ou might have seen that we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. I think there’s some necessary context to understand what this means to the users on this instance.
How federation works
The way federation works is that the community on beehaw.org is an organization of posts, and you’re subscribed to it despite your account being on lemmy.world. Now someone posts on that community (created on beehaw.org), on which server is that post hosted?
It’s hosted on both! It’s hosted on any instance that has a subscriber. It’s also hosted on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, etc. Every instance that has a subscriber is going to have a copy of this post. That’s why if you host your own instance, you’ll often get a ton of text data just in your own server.
And the copies all stay in sync with each other using ActivityPub. So you’re reading the post that’s host on lemmy.world, and someone with an account on beehaw.org is reading the same post on beehaw.org, and the posts are kept in sync via ActivityPub. Whenever someone posts to that community or comments on a post, that data is shared to all the versions across the fediverse, and these versions are kept in sync. So up until 5 hours ago, they were the same post!
“True”-ness
A key concept that will matter in the next section is the idea of a “true” version. Effectively, one version of these posts is the “true” version, that every other community reflects. The “true” version is the one hosted on the instance that hosts the community. So the “true” version of a beehaw.org community post is the one actually hosted on beehaw.org. We have a copy, but ours is only a copy. If you post to our copy, it updates the “true” version on beehaw.org, and then all the other instances look to the “true” version on beehaw to update themselves.
The same goes for communities hosted on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Defederation affects how information is shared between instances. If you keep track of where the “true” version is hosted, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on.
How defederation works
Now take that example post from earlier, the one on beehaw.org. The “true” version of the post is on beehaw.org but the post is still hosted on both instances (again, it has a copy hosted on all instances). Let’s say someone with an account on beehaw.org comments on that post. That comment is going to be sent to every version of that post via ActivityPub, as the “true” version has been updated. That is, every version EXCEPT lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. So users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won’t get that comment, because we’ve been defederated from beehaw.org. If we write a comment, it will only be visible from accounts on lemmy.world, because we posted to a copy, but our copy is now out of sync with the “true” version. So we can appear to interact with the post, but those interactions are ONLY visible by other lemmy.world accounts, since our comments aren’t send to other versions. As the “true” version is hosted on beehaw, and we no longer get beehaw updates due to defederation, we will not see comments from ANY other community on those posts (including from other defederated instances like sh.itjust.works).
The same goes for posting to beehaw communities. We can still do that. However, the “true” version of those communities are the ones on beehaw, so our posts will not be shared to other instances via ActivityPub. And all of this is true for Beehaw users with our communities. Beehaw users can continue to see and interact with Lemmy.world communities, but those interactions are only visible to other Beehaw users, since the “true” versions of the Lemmy.world communities (the ones sent to/synced with every other instance) is the Lemmy.world one.
Communities on other instances, for example lemmy.ml, are unaffected by this. Lemmy.world and beehaw.org users will still be able to interact with those communities, but posts/comments from lemmy.world users won’t be visible to beehaw.org users, as defederation prevents our posts/comments from being sent to the version of these posts hosted on beehaw.org. However, as the “true” version is the one on the third instance, we can still see everything from beehaw.org users. So we see a more filled in version than the beehaw users.
I can understand wanting to have a well-moderated community.
What I don’t understand is how they expect to do that with a moderation team of just 4 people.
I guess now people will just leave Beehaw, its communities that were popular here will be replaced by others in the Fediverse and life will go on. The Fediverse is built to be resilient to such changes.
The crazy part is that they want to be able to view and comment on other instances’ posts but not vice versa.
Like why should other instances agree to that?
Hopefully beehaw dies off quickly.
Yeah, the level of entitlement is insane.
I don’t get why you hope for this? Isn’t the point of fediverse to have lot of different instances for different people?
Beehaw will continue existing as it chooses to exist, with or without lemmy.world. Isn’t that a good thing? That’s decentralization. That’s what we want more of.
It’s a really shitty thing to do a growing platform. For the 3rd largest server to defederate a week into the platform growing is going to go a long way to convincing folks this platform isn’t viable. Honestly this may be it for me.
The Beehaw admins are really in love with their ideals but I can’t help but feel like they have effectively kneecapped a new platform.
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This is a roadblock for sure, but this platform does work. I feel like the fediverse is perfect for Reddit. As soon as chat moves from beehaw we’ll be rolling again!
I disagree. It’s like a poorly implemented private subreddit. People didn’t complain that that was possible before and I don’t see why they should now.
It’s quite literally free-loading off other instances though.
Not just in the content sense, but also the actual monetary cost of the image hosting, etc.
A little yeah, but even then their posts can still be seen by everyone. But I got the impression that wasn’t at all the point anyway. It was to keep control over comments and content, not to not shift monetary costs, though I suppose that will be an unintended side effect.
How much cost are you to lemmy.world? Are you planning to track it and pay for it?
How much cost is it to lemmy.world to federate with another instance? Are they going to keep track of it and send out invoices?
This free-loading complaint rings hollow.
On that note, is there a donations thing somewhere for lemmy.world? Would like the donate to the community so the servers can keep on scaling
Check the sidebar at https://lemmy.world/
Where did you get this idea from? They won’t be able to interact with other instances from Beehaw. They clearly don’t want to based on this action.
Read their comments - https://beehaw.org/comment/262284
Site (instance)-wide limiting is exactly that.
That doesn’t seem accurate.
In that scenario, if a Beehaw account “follows” an account on a limited server, they would be able to interact as normal.
Oh I completely agree, there’s nothing wrong with wanting well-moderated communities. But their way of going about doing it makes absolutely no sense.
I don’t think you’re technically wrong, but I think with the reddit migration it’s overall damaging to the concept of a fediverse to have a large instance defederate with two huge instances.
There are people who are just getting settled only to find out they now have to use two accounts to access the content they needed one for yesterday.
Yeah, the solution is just to leave beehaw though. It takes a few minutes to make a new account on another instance. If they really want to access the beehaw stuff they could join an instance that is still federated with them, that way they could see the beehaw posts and the lemmy.world posts.
It’s probably best just to abandon beehaw entirely though and use alternative communities in the Fediverse.
People really shouldn’t see that as a bug, it’s a feature. Reddit does something you don’t like? Too bad. One instance in the fediverse does something you don’t like? It’s incredibly easy to leave. Maybe some day you’ll be able to transfer accounts to other instances, that’d be neat.
I made a new account yesterday. The beehaw node was a choice but I did not take it. I won’t be making two accounts to access “all of this content” and this little bit over here.
I’m not sure what would change my mind but it would need to be very enticing.
They are fine with being a small community. They aren’t interested in growth for growth’s sake. They existed for 18 months with around 200 members and were content with that continuing indefinitely. They aren’t against growth, they simply don’t value it highly.
And yet they still have the largest communities by an order of magnitude.
I saw on one of their post that they now have 36 mods
I guess that’s an improvement. I mean their users seem to like the set-up. I just don’t like not being able to create communities and having such a small group of users in control.
It just seems ripe for abuse like we saw in Reddit.
But that’s the wonder of the Fediverse, each user can pick their instance.
It won’t. There will be likely lots of cases of mod abuse that ends up pushing users away. Moderation requires a healthy balance, not an extreme of either side. Lots of Reddit subs had similar issues, but they at least benefited from the overall growth of the platform itself to fill the previous slots with new users.
The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users. And beehaw didn’t have confidence in the moderation of shit just works and lemmy.world and couldn’t keep up with banning them on their side. Thats why they defederated.
Sure, there’s no issue with that. I think most people agree that Beehaw can run their instance as they see fit and even understand their intention of trying to keep out trolls. We’re just also saying that it’s not the most efficient way to deal with the problem, and mainly it punishes Beehaw users as far as I can see.
This makes perfect sense.
It’s correct what you say, but the idea bugs me the more I understand it.
It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance. These other users can have nothing in common with the causing users, or might have even opposed them in their wrongdoings.
There is also a level between users and instances; communities. Maybe the problem was with one specific community, yet all other communities who happen to live on the same instance feel the same consequences.
Defederating individual communities would feel better for me, but ultimately I think a problem caused by individuals should be solved with these individuals, not with groups which are more or less meaningfully associated with those individuals.
undefined> It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance.
That’s why I always thought that the ideal scenario for federated web is to have instances that are either single-user or are down to friends-of-friends level of members (say, under 100 users per instance), so that there can be social accountability and if you have a bad actor on your instance, then it’s easy to kick them out and preserve your reputation. Bad actors will concentrate on their own instances and they can be defederated without collateral damage.
So, if Beehaw’s registration model is invite-only (that’s what I gather from this thread), then I think they probably have the right approach to federation; they are vouching for their users and they are responsible for making sure that they won’t be damaging communities across the federation.
Unfortunately Lemmy doesn’t have that kind of fine tuned control yet
Yeah having 4 mods for something this large isn’t realistic, though I also understand they have problems with the moderation tools. Hopefully they can find more mods and lemmy can get better tools. I think once that happens they are considering refederation.
As much as it seems like a bone headed decision I can understand why they made it and that they probably didn’t have much choice given the resources theu have. I suggested to them that they should consider a whitelist/invite only system of users from certain instances instead. I haven’t heard back from the mods on that but another user has already tried to shoot me down.