users who may not be aware, and a lot of new users who have no idea this ever happened. Now Beehaw is known as a hub for homophobic trolls that allows queer users to be trolled, and the trolls know they can get away with it in that community. Sure, eventually someone will come in to let that user know what's up and where to go, but by that time the damage is already done.

That also leads me to question how reporting works for this type of thing. If I report a user for breaking sub rules on the false version, who does that report go to? Is it a random lemmy.world mod/admin because we are both lemmy.world users in a community without beehaws mods or is it lost to the ether because there's no longer a connection to beehaw mods? If it goes to world mods, what if someone violates the subs rules that are still shown on the false instance, but not lemmy.world rules? My understanding was that moderation happened in communities by the host instance so does that mean these shell communities are completely unmoderated? That makes me feel very uncomfortable that these shell communities are even still available to world users, if it is the case, and should be cause for a mutual defederation until it's addressed but I'd like to have my reasoning corrected here if I'm off base. I'm still learning but this has me a little concerned so would appreciate being corrected if I'm wrong.

Edit: people are misunderstanding what I'm saying in the comments.

Who is moderating posts made by lemmy.world users in 'false' beehaw communities since the official beehaw moderators can no longer see these posts?

https://lemmy.world/post/172609

https://lemmy.world/post/167045

https://lemmy.world/post/158352

https://lemmy.world/post/185750

https://lemmy.world/post/162320

It would be a little less confusing if communities on defederated instances were marked as such in the "all communities" list.

Why did they defederate us?

I was just poking around a bit over at beehaw, earlier. and I got the STRONG impression that they really weren't in a position to deal with the sudden influx of users: not enough mod team, not enough money, not enough spare time in the day for the few people running it. I'm not holding that against them, that's to be expected in Fediverse spaces, which I gather intend to spread the load across thousands of instances, not just one.

Is this just them trying to get things under control, or was there some other problem?

If you look at the table on Awesome Lemmy Instances, Beehaw is far and away the most block-happy instance around, blocking over 70% of all instances in the Fediverse. They seem to see it as the defacto way to manage their instance.

Makes sense since, as other users have pointed out, the whole instance seems to be run by only a handful of the same Admins/Mods, so they are likely stretched very thin and are just taking the biggest swings they can to manage everything. They either need a major overhaul to their approach or that instance is going to fade into nothing.

A great lesson in how the federation works. Thanks for posting.

Honestly this is pretty disheartening.

I've just recently had this discussion with a friend where he told me he prefered Nostr because he was afraid instances would randomly start banning eachother. I told him that I've never been banned from anywhere on my life and it just wasn't realistic at this stage of growth.

Well that aged like milk, huh?

What was their reason for defederating? I tried to read their post and it didn’t make sense to me.

My second day using Lemmy and infighting is already destroying it.

That's a real bitch move, basically shadowbanning huge portions of the reddit migration. Unsubscribed from everything they host and lost a ton of content. Hopefully we can grow our own technology, gaming and whatever other large discussion hubs.

This isn't much better than what reddit is doing, fucking safe spaces. I miss the hell out of the internet at the turn of the millennium. When the users started touching things it all went to shit.

Great write up! Definitely going to point this to people who ask me about how fed stuff works

i deleted my beehaw account and registered here as soon as i read about the defederation. They're trying to police the beehaw community way too much, bunch of softies imo..

Its convenience. 99% don't care about anything apart from getting what they need. The blackout caused them inconvenience so its therefore annoying. Its the same attitude that can appear when workers take strike action.

They literally said they wanted to create a safe space for themselves. Just let them.

Thank you, that is a great explanation.

I do get where Beehaw admins are coming from. They want their instance to be a tight-knit safespace, and it is pretty hard to accomplish when there are only several admins dealing with an insane wave of newcomers. Unless Lemmy moderation tools get better, that seems like an OK temporary solution. Though, it is still kinda unfortunate that federated services, while being a great idea overall, are so prone to balkanization (that is, essentially, the fragmentation of mastodon situation all over again) but it gives user choice.

Say I never read about these news: am I able to somehow see that a community belongs to a defederated instance, or do I have to guess based on the (lack of) new activity?

Man this is starting to sound like reddit 2.0 where everything is walled off depending on what your subscribed to