I find this news disconcerting coming from such a large instance so early on. Many of the criticisms of Lemmy I’ve been fighting against on Reddit have had to do with defederation and the possibility of getting cut off from your favorite communities on your main account. I handwaved that away as being extremely unlikely save for the exception of NSFW or extreme political content. But this news has taken me quite by surprise. Perhaps I should have seen it coming given the community Beehaw is trying to foster.
This really makes me wonder what will happen to instances that make this decision. Will their communities diminish in favor of the more accessible ones? Will this decision hurt Beehaw in the long run? What does this mean for the Fediverse in the near future when fighting against its detractors has been such an uphill battle?
Thoughts?
I’ve read the post: my take on it is that there’s not enough moderation tools, and the only one that really works against servers with open registration is defederation.
Don’t the admins create all the communities there? So, instead of spreading the moderation role it’s concentrated amongst the 4 admin? Seems like they just bit off more than they could chew.
yeah that’ll never work. Even with reddit… the idea is that you build an instance for people to build communities. You set instance wide rules and the mods of said communities have to adhear to and enforce them or they lose their community.
Everyone running an instance is going to have to adopt this methodology or they’ll be overwhelmed in 2 seconds flat. The internet is big and with lemmy getting popularity it’s not going to get eaiser from here. Even with tools, 4 people can’t moderate a ton of communities.
I know this is an unpopular move for many Fediverse users including Beehaw. I support this move by the Beehaw admins because they are overworked enough managing the site, they don’t have the energy to be constantly chasing trolls spamming accounts posting harmful posts and messages onto their community.
They have a stated ethos, and they should do whatever necessary to be able to keep up with the growing user base. Of course it will stunt their growth but between pursuing growth and keeping the vibe on that instance, they choose the vibe and I respect that decision.
Kinda glad I chose a lower key instance in terms of ideology and size (lemmy.ca). But it would be nice to have a single log in associated with the full fediverse.
You can do this already though (unless I’m misunderstanding you). I’m on one account (this one) and I’m subbed to communities on multiple different instances. It’s my single log in associated with as much of the fediverse as Lemmy can access.
Nah, I’m referring to one account (think like FB login or Google log in, but not awful) that accesses all the Lemmy instances without being on any particular instance. This means that users are independent of instances but still access the fediverse. Then instances block individual users if needed, users block instances if needed, but instances are still decentralized and owned by smaller groups than giant companies like Reddit, preventing a company from monopolizing things. It also removes the whole account migration thing. Could be as simple as one mega instance that hosts only accounts and all other instances host content.
It also removes the confusion. Right now I’m kat on lemmy.ca, but there could be kat@ any other instance and you’d never really know unless you memorized my instance handle.
An interesting idea. I just wonder because the whole thing about Lemmy is decentralization and if I understand your idea, it would sort of be a centralization which sorta goes against the whole thing?
I mean it would still be decentralized in most ways that matter. Nobody would own the hosting of instances except the small groups or individuals that do, so if a surpressive party ever tried to control the narrative on a large instance with multiple communities, users could just focus on other instances that aren’t like that. Likewise, it would greatly simplify the moderation needs of other instances (in some ways) - instances would focus on blocking harmful users, but they wouldn’t have to worry about potentially replicating content from harmful instances. Sign up is also simplified, preventing the “where do I go” confusion.
It could also marry the different fediverse hangouts in different ways. Think about YouTube - they have a place for the main feed, they have a place for shorts, and those two places don’t even really give the same vibe. A good fediverse app could have different views between Mastodon, Lemmy, Tumblr (they’re either federated or plan to be), etc but one account that has a single access point for all of those. Sliding between the views gives you something like Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, etc. Instead of 12 handles, YouTubers give 1.
There are pitfalls - who owns the big account instance? What if the owners of it somehow abuse their power over the community, can we create another account instance and link it up, good as new? How hard is it to screen individual users from the perspective of an individual instance owner or group? Do we want to have our activity linked across multiple different places on the internet - after all, Mastodon is more real identity meaning, but Lemmy is more anonymous like Reddit. Who funds the mega instance? Is there incentive to pay for smaller instances if they don’t hold your account as well? Will the big instances just… Own all the data eventually anyway (this could happen even without one login)?
I think the only way it could work is from some strange non profit Wikipedia type setup where it’s completely FOSS and nobody can ever have ownership to monetize or exploit the user base. Thing is, I’m not a tech person at all. I see shit like Linux as an absolute miracle and completely fail to understand how that even works (people collaborating on a project that’s totally free in most cases). I’m just kinda shooting the breeze and trying to think of how things could work possibly, but these ideas are probably bad for reasons I didn’t even realize.
I think the main issue we run into with the concept of a user account server is that banning needs to be an ability that someone somewhere has. If someone starts posting some highly illegal content we need a way to ban them. But then invariably giving someone that power is exactly what centralization is. Separating that one user server into multiple leads to other awkward outcomes as I posted elsewhere in this thread. Namely, you end up back where we started where certain instances ban certain user servers that are known to host problematic people.
Does this mean that I need to run my own Lemmy to federate from all the sources I’m interested in, if I want content from beehaw and lemmy.world and a.n.other.example.org if they are not federated together?
If I do create my own, do I have to persuade those servers to accept my federation?
So much I don’t understand. Wait… I think I get it: if lemmy.ca federates with all these places, I see it all and can interact with it? Are the federated/defederated lists openly available somewhere?
Yes! If you look at the bottom of any instance, there’s an “Instances” button that will show you which instances are allowed/blocked. You shouldn’t need to create your own server if you can find an instance federated to all the ones you’d like. Defederation seems to be the exception to the rule, though beehaw.org has a larger blocked list than I’ve seen on other instances. In their defense, some of the sites they’ve blocked look pretty horrible…
As for making your own instance, I’m afraid I don’t know what the process is to federate with other instances…
That is so cool, thank you! I would never have thought to click on any of those links
This kerfuffle is not only hurting Beehaw, but also Lemmy as a whole, and even Kbin. Before Kbin’s cloudflare stuff, my Fediverse news feed experience was fantastic. Being able to read, post, and comment from anywhere is a really neat feature, and I’ve since found that I can post to Lemmy communities from Mastodon. Now we’re back to splitting everything up again.
Hot take: I think Fediverse won’t truly take off until logins are decoupled from instances. Get rid of the unique logins per-server and it won’t matter where you go, how active a server is, or who has a grudge against you for whatever reason. You’ll lose access to a space, sure, but you won’t have to move to another server and create yet another account on someone else’s server with no guarantee that you can remove or export your data…
A universal login system would be either:
An absolute nightmare of security
Or just a centralized service with extra steps.
The fix to the issue here is just implementing account migration.
I wonder how separating logins from instances would work from a programming standpoint. People’s accounts need to be hosted on servers somewhere, so it raises some really interesting questions when the topic of defederation and drama like this comes up. For example, the Beehaw admins are running a server somewhere. If we decouple accounts from instances, then my assumption is that we’re randomly assigning accounts to servers. So that leads to the possibility of the Beehaw admins hosting an avowed fascist on their server by the design of Lemmy as a whole. I’m sure they would probably take issue with that. Beyond that, who has the control to ban spam/abusive/illegal accounts from the platform as a whole? If someone is going around posting child porn or something else illegal, surely we need to have a way to remove them from all of Lemmy. If it’s the server owner where the account was assigned then that raises some really weird questions about their control.
Another theoretical structure for this would be having two types of servers - user servers and community servers. Then users can still choose their server admin, but it would be divorced from any restrictions a community server puts up against other servers. But then what happens when an avowed fascist creates their own user server and won’t ban troubling accounts? Then that raises questions of whether a community can ban a user server, which kind of brings us back to square one…
We almost had decentralized logins with OpenID. I remember the push. It started seeing more widespread usage in the spaces I visited at the time, and even Google is/was an OpenID provider. Facebook and their “Login with Facebook” nonsense took things backwards when other vendors wanted to be a
data trackerlogin provider, also.With the ban evasion scenario you mentioned, having something like OpenID would give you an immutable ID number that can be used anywhere. Bans and blocks would go according to that ID, and evasion would require a new account. I think that would be a good middle ground for data privacy. It does make law enforcement’s job harder, though. Which does take us back to square one when it comes to removal of content, especially illegal content.
I am actually reaching the end of my knowledge on the subject in the following, so if anything after this is flat-out wrong with the technologies listed, I’d love some corrections.
If we go purely theoretical with existing tools, a blockchain would ideally assign those unique IDs. That’s a username and account creation date. GPG to sign each request (the second factor), and the entered password with the signature would decrypt an encrypted blob on IPFS with the requested information, similar to how Storj DCS stores data in encrypted buckets. Enter the wrong password, you get an empty bucket. Password recovery becomes an issue at that point, but one really should be using a password manager, passphrase, or hardware key these days, anyway.
Or use it as a feature and increase overall privacy by using a different password for each unique data blob shared with a service you’re authenticating with. It won’t matter, because your ID won’t change. For law enforcement, that does make things exponentially more difficult, maybe if you store the successful login attempts on the blockchain with the metadata that they claim to obtain from companies, it might work? There does have to be a balance between transparency and privacy.
Feels like a simple method would be a login provider that is related to the government. The gov have the best way to identify you and prove that you are who you are. That’s how you would get one unique ID that cannot be evaded by simply creating a new account.
Although, if you get banned from a community, there would be no way to get back in it because your gov id would be banned. Maybe the ban appeal could be more official instead of a letter to a random mod and hope you get an answer, hell, why not judiciarice the whole ban appeal thing so that you do have real recourse if you ever get banned for no good reason, a bit like when you get fired from a job.
Food for thought…
From what (admittedly little) I know about the fediverse I can’t see this being a good decision for Bee’s long term growth. I respect their stance but I simply think there isn’t enough content for small groups to sustain yet. Reddit thrives on a newsfeed style experience, if there’s nothing to scroll people won’t stay. The only reason I’m here is because I can scroll everything in all, which is how I found this post, for example.
I mean, “long term growth” isn’t desirable. Growth isn’t sustainable. If they have a critical mass of community, then there is nothing that says they need to grow until they destroy themselves.
Long term growth is necessary to keep any online community alive. Not necessarily accelerating growth. But if a community has less members coming in than the ones who leave over time it will eventually die, no matter what platform it’s on.
Growth doesn’t nessisarily mean your userbase is growing. It can also mean replacing users lost to attrition.
