I read that they “defederated”… What does this mean? And why did they do this? And what are the consequences?
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- Beehaw admins explained the move in this post: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
- This post explains what it means for
lemmy.worldandsh.itjust.worksusers: https://lemmy.world/post/149743.
In short, they were having trouble maintaining their moderation standards. In an incredibly short-sighted move, they’ve split the lemmyverse… offloading the costs of their moderation choices to the rest of us who now have to deal with incredibly confusing asymmetrical replication.
They’ve called this move temporary, but there’s no schedule for restoring federation and no set list of criteria for what will enable that to happen. I would say it’s more “open-ended” in that they haven’t committed to defederating forever, but there’s no useful limit on the duration of the defederation either.
Personally, while i think it’s not the best solution…they don’t owe us an audience or a megaphone. If they owe anyone anything, it’s their own users. If they’re overwhelmed, and i totally believe that they are, they should do what they have to in order to deal with it
This view is technically correct, but I think very narrow because it takes no account of the external costs to the rest of the fediverse. Admins of major instances that host a double-digit percentage of the lemmyverse userbase SHOULD be expected to conduct themselves in a way that promotes the overall health of the ecosystem in addition to the health of their local instance. Jumping straight to defederating other major instances imposes massive costs for folks outside Beehaw, as described in my comment further down this thread.
There is an aphorism often deployed against free-speech absolutists, and I think paraphrasing it is applicable here… They have the right to use defederation carelessly and to the detriment of the rest of the fediverse if they choose to, but they don’t have the right to be free of the consequences of doing so. If the rest of the fediverse abandons Beehaw communities as risky and poorly moderated (and cutting off more than 30% of the active fediverse without cause IS poor moderation), that’s a reasonable consequence. If admins of other instances decide they don’t want to deal with this nonsense and band together to permanently defederate Beehaw from the majority of the lemmyverse, that’s also a reasonable consequence. No one else owes them a megaphone either, though so far other admins have shown more care for the health of the lemmyverse than the Beehaw admins have and have left the door open for them to rejoin the lemmyverse on normal terms, in spite of the high cost in confusion and user-unfriendlyness to everyone outside of Beehaw in the interim.
Another way to look at it is that they suffered a DOS attack (in the form of more trolling than they could handle with their current staff), so they blocked the source. It sucks that some of it was coming from our instance.
Not everyone has the same level of resources available to deal with the same problems.
How are the offloading moderation to others? Closing signups to avoid spam etc seems pretty useful
They didn’t close signups. They, as a top-five instance, defederated with two other top-5 instances, which will now lead to massive ongoing confusion related to asymmetrical federation. Did you read the second link from my comment?
The defederation will:
- Increase the workload of admins on other major instances, who now have to moderate these high emotion threads and figure out how to respond to the defederation at a time when they are equally overloaded.
- Increase the workload of volunteers who answer new user questions, as there will now be an ongoing flood of confusion around asymmetrical federation.
- Sunder established communities that people outside Beehaw have invested in, many of which will now once again struggle to find the “critical mass” re-establish themselves.
- Reduce confidence in the lemmyverse in general, as one of the formative experiences of new users will be this confusing mess of trying to re-establish their subs after having just gotten settled.
The external costs of flip-flopping the federation status between major instances is huge, and will be primarily born outside of Beehaw. If Beehaw admins want to have a very strict moderation policy, that’s entirely their option. If the costs of those moderation policies spiral out of control, that’s also entirely their problem. If they try to solve that problem by swinging a giant banhammer around at 30 thousand lemmings representing more than 30% of the active lemmyverse… that’s using your power as a major instance admin to make your own life easier and the lives of everyone else in the lemmyverse worse.
This sounds incredibly dumb. The nice thing about the feddyverse is that you can receive content from other servers and comment on it imho. Very disappointing.
Wel, they explain that in this case, it wasn’t all that nice to receive content from other servers, because it was a lot of work to moderate posts of users from two instances with no sign up requirements. They also said they couldnt wait on moderation tools being developed. They’ll refederate once the storm dies down I strongly believe.
To describe this as defederating from “two instances” really undersells the impact. Those two instances represent 40% of the active userbase of the top ten instances in the lemmyverse in the last month, or well more than 30% of the entire active lemmyverse. When you add beehaw’s active user count into the mix, over 50% of the lemmyverse has been cut off from each other. This is an absolutely massive disruption to the federated network that will impact everyone for months to come… and has already created far far more moderation and support work than it has saved. See https://the-federation.info/platform/73 for user stats.
The Beehaw admins decided they would rather rule their smaller, isolated fiefdom with absolute power than allow external users to take part in their communities.
Unfortunately they made this decision, with no forewarning or discussion with their users, after having established some of the larger communities there (Gaming and Technology especially). So now it splits the lemmyverse at a critical moment of growth.
Imagine the average Redditor’s experience now:
- Checks out the Lemmyverse and sees interesting communities on Beehaw - Gaming and Technology
- Tries to register for Beehaw but receives no response from their manually reviewed registration process (with 4-5 admins lol)
- Registers for lemmy.world as it is a large, popular and well-run instance
- Now finds they can’t view or comment on Beehaw content, and is confused over which users can even see their posts and replies
- Goes back to Reddit
Beehaw has acted very irresponsibly over this, it’s practically an act of sabotage - The Federation Betrayed.
perfectly clear, thanks!
They defederated specifically with my instance (sh.itjust.works), and lemmy.world. What that means is that we can’t access content on Beehaw, they can’t access content on our instances.
If they see this post, my comment will be invisible to them. I can see their comments though, we haven’t defederated with them.
They did this, as far as I understand it, out of a concern about our open user signups, where users don’t need to be approved, they just need to not get banned. I have heard third-hand that there were some instances of hate-speech from users on our instances who quickly got banned (our instances don’t allow that either, but it isn’t pre-emptive), but they don’t want the overhead and extra work for moderators.
I don’t know the why, but the word “defederate” refers to an instance ceasing communication with other instances. That means any posting, commenting, or messaging, no longer works across the connection between that instance and others.
Basically, to everyone on beehaw, the rest of us have gone silent, to us, beehaw has gone silent.
… to us, beehav has gone silent.
Beehaw hasn’t gone silent for us, see https://lemmy.world/post/149743 for details. Other instances haven’t (yet) defederated Beehaw, so things behave asymmetrically.
Indeed.
They defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
Announcement post from beehaw admins here: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Yes but defederation is a one way thing. Not two way.
Beehaw defederating Lemmy.world doesn’t mean much for Lemmy.world because they haven’t defederated beehaw. Users on Lemmy.world can still see posts and comments from beehaw, but users on beehaw cannot see posts and comments from Lemmy.world.
The only issue for users on Lemmy.world is that if we comment on a post on beehaw, none of the users on beehaw can see it. Users from other instances can though.
