You may not have given them location data to that app in particular but your devise probably has an advertising id which has tied you to a location for other services.
That is the direct reason, yes, but the larger problem is that without effective moderation they are unable to curate the type of community they want. “Safe space” is a loaded term, but if you actually read Beehaw’s documents (particularly the ‘spirit of the rules’ one) it is quite clear that they are attempting to create an online community where people feel safe and can be themselves free from attack and/or ridicule. The de-federation is because they are unable to deliver on this “safe space” promise at the moment. In my opinion that’s absolutely fine and they should be praised for taking quick and decisive action to protect their community. It doesn’t need to be some controversial thing that people attempt PR spin over. Just call it what it is. If people have a problem with it, unlucky.
it's just because the mod tools aren't where they need to be yet and beehaw does a lot of work to protect minorities. the mods weren't really happy with having to defederate and they plan on refederating once the tools are better or we get settled in
I mean—maybe? That wouldn’t necessarily be malicious, but I think it’s fair and appropriate to apply a healthy amount of skepticism and suspicion to their purported goals and reasoning. Beehaw is a self-proclaimed “safe space”, and unfortunately that term has become a kind of dog whistle for militant identity politics.
Particularly in instances, like this one, when thinly veiled patronizing is wielded to preemptively paint a large group of strangers with a very broad brush in the purported aim of protecting marginalized persons from “malicious” outsiders, my cynicism radar tends to beep very loudly. It may well in fact be true that the current suite of mod tools makes beehaw’s managers powerless against an overwhelming tide of new traffic, but that wouldn’t automatically rule out competitive motives.
Federated or not, Lemmy represents an opportunity for wealth for whoever is best positioned if it ends up being a successor to Reddit, and what we’re going to see is a round of jockeying and vying for position in the coming (ongoing) chaos. I’ll admit that like many of us I’m very new to this platform, but the fact that defederation is possible at all leads me to believe that less scrupulous individuals in positions of ownership could with only small effort leverage it to enlarge their influence at the expense of competing servers.
Maybe I’m dead wrong on a technical level; maybe I’m full of shit–I’ll admit I basically don’t know what I’m talking about except in the broadest possible terms, so somebody please correct me if I’m wrong–but I wonder if this isn’t so much about creating an echo chamber as incentivizing people who identify with beehaw’s stated ideology to come under its umbrella (with supposed protections for hate speech), and defederation is just a way to force people to make the same kind of unhappy, unnecessary choices many of us just made with Reddit.
EDIT: I really can’t thank y’all enough for this. It feels like I’m right back on Reddit. From the accusations that I must be a secret conservative because I dared to question motives to the folks unable to actually engage in discourse without manufactured disdain, it’s like nothing has changed at all.
Maybe beehaw doesn’t have an axe to grind, but somebody sure does.
Okay. To be clear, I wouldn't automatically assume anybody who wants to be free from hate speech has bad intentions, but I also think it's fair to be critical of any effort to stifle dissenting opinion--even uncomfortable opinion--with the justification that the censorship is to a third party's benefit, and it's immaterial whether the third party is children, a historically disadvantaged group, or any other class. That is, I don't say all this to accuse beehaw of ulterior motives--but I also wouldn't put it past anybody, and skepticism is appropriate (like always). More and more frequently, "safe space" really just means: We want an echo chamber, but it's okay because we know best. That's a red flag.
When it comes to racism, sexism, and transphobia, the “dissenting opinions” are things like “you do not exist” and “you are sub human” and “you do not deserve rights.”
You’re fooling yourself if you think that not tolerating hate == stifling dissenting opinion. How should one stand up for human rights? Moderately? Or militantly?
Sounds like you’ve bought the old conservative line of bullshit on all this. “Oh they don’t permit sexism? We should be highly skeptical of this!! What about freedom of speech??”
The problem with defederation is the same problem with the position you're taking, that it conflates all opinion with whatever worst thing you can imagine, enabling you to insist that because *some *people are awful, everyone who doesn't agree with the proposition is (or in beehaw's case, everyone who doesn't join their walled garden). This isn't a case of "they don't permit sexism." They didn't permit sexism when they were still federated. Defederation is an extra step--they want you to use their server or otherwise not participate in their communities at all, and the explanation for why is that the people on lemmy.world are sexist. Maybe they're authentically overwhelmed, and it's certainly their prerogative, but one would be wise to examine their stated basis more critically, because heavy handed owners of platform infrastructure is why Lemmy is in this position in the first place.
Now you’re just not reading. Look at this thread. It’s been clearly shown and stated publicly that they are simply overwhelmed by the explosive growth coming at them from instances like lemmy.world that have added millions of members overnight. They have a more intentionally managed community with high standards and hands on moderators and they cannot right now handle the sudden explosive volume. They are trying to scale up and their desire and intention is to refederate. Meanwhile you have spun up all kinds of tales in your head about how they want to control speech or ban it because of their militant identity politics. You’re making all of that up, when the actual explanations are right there in public for you to read. Try gathering more information and forming fewer judgments based on your internal biases.
My god, this post was unnecessarily long. I think they just don’t weirdos posting dick pics and bombarding it with questionable content. Not everything is a culture war.
Oh, gardens can have diversity without being an echo chamber. As they said they don’t see another way to stop those people who like to shit in carefully created gardens.
Beehaw.org is a highly maintained instance with careful moderation and rules for their instance and communities.
The explosion of new users this month has overwhelmed their moderation team with having to keep up with now moderating new huge user bases from large instances like sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world. These instances in particular it seems had lots of bad actors causing issues in their communities.
There are plans for them to re-federate at some point with the advent of new modding tools and updates to Lemmy
But it does put a damper on the growth of every instance. The second people hear one of the biggest instances has cut off from the other biggest instances, they go "this fediverse thing is just too complicated!" and go to one of the centralized replacements.
The issue is the the growth could literally kill the underlying servers. Imagine running an instance on a raspberry pi and all the sudden see a hundred thousand users start hitting your server.
If that was Beehaw's issue, I'd be more sympathetic, but it isn't. They are using it as an incredibly crude moderation tool, not because of some technical limitation.
That’s the point! That’s the whole point! There are no other tools built yet It IS an incredibly crude moderation tool, because the alternatives are being worked on as we speak
They have defederated as a moderation step, not as a technical step. Large instances with open registrations were the source of several trolls that would spew hate, get banned and then simply re-register.
There is no moderation tool to deal with that aside from limiting sign-ups, which the instances in question were unwilling to do (which I get, because manual approval creates a huge workload).
In order to keep their community as safe as possible, Beehaw defederated, because they prioritise community safety over community reach.
"The growth" of the fediverse in general or of any platform in it is not responsibility of one server. The only thing Beehaw admins are responsible for is Beehaw.
If you want Lemmy to grow create your own communities and threads, participate in other people's communities and posts, etc.
there are more than 1000 Lemmy servers, many of whom are open to community creation (something that Beehaw never has been)
Go create content on Lemmy if you want it to grow.
BTW, "growth" is not necessarily a good thing on the fediverse. Growing too much can be the death of a server.
I don’t mean to the growth of the fediverse is their responsibility, but I feel it is a problem that will affect them along with everyone else. Trolls are an existential threat to a safe space community, but lack of users is too.
You said yourself that Beehaw is one of the largest communities. They aren’t struggling for users, despite stricter rules and de-federation. If you actually read the announcement threads about the de-federation, Beehaw users love it and are very supportive of the decision. The outrage seems to be entirely generated by people who aren’t members of that community, so who cares? If you’re that unhappy make your own community (or cry) but don’t pretend it’s the responsibility of Beehaw to pander to non-members.
And to the overall growth concerns, again - who cares? Lemmy doesn’t have to be a 1:1 reddit replacement. I’d say many of us actually consider it’s relatively low user count as a positive.
You said yourself that Beehaw is one of the largest communities. They aren’t struggling for users, despite stricter rules and de-federation.
The pond is very small; prior to last month it was a puddle. That bar isn’t exactly high. Beehaw definitely aren’t seeing the growth that .world is today (there’s been a 40% increase in users here today alone), and I don’t doubt a large portion of that is that fewer people are directing users their way due to the defederation.
Beehaw users love it and are very supportive of the decision. The outrage seems to be entirely generated by people who aren’t members of that community
I’m not sure we are reading the same Beehaw defederation post. The top comments on the post that got linked earlier in this thread are all native Beehaw accounts either expressing frustration or saying they will leave for other instances. Judging by the replies they aren’t in the majority, but it is still a large portion of them.
EDIT: my understanding of the Lemmy UI was flawed and I was wrong. The above commenter is correct here.
but don’t pretend it’s the responsibility of Beehaw to pander to non-members.
I’m not pretending its their responsibility. Its not. They don’t owe anyone anything. I can still call them out for what I perceive as shooting themselves in the foot. Explain their motivations all you want, I understand what the Beehaw admins are trying to say, but I disagree with them and personally think this will have a longer-term negative effect on their platform than the trolls will.
The top comments on the post that got linked earlier in this thread are all native Beehaw accounts
No they’re not. There is literally only one top level Beehaw comment in that thread and it’s only mildly critical (along the lines of “I understand but this isn’t the community for me”). Every other top level comment is from an external user, particularly the negative ones.
I apologize, you are correct; I assumed every account displayed as “[name]@[instance]” if it wasn’t native to that instance, and that every account that was just “[name]” was a native one, but it seems like some (mainly kbin.social?) accounts don’t do that.
I don’t know why that’s the case. For whatever reason that thread had a lot of kbin people in it, but earlier threads in relation to de-federation had more Beehaw natives and they were generally very supportive of the decision.
Regarding Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, this post goes into detail on the why and the philosophy behind that decision. Additionally, there is an update specific to sh.itjust.works here.
For now, let’s talk about what federation is and what defederation means for members of Beehaw or the above two communities interacting with each other, as well as the broader fediverse.
Federation is not something new on the internet. Most users use federated services every day (for instance, the url used to access instances uses a federated service known as DNS, and email is another system that functions through federation.) Just like those services, you elect to use a service provider that allows you to communicate with the rest of the world. That service provider is your window to work with others.
When you federate, you mutually agree to share your content. This means that posting something to a site can be seen by another and all comments are shared. Even users from other sites can post to your site.
Now when you defederate, this results in content to be no longer shared. It didn’t reverse any previous sharing or posts, it just stops the information from flowing with the selected instance. This only impacts the site’s that are called out.
What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.
A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)
A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)
Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.
On that last point, another consideration at the individual level is - what do you want out of Lemmy? Do you want to find and connect with like-minded people, share information, and connect at a social and community level? Do you want to casually browse content and not really interact with anyone? These questions and the questions that they lead to are critical. There is no direct benefit to being on the biggest instance. In fact, as we all deal with this mass influx, figure out what that means for our own instances and interactions with others, I would argue that a smaller instance is actually much better suited for those who just want to casually browse everything.
Lastly, and tangential, another concern I have seen related to this conversation is people feeling afraid of being locked out of the content and conversation from the “main” communities around big topics starting to form across the Lemmiverse (think memes, gaming, tech, politics, news, etc.) Over time, certain communities will certainly become a default for some people just given the community size (there will always be a biggest or most active - it’s just a numbers game.) This, again though, all comes down to personal preference and what each individual is looking to get from their Lemmy experience. While there may, eventually, be a “main” sub for <topic xyz> (again, by the numbers), there will also always be quite a few other options for targeted discussions on <topic xyz>, within different communities, on different instances, each with their own culture and vibe. This can certainly feel overwhelming and daunting (and at the moment, honestly it is.) Reddit and other non-federated platforms provided the illusion of choice, but this is what actual choice looks and feels like.
I'm already starting to get pretty tired of people in the fediverse saying shit like this:
What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that’s chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened.
A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do)
A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.)
Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse.
Having "multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse, if you want it" is the most nightmare user experience sentence I can possibly imagine.
A user does not want multiple avenues to maintain access to the unfiltered fediverse with it being unclear when their comments will be shadow banned and not. They want to be able to see a post and go in and comment on it.
Federation is not a feature, it's an implementation detail.
User experience is not the primary motivator for the development of the Fediverse. The features you dislike are the core features of the Fediverse and are the main reasons it exists.
Federation is a feature. If you want to spin up a network of Lemmy instances between universities and ONLY federate with other universities, you could!
Want to spin up a private instance for you and your friends and not federate with anyone? You can do that too!
To me one of the big selling points of federated services is you don't have to be part of the same giant bucket as every other shithead. If you want, you can pick and choose who you federate with.
Beehaw never tried to promote itself as a default instance. It was a toy hobby project started by four friends that through a fluke of where it was listed, had an enormous, unexpected growth spurt.
It's still those four people's server though, and it's totally their prerogative in how they run it. We aren't entitled to it's content, and users don't have to stick around if they don't like the way it's being run.
The fedeverse gives you choice. That means there will be some servers whose choices you don't agree with.
I'm sorry, but no. The point of the fediverse is not to spin up niche communities, since we already have forums. You want to be part of a niche small forum, go spin up your own bb instance and run a niche small forum.
The point of the fediverse is to recreate the global social networks that are twitter / Reddit / etc, but to do so using open source servers that are decentralized and anyone can host.
Again, federation is not a user facing feature, it's an architecture / implementation detail. Fediverse enthusiasts are like train enthusiasts who love every detail of how they're built and their history and how much philosophically better they are than cars, but none of that matters and train networks will fail if they don't provide quick and convenient transportation to their users.
If that were true, then the software wouldn't have the ability to defederate built directly into it in the admin panel. You could write software in a way where defederating from a specific instance is hard to do.
IMO the point of any open source software is the noone really has ownership over what "the point" of it is. Anyone can take that software and use it how they see fit.
If that were true, then the software wouldn't have the ability to defederate built directly into it in the admin panel.
A setting in an admin panel is not a user facing feature.
IMO the point of any open source software is the noone really has ownership over what "the point" of it is. Anyone can take that software and use it how they see fit.
In broad strokes yes, but in more specific and relevant strokes, the point of social networking software is for users to use it to engage with each other, not concern themselves with how it's servers are administrated.
I develop software for a living. If someone is using my software in any capacity, they are a user from my point of view, even if they have admin privileges.
Oh wow congrats, like half the world writes software, I also write software for a living, but I don't confuse the admins running my software and using my admin portals with the primary users of my software who will determine whether or not it will be popular or a success.
Back up and examine the context of the conversation and then stop with this pointless semantic distinction. In the context of whether or not your social network software will be successful, an admin setting that allows one instance to connect to other is not a user facing feature.
People do not open Reddit to examine how the Reddit admins configured their kubernetes clusters, so stop with this dumb bullshit pretending like users care about federation. They want somewhere to come have a discussion with everyone else interested in the same thing. That's it.
First off, cool your jets; you're being kinda rude for no reason here. Just because we disagree doesn't mean either of us is an idiot.
My point is just that you still develop features specifically for your admin-privileged users right? That's the only thing I'm trying to say by calling admins users, that they still belong to the bucket of people you consider when adding features to your software, even if they are only admin-facing features. You're right that it's just a semantic difference, so let me rephrase using your terminology then;
Admins of the software may want to create and promote their own private sites using the lemmy software that federate with only a subset of other lemmy instances. For instance, a network of 'academic' lemmy instances run by universities -- with high moderation requirements -- that do not federate with the 'popular' fedeverse.
In that sense federation is a feature, to admins.
I'm also not 100% sold on it not mattering to end-users. Like I'm a user by your metric, and I like that Kbin can de-federate from extremist instances or instances run by corporations like Meta, and will likely move homes if it doesn't and I start seeing too much content from those instances. It's a feature I specifically appreciate about this platform.
The most trolls came from those two instances since they have no criteria to joining and they have so many users, and beehaw prides itself on being a nice, safe space. Lemmy currently doesn’t have the moderating tools to empower them to take care of all the new, toxic redditors, but they said they’re willing to federate with them when it does, which I’m sure it will eventually.
Yeah man beehaw is supposed to be like a safe space for minorities and stuff. It’s been around for a while and is strictly moderated. Once all this Reddit shit calms down and there are better moderation tools on the lemmy side they’ll rejoin - it’s just too much to deal with without the right tools right now Ave they are still working on making the tools.
This Reddit shit sped up a lot of stuff that was already in the works.
Ah ok, thanks for that. That's a shame though, so far what I've seen of Lemmy has been so much less toxic than Reddit, you'd hope it wasn't necessary for them to defederate. However if they feel it is necessary, then fair enough I guess.
They're curating a particular community to try to avoid trolls and shitposters and lemmy.world was growing so fast that they didn't have the mods or tools to keep everything in line to their satisfaction on their own instance. Once they're happy with their mod abilities they'll probably refederate.
Since Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works had fully opened sign ups with no vetting during the big migration, Beehaw was getting a lot of trolls and spammers coming from those instances. Since Lemmy is kind of new there weren't enough moderation tools for them to fully deal with that with their team so they defederated until those tools exist.
Lemmy got a large influx of new people (you probably noticed that), and those new people weren't reading their gidelines (that are more strict than usual) before posting there.
If you decide to make an account there, make sure to read their guidelines first.
It's nominally a personnel/time issue. It's easier to defederate with rapidly growing instances than try and keep tabs on the flood of posts which are coming in from them. Lemmy.World, at least for a time, was still federated with some shitstances, also out of manpower limitations, and beehaw decided to just take their ball and leave. It's the way federation works and is entirely up to them, just as reddit raising api costs and kicking moderators is within their rights. Your server, your rules. We can argue whether it's the best way to manage and build a small platform, but its the state of things at the moment.
disc: I'm a member of lemmy.world, as well as a smaller lemmy instance and kbin, both of which are still federated with beehaw.
They basically shadowbanned us because they are lazy... jokes aside, they don't have the manpower to moderate all the bots away. At least that's their reasoning.
Absolutely. Ideally this would also be implemented on a backend level. An easy way to create multi sublemmies and share and Link to them would make it possible for massive communities to form on and migrate to Lemmy in a sustainable way.
Federation should ideally work not only at a server level, but a community level.
If there’s three different /c/aww communities across different servers, their respective mods should be able to join into a meta-community.
There is the potential for a less moderated child community to end up polluting the meta community, so membership should probably be able to be revoked by majority mod vote.
But aggregating a meta-community across each sub community could allow for a much more seamless growth between servers and avoid the duplication that’s inevitable by putting the onus on the client-side.
It’s occurred to me that if my wife ever cheated on me, maybe instead of getting upset I could just make friends with her boyfriend. We’d already have it in common that we like having sex with my wife so maybe we’d have other stuff in common, too.
A man who is unable to set very fundamental boundaries in a relationship is not a real man. If you enter a relationship with the intention of having a monogamous marriage, then get cucked, then accept it, it means you have no spine. Any “boundaries” that you loosely claim to have, really don’t exist. How are you supposed to be a father? Children need a man as a father, not a spineless cuck.
I can respect a man more who just has casual sex/one-night-stands. Because there is a possibility that he can set boundaries once he actually enters a relationship, whereas with you, it’s a certainty that you cannot.
Oh I mean IRL I would probably react harshly to my wife breaking that boundary, but the worst case scenario is that she does it with someone who’s got terrible vibes and just cannot hang.
I’ve not been well for a couple days, so husband has offered to make butternut squash risotto which I am super excited for! Seems like a lot of effort while the weather is still quite warm, so I’ll make sure he’s well rewarded once I’m feeling better.
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