Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
It’s getting pretty tiring to see people feeling entitled to have access to any and all communities of the Fediverse, if the people paying for the running cost of the Beehaw instance wants to defederate (for whatever reason, “good” or “bad”), that’s their prerogative.
If you really want access to their content, apply to join, otherwise sign up to any of the dozens of lemmy instances federated to the rest of the fediverse.
One of the great things about the Fediverse in general is choice, user and instance admin can choose how they want to interact, and are not beholden to a company or group which can take any arbitrary decisions they want.
TLDR : Instance admin are entitled to how they want to run it, you’re not.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
I’m entitled to leave to another instance. One of the main things to look at when choosing an instance is who they are federated/defederated with. I would never join BeeHaw Lemmy.world, or Sh.itjust.works because of their feud. I’d rather join a third party instance and have access to all the content on all three.
It’s not a feud, lol. Admins from all of them say they talked it out and they plan to re-federate in the future. Beehaw wants to be a heavily moderated instance, and lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works were growing faster than Beehaw’s moderation ability.
If you really want access to their content, apply to join, otherwise sign up to any of the dozens of lemmy instances federated to the rest of the fediverse.
I think it was pretty clear, yeah
Until the instance you choose to set up on ends up in a feud with any, or all of those instances.
The whole fediverse experiment is going to end up with a number of small, highly segregated communities, and even more political polarization. I guess if you want to live in an echo chamber, a federated environment is the best way to go about it.
I don’t think so, Lemmy is just going through growing pains. Those instances are already talking about refederating.
I signed up through sh.itjust.works - was this a bad idea? Only opened my account 2 days ago so learning the ropes.
Nothing is stopping you to register on multiple and see how each one feels, then stick to the one you like most. Instances with application process tend to have a bit more curated user bases and that’s reflected in conversations where they participate. You could try lemmy.world, Beehaw, lemmy.ml, or any other instance.
Don’t worry about it, sh.itjust.works is a popular instance and Beehaw just want to do their own thing. Unless there’s a specific community hosted on Beehaw that you really want to be a part of you probably won’t notice, as most popular subjects have communities on other servers.
Shitjustworks was defederated from Beehaw, if you absolutely want to be able to post on Beehaw, you’ll have to create an account there, otherwise you should have access to every other instances federated to shitjustworks
I’m criticizing people criticizing people for criticizing people who criticize people who criticize…
You’re just as tiring as the people you’re criticizing.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Ah, in less than 48 hours we’ve come full circle.
What beautiful dawns await us.
Wow so much misinformed hostility against Beehaw here. The mod tools for Lemmy are currently limited and they just want to protect their community from trolls and spam. There’s no conspiracy here to break federation.
Beehaw is some pseudo moral purity echo chamber. They consider anyone with a contrary opinion a troll. People create these “safe spaces” under the guise of protecting minority groups, but fuck… I’m a minority, and I knew immediately I wasn’t going to be welcome there.
People are free to judge it as they please.
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Why aren’t other instances having this problem? Like if trolls and spam are such an issue, why do I only see relevant on topic comments in other instances?
T he issue isn’t trolls, it’s political dissent. And if you care about the truth, if you care about having the ability to talk about and express your ideas freely to other people, to have uncomfortable discussions with people you disagree with, to be exposed to new ideas, and fuck… to possibly even change your mind, you shouldn’t support beehaw.
If you genuinely want that type of environment, go for it, but that place should be called out for what it is.
This type of political authoritianism is why I left Reddit. It kills discussion, and I’m here for critical discussion.
Why would you not be welcome? Is it for your political opinions? Even if it were, I don’t think they would personally shun you unless it entails attacking minorities.
That aside, and having said that of course it is everyone’s perrogative to judge this behavior, I personally feel it is an exaggeration. Not every instance is about free speech nor should they be, at the end of the day the fediverse is about creating communities, one is able and should shape them into what their vision of that is. This is not authoritarianism, in this case they said it is due to their inability to moderate.
Even if it weren’t for that, it is good that communities don’t federate with every instance, aa I said, not everyone is about free speech and changing opinions some are here to have a good time and for that adequate protection is necessary.
I myself prefer deciding myself when to block other instances, so I joined one that let’s users decide. But if other instances decided to block us I would understand and either move on or join another instance to interact with them without thinking much about it (having multiple accounts is kind of easy on the apps,)
I think I’m kind of used from servers blocking one another from my time on mastodon and I’ve seen the necessity of the practice, for example an anime focused group blocking bot instances, brigading, alt right groups, etc.
This is not authoritarianism, in this case they said it is due to their inability to moderate.
Rationally I think this is straight bullshit. Their inability to moderate is because of the desire to control the political direction of topics. If people want an echo chamber, fine, but I’m calling it out.
If people want an echo chamber, fine, but I’m calling it out.
Yes, that was always allowed. Beehaw is extremely up front about the kinds of voices and perspectives welcome on it. It never claimed to be a bastion of free speech. Complaining about that is like saying you don’t like a burger restaurant because they don’t serve sushi.
Dude this is a discussion based website, and you’re complaining about me complaining? Pot meet kettle.
you’re complaining about me complaining?
I think it was Alexander Pope who once said that bad criticism does more harm than bad writing. Same principle applies here. Your criticism is bad. You don’t like getting “called out on it,” then make a better one.
Dude I’m voicing my opinion. You apparently don’t even disagree you just dislike like I’m expressing it? What’s your deal?
Fine, I just don’t get the echo chamber feeling but admittedly I only use beehive for gaming/anime/escapism hobby related communities so I haven’t seen it being all about conteolling politics, at least not directly.
At the end of the day I barely get what you mean by controlling politics, since it is not apparent on the communities I visit. Also keep in mind, I’m not american so if this is about the culture war over there or a republicans vs democrats thing I probably won’t notice it since it hasn’t affected any discussion I’ve had.
But I would need concrete examples for me to see it as authoritarian because in a vacuum as I explained I can see communities pulling this kind of conduct without it being about controlling the discourse per se but more about helping communities.
Edit: forgot to say, but if it was over politics I don’t think that would necessitate a ban lemmy.world (or alternative ly that would mean complete defederation) since it has no clear political affiliation, I see it just it being massive and difficult to moderate otherwise they would have targeted many other toxic instances way before touching .world.
So if you take Reveddit, and go look at Reddit communities you’ll see massive political disparity in how comments are moderated. Go look at beehaw modlogs and you’ll see the same thing.
If you personally aren’t able to see the bias in moderating, sorry I don’t know how to teach that.
Beehaw lost me when admins allowed a female user to repeatedly insult men, say 95% of them are awful, that men shouldn’t even exist etc they claim they’re a “safe, welcoming space” but it’s actually hypocritical.
They defederated from this and other instances and yet I’ve never seen any comments reaching that level of hostility here. The only way to interpret that is that they actually are okay with insults and bigotry as long as it suits their whims. If a man had made the same remarks it’d be written off as the rantings of an incel and they’d likely be banned.
I should be their target audience as someone who has voted left my entire life and it’s too much and too controlled for me. Either they’re for all equality and inclusiveness or they’re not. Pick one.
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Eh, there were a few posts about this on lemmy.world when it happened. People went through beehaw’s modlog and could only find a handful of actions taken against both communities.
Seems they just want to have their own little bubble.
Safe spaces are pretty much that. I would actually like to join beehaw if I ever need to switch to an instance for my own sanity. I left reddit but it’s followed us here so I think a more curated experience would be nice.
That is unless they’re nazis, fascists, authoritarian or any other kind of violent extremist faction. I’m sick of having no faith in humanity because of all these backwards ideologies being “expressed”. To quote Costanza, these pretzels are making me thirsty.
I also don’t like how beehaw has downvotes disabled. I get not wanting there to be brigading, or negativity, but being able to downvote a troll, or a post that is blatantly providing misinformation (purposefully or not), is invaluable.
I think there’s value in it. The underlying idea is that if someone is wrong, even if blatantly so, you have to take the effort to explain why. On reddit, the downvote button was just as often used as a community cudgel against dissenting opinion, even when the opinion was 1) genuinely harmless but unpopular, 2) well reasoned and supported by evidence but something that went against the mob mentality, or 3) just something that people didn’t understand and their gut reaction to it was negative.
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Yep, I applied to join when I was fresh and it asks about how active applicants are. I was honest and said I wasn’t the most active person but that I did participate in the subs that I used the most. Was trying to be honest and didn’t see any red flags with that. They still denied me, so fuck beehaw
True, but unsubbed from them when it happened because I don’t want to see communities I can’t interact with.
Why add to the problem and have frustration with wanting to discuss something you are blocked from?
They have every right to protect themselves against spam. But that said, ever since they defederated, their activity and user numbers are down.
Agree that they have every right to handle their instance however they want. I also have the right to not interact with them while they are blocking the instance I call home.
Good. Serves 'em right.
It’s important to note that the admins of beehaw are not happy about this solution, either. And they hope to refederate once they have better tools and enough mods / admins to deal with it.
They point wasn’t to shadowban, that was a side effect. The point was to protect their member–who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance–from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that. Nobody’s happy with the situation, but it’s the best they could do under the circumstances with the resources they have.
I also don’t think it’s wrong for instances to have their own strong rules and preferences. This is one of the GOOD things about the Fediverse. The software features and how people use lemmy will catch up eventually.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on…that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it’s not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like “true-” whatever.
That’s true for just the duplication problem, but the defederation / shadow banning issue is not one that reddit has and is pretty confusing and poor user experience for new users coming in.
This isn’t reddit 2.0. It’s a different platform with different mechanics that hasn’t had over a decade to mature.
Change is hard. People need to learn to adapt.
Right, but even non-reddit users would be confused by it. When everyone advertises lemmy as seamlessly integrating with all the different instances, it doesn’t matter what instance your account is on, this definitely is not that.
The idea behind federation is, that individuals host their own instance and connect (federate) with others individual’s instances.
But that’s not easy for less tech savvy people.
Expectation management… people need to stop pitching this on Reddit as the new Reddit then.
But… It is essentially identical in design to Reddit apart from the decentralised concept.
Which is a massive change that tbh I’m still not sold on.
Federation seems to cause more problems than it solves and it’s created so many fractured communities that it’s impossible to get involved in niche ones anymore.
It’s definitely more messy. I suppose the reason i left Reddit was that the corporate structure ended up compromising their ability to live up to the responsibility of running a community space. As running the community became increasingly subordinate to revenue the decisions of the corporate body became increasingly out of whack with the best interests of the community. The federated concept feels like a possible solution to that problem.
Well, new Reddit might easily mean better but also diffderent Reddit. Also, I am not sure whether people actually call it a new Reddit. Most of the time I heard the destription was a Reddit alternative which by definition doesn’t imply that it’s identical or even better in all ways.
But… It is essentially identical in design to Reddit apart from the decentralised concept.
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I foresee a lot of issues with defederation and the proposed mod tools in the future, as well. They can refederate but it’s not a good look for the platform when the federation can be fractured so easily. We have not seen the last of this issue.
I also question what it’s going to look like when these moderation tools are implemented. Lemmy has more avenues for moderation/admin abuse than Reddit, and less recourse for users. There are a lot of concerns here that just seem to be swept under the rug under the pretence that “you can always go to another instance”.
Ultimately it’s not an issue with the function of the fediverse, but with the moderation philosophy of the people running these instances. Particularly when it comes to the viability of voting. That’s a huge opportunity for suppression that I don’t trust certain admins not to abuse.
How does Lemmy have more avenues for admin abuse than Reddit? On either platform, the admins can technically do whatever they want. (Including editing users posts, spez). Lemmy makes it easier to just go somewhere else. At the end of the day that is all you can do.
The` point was to protect their member–who specifically wanted a certain type of safe friendly instance–from hostile weirdos sending dick pics and stuff like that``
They are making community policy around a single person?
I am not following.
With that being said, they can do as they please and other can do what they want. That’s the beautity of the protocol.
However, people shoudnt be surpised when others take the ball and play else where.
Looking forward to seeing how this works out.
That was just a typo. Beehaw has advertised itself as being a largely positive, safe online space. People who sign up for it would generally be considered to want that same ethos.
It’s not ideal at the moment but until the moderation tools improve it’s the best way forward if they want to stick to their ethos. I enjoy Beehaw and the admin do seem like they want to refererate when it’s possible to.
I’m on both Beehaw and Lemmy.world so I between the two I can interact with everything I would want to see.
I think they just dropped the s off members.
I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be “members” and missing the s is a typo.
@[email protected] , you should add a link to the announcement which explains why Beehaw defederated since this looks to be the top question many are asking.
tldr; too hard to mod. That’s pretty dumb, but the cool thing with the fedi is you can just not care and swap instances.
Those are good points. Time to find a different instance. My account is not precious. Supporting a sustainable growth is.
The slowness of Lemmy.world to defederate from the fascists, and now this makes me feel I can find a better home. A home that is a better partner to the fediverse.
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Newbie here. Is there an easy way to identify a beehaw community? I’ve been hitting the subscribe button left and right to build up my profile feed and I’m just winging it here. thanx!
And this is why the fediverse will never work out - if I gamble wrong and set up shop on an instance that gets in a pissing match with other ones, I either have to make an account elsewhere (and then have to do it again later the next time two instances defederate each other) or live with only seeing some of my subscribed content.
Okay, guess I just won’t use it then if they defed from my primary instance. Glad they did this now and not later when they became bigger and more important.
If they’re that into making a safe space then fine. Hopefully some other people will also make more free spaces and both of them can exist and everyone can be happy.
I realize that is a highly optimistic outlook to put it mildly. I must remain hopeful to avoid losing my mind, if I haven’t already -.-
Is there a page where we can see which instances are ban-crazy and which ones actually federate and communicate?
this is completely reasonable, they own the instance and should be able to do whatever they want with it.
Nice. Its been just 2 days for me using lemmy and im already banned for no reason in an entire server that i do not use just because im in another server. I whana say reddit moment but im getting mixed info into their reasoning. Some say its because they cant mod that much people and just defederated temporarilly while they fix stuff and others say their a radical echochamber that doesnt tolerate any slight deviants. So i dont know what to believe. If any of ya m8s could enligthen me some more that’l be sweet. Thank you.
Most normal users won’t care about any of this because it’ll shake itself out quickly as has happened with Mastodon. But if you do care, join up with a smaller server that plays nice with everybody and enjoy the whole fediverse.
this, then :
Selfhosting
Also: multiple accounts.
Also: multiple accounts.
Last I checked, their reason for defederating is to avoid the high influx of new wildcard users from large instances without vetting processes.
As for the radical echo chamber part, I can’t say for sure because I didn’t actually interact with them but I recall the term they make you agree to apply for an account was somewhat vague, possibly allowing arbitrary bans to enforce an echo chamber.
They pretend to defend their users from ‘bad’ instances. Until users are happy at 1984 instance (beehaw is even worst) that’s okay, otherwise there are still options to register at some normal instance, which let users decide themselves what they should see or not.
It has nothing to do with defending their users and they never even fucking claimed that was what it was about. You are making shit up to be mad about, JFC.
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Im sorry m8, i dont whana be an ass but… i dont understeand what you are trying to say in this part:" Until users are happy at 1984 instance (beehaw is even worst) that’s okay," what did you mean?
Q
This is a bit of a bummer since I’m interested in a lot of the beehaw communities. Should users just make separate accounts to interact with beehaw communities?
If you don’t want to color with your opinion, use a different word than shadowban. They didn’t do this with malice as the connotations of that word would imply.
Can you help me understand exactly how this will affect me? I actually have accounts on both lemmy.world and beehaw.org (I signed up for both when I initially found Lemmy and was trying to figure the whole thing out).
If I’m on my lemmy.world account, will I no longer be able to browse beehaw communities? On the flip side, if I’m on my beehaw.org account, will I no longer be able to browse lemmy.world communities?
Am I understanding things correctly? If that’s the case, then is the only solution to flip back and forth between the two accounts depending on which server the community I’m wanting to browse is on?
If you get an account on an instant that isn’t involved in this mess like FMHY you can browse both without any issue.
This was my thinking.
Is there an easy way to check if anyone has defederated from your instance?
there should be an instances button at the bottom of the page that shows it.
I might have to go here. I’m already tired of defederation and its histrionic champions.
Basically. You can browse them with the opposite account but you can’t interact.
So it’s like getting banned from a subreddit, except you can’t even browse with the same account after being banned?
Yes browse. No post.
I disagree with this. A more nuanced take is that you should consider any beehaw communities read only unless refederation happens. The defederation was not out of ill will, it was about self preservation in a growing ecosystem and the reasons were clearly communicated and a path to refederation was left open. Read only posts are still valuable, and even though there is a more complex mechanism at play than true “read only” understanding that you can view is better than just blocking them in reverse. We are all friends here, and I think in the long run refederation will happen as this platform matures.
It would be nice if Lemmy let you know if you were browsing a thread from a defederated instance. Like a flair in the title or something, So you can read but you know your comment will only be seen by users on your instance.
I’m basically a read only user anyway so hah!
I’m starting to realize that maybe I should learn to lurk. If I lurked in reddit I would have had a better experience.
Lurking with occasional comments in areas that interest you is best, I find. Oh and ignoring anyone who comes off as a troll or clown
Ignoring anything so controversial that people are at each other’s throats also helps. Although a healthy bit of disagreement is always fine.
Yep I’m all for some healthy back and forth, but once people start frothing at the mouth, I’m out
Yeah I would agree with this. It’s good to know for anyone new coming in but should be taken in good faith unless and until a reason crops up to change that. Not seen anything like that so far.
Can we actually see the posts from people at Beehaw?
I was subbed to some communities from before defederation. I also have a accounts at a few instances for discovery.
Why?
At the time LW and SJW had few barriers to signing up, so they had a higher rate of spam coming in and the beehaw team said they couldn’t keep up with moderating it. No idea if this is still the case, but they remain federated.
SJW is a wild abbreviation
Oh no, are we calling shitjustworks SJW now??
I thought about that while typing it but I thought it was kinda funny so decided to leave it haha
We need to replace dumb acronyms with better ones, anyway.
Maybe SHJUWO or SHIJUWO
I wonder if that was intentional on the instance owner’s part?
Nah definitely not. I don’t know about the owner but there was definitely too much “debate” on whether to defederate from exploding heads for my liking, felt a little too “free speech-y” so I set up on lemmy.world instead
