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.

  • jwt55@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I doubt this instance is being used by enough people to get trolls using it. It’s just because of the registration policy, which is open as opposed to the rest of the instances.

    They just are too lazy to moderate it. Nothing to do with actual illegal content or imaginary trolls.

    • Echolot@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      It seems to me like they don’t want to give up any control by adding mods (currently it’s only the admins) and choose the easy way out by reducing the amount they have to moderate…

      • spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        I think this is actually totally reasonable on their part. It does, however, mean that we need to start rebuilding some of the biggest communities elsewhere.

          • AyyLMAO@exploding-heads.com
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            1 year ago

            I’m pretty sure that means that if a Beehaw user is blocked from Lemmy.world, they can still comment on posts federated from Lemmy.world to Beehaw. In the Beehaw duplicate community. But when content from the specific user is sent back to Lemmy.world, the instance refuse to accept the comment either due to the individual being banned from the controlling community on Lemmy.world or from the instance as a whole.

            At least that’s how it seemed to work in late 2022 when I administered my own instance and people were intensely ban and block happy on the instance level.

            But isn’t it easy to test? I’ll make a community on my home instance and you subscribe to it so it’s federated to Lemmy.world and then you simply remove the content from Lemmy.world, yes?

    • this@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Yea if they want to defederate will all instances that have an open registration policy they are going to miss out on a lot of things, they are also going to have to defederate a lot of instances. I’m a little sad because theres a lot of decent content on that instance and is going to be inaccessible to a lot of users now, but whatever, their admins made their choice.

      • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        By my understanding, and I’d love to be corrected if I’m wrong, but we should be able to still see and interact with their instance their users just cannot see it

        I’m a bit doubtful of this so I’ll have to check though

        Edit: I am wrong

        • kiboutrash@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Unfortunately I don’t think we can. I’m still subscribed to News@beehaw and the last post showing up when viewing the community from sh.itjust.works is from 15h ago, while viewing it from beehaw.org shows there are many more recent posts.

        • ShadowAether@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Not really, the block goes both ways (they can’t see our content and we can’t see theirs) so effectively there are two communities for already subscribed communities

        • this@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          I hope this is the case, I would still like to be able to see their content, even if they can’t see ours.