cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

We’ve been defederated. Were there that many trolls/assholes on our server? What on earth happened while I was asleep?

hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one:

we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.

we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).

an unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.

aside from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:

  • these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
  • the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
  • our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
  • and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for

as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:

There’s a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it’s not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can’t even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.

Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.

and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.

this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.

thanks for using our site folks.

  • thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I find this very disappointing, not because I’m hugely attached to Beehaw (although their large gaming community has dominated my feed this week). But rather because the first response to whatever adversity they were facing, real or perceived, is to take the nuclear option. The biggest drawback to Lemmy as opposed to Reddit is the over fragmentation and the lack of quality content, so intentionally increasing those challenges feels short-sighted and bad for the ecosystem as a whole.

    • Ludrol@szmer.info
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      1 year ago

      I would say that on lemmy mod tools are in pre-alpha state that work for instances under 1000 users. Lemmy needs more tools to moderate and without any other option beehaw decided to go nuclear until they get mod tools

      Whole reddit debacle was about 3 party apps and moderation tools

      • thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Ok so help me understand here. The root post is Beehaw complaining that their four admins can’t handle the new influx of users. But isn’t that the entire point of moderators? Shouldn’t each community be responsible for dealing with trolls, etc? From what I’ve seen of Beehaw, they’re attempting to have the same handful of admins moderate every single community, which was never going to be sustainable and IMHO misses the entire point of this sort of experience.

        • kukkurovaca@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          If all the new trolls are coming from two instances, and defederating those two instances will keep the load manageable for them, why wouldn’t they?

          This kind of decision is a big problem for scaling up Lemmy as a reddit replacement and welcoming huge volumes of new users, but I don’t think that’s Beehaw’s goal and certainly not their responsibility.

          The tricky bit is figuring out how to set up fediverse-wide communities in places that most (non-troll) users won’t be cut off from them.

          • thirdorbital@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I mean sure, they can take their toys and go home. It’s their instance; it’s their prerogative. I guess I just don’t understand why anyone would want to be invested in a tiny little dictatorship where four admins run every single community.

          • nottheengineer@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            That’s exactly the issue. We’re at a point where many communities are looking for a place to go instead of reddit and this whole situation will scare them away from lemmy because they don’t know which instances are safe places to set up camp. Beehaw was the only one I saw with a bit of branding in the form of consistent logos and I think that alone has pushed many users to them. I personally just picked the instance that seemed the least shady at first glance and didn’t already ask people to register elsewhere and I think most of beehaw’s users did the same and landed there without getting into the details about the server’s ethics.

        • Ludrol@szmer.info
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          1 year ago

          I don’t know how to answer the question. I don’t have enough information but from my testing moderation tools are in a poor state and what moderator can do if they can’t moderate.

    • Barbarian@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      I tend to agree. Their server, their rules, but an attempt to find a compromise of some variety rather than suddenly and unexpectedly defederating would have been nice.