this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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People can block communities right? That might make more sense than just severing connections to other servers completely?
See, that would be such a better option. Let individual users block servers from appearing for them alone in any interactive sense. The Beehaw defederation was not only terrible timing, but it exposed the biggest achilles heel of this whole idea.
Can you elaborate more on this? Its a tangent, but one I'm out of the loop on.
Why DID beehaw split?
I'm not fully in the know on this by any means, but from what I understand, Beehaw's admins/mods decided to defederate from sh.itjustwor.ks and lemmy.world because of an inability to moderate effectively due to the massive influx of new Lemmy users last week - most of which were in those two instances, as they have open registration.
Beehaw requires you to apply to join.
How would splitting off fix that problem, though? If 100k users joined beehaw, and they stop syncing with the rest of the federation, they still have 100k new users to moderate.
Or am I looking at this backwards, and they want their gated garden, absent of slugs?
Beehaw would not let 100k users into their platform to start with. They will grow according to their means to moderate. That's why they only allow sign-ups through application, go bring down the number of new sign-ups and filter by quality.
I think there's definitely a bit of a gated-garden mentality here, but it's mostly just being overwhelmed. If they had more help, or had ASKED for more help, it would probably have been much different. I'm new here myself so I'm not going to pretend to understand the nuances here.
The general way I’ve been putting things around federation is that it’s a different kind of friction from corporate big social, and there’s an adjustment period needed for both admins and users.
We’ve kinda gotten used to all living under one big umbrella corporation and tolerating their untouchable shadowy actions, as well as the convenience and relative simplicity that brings.
Federation is more chaos but also more human and flexible. So we get more interpersonal friction and less convenience, but more choice and direct connectivity to the admins. Arguably more accountability or transparency from admins too, but I think that’s the part that needs the most growth largely because many don’t know what that really looks like.
The transition can be tough sometimes. A loss of convenience can make us entitled and drama can be a real turn off. But I think it’s useful to think about how much our tolerance goes down when we can put an identity to an action we don’t like. It’s also useful to think about whether the friction of federation is more like real human interactions and whether that’s healthy.
I’m not a decentralisation fanboy. I tend to be critical of it actually, but I think there are trade offs both ways.
You could say that, they have said more than once that they want their instance to be their safe-space, which is cool and all, if their users are all up on defederating at the fall of a leaf along with the mods that's cool, the "problematic" part are the users that join that instance because it's big but don't expect them to be like that, because then they have to drop that account and create another in a different instance.
But I've said it more than once, until we get migration tools think of your account as disposable or prepare to keep multiple accounts to juggle servers.
That said, I think they would be happier using a forum-like server instead of the fediverse because they seem like the kind of instance to end up isolating themselves.
Not even that, it also affects users on other big instances that happen to be defederated by beehaw and with beehaw still hosting some of the biggest tech and gaming communities, users won't have access to that depending on which other instance they joined.
Hard disagree, I keep seeing the same news/posts inside and outside Beehaw in other instances that have their own community, sometimes they even have the same name.
if you joined lemmy.world for example as a new user, ~~you won't be able to see new comments made by users of beehaw.org. Only those who were made before defederation because they're still part of the copy of your instance.~~
Edit: Had it backwards, you can see their posts, but you're still affected by the defederation because you can't interact with them since they won't see your posts, regardless on which instance you make it.
And if you comment on a community that is actually hosted direclty on beehaw.org, no other user from any other instance will see your posts because beehaw won't publish comments from your instance to the other ones.
The admin of lemm.ee just wrote a long post about the consequences of the latest defederations of instances that are most likely spam bots
I remember mods saying that it was too much work managing the trolls and other "offensive" content so by splitting it was easier for them to control
You’d think the concept of letting users choose their instance would also apply to letting the user choose to block or not. It’s not like the entire instance is full of Donald users, just one crappy part of it.
Tell that to admins with strong opinions, and other admins who don't wanna anger admins with strong opinions and get defederated for not defederating the offenders.
That's the part that gets me. Like, I'm all for "it's your server do what you want," but I do judge you if your reason for defederating my server is something so stupid as "this other server says they're bad, so I'll trust that."
You fools ain't never had a friend spread a runor about another friend? Never watched a sitcom? People lie lol, if you're going to make overarching decisions that affect your users too, you could maybe stand to do a modicum of your own research into it instead of just letting the one you "trust" bully you into compliance simply because this other masto instance doesn't cater specifically to marxists, and "capitalists are nazis" so they must be banned or else they'll speak!
My masto server is defederated for being anti trans, yet one of our organizations key members has been a trans woman since 1981 and she's one of the most prolific posters on the server (and one of the best, I might add). We're labeled "anti trans" simply because we didn't defederate with a server that is actually anti trans when the "good guys" tried to bully my admin into it, but the admin respects us enough to allow us to make our own decisions regarding what we want to see or not see on our feed, so of course that suggests to these reactionaries that he wants to somehow exterminate the jewish people.
I'd be more open to it frankly if I wasn't a direct example of how that system can be and is being abused to create echo chambers and bully those who don't want to live in them. By all means, your server your right to do so, but my right to think you're a bad person for it if it's for silly unresearched reasons such as this. And you might say "they don't have the time to investigate everything, so they just throw the book at it." Well, they chose to become admins, they chose that job, maybe managing a public server just isn't for them, I know I don't have the time, that's why I don't do it.
Completely agree. Admins are free to defederate. Users are free to heavily criticize and leave. That's how freedom works. 😊
Yes, just venting my personal grievances with the reacionary culture of the fedi at large. I think the fediverse would be perfect if most of the moderation (regarding cultivating your feed and blocking instances, communities, and users) was placed on the individual, barring outright illegal content like CP, revenge porn, or beastiality which should of course be nuked from orbit and are all actually illegal.
I'd like to see the culture go not from dictator (reddit) to smaller dictators (lemmy), but from dictator (reddit) to anarchism (lemmy, but with more community decision making for themselves as an individual rather than The Council of Beehaw and The Council of Lemmy.world deciding all their peasants are at war with each other.)
Admins are effectively dictators. Some do have anarchistic views such as lemmy.dbzer0.com (and even there, to what extent?). The vast majority only care about themselves and what is theirs. No authority with absolute power will submit themselves to the will of a collective of strangers.
My masto admin still is free to ban people he doesn't like from his server of course, he just would rather we be able to curate our own feeds, and I'm sure curates his own just the same as we do. He didn't abdicate the throne I suppose by the nature of being the server owner, and our server is private (exclusive to those in a particular club,) I guess he's just a benevolent dictator. Still though, I like his approach.