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 don’t know whether or not this was the right decision for beehaw, although I certainly sympathize with them having staffing and mod tool issues. Modding any forum is a thankless and tiring job, and I’m sure in it’s super early state Lemmy doesn’t exactly have a mature suite of tools to work with.
I am very interested in the community reaction here though. There seems to be a shared assumption that instance creation in the Fediverse means an open exchange of users and content (outside of bad actor or extreme instances), and most instances should only be distributing technical burden and otherwise be almost just an aesthetic in the larger Fediverse.
This despite the user philosophy in the Fediverse being ‘go where you want, interact with who your want’, and federation tools meaning that philosophy applies to instances as well. And if you want meaningful differences between communities and instances, this has to be so - there has to be a strong ability to self-regulate, up to and including the ability to defederate from incompatible instances.
I think it’ll be very interesting to see how the Fediverse develops. A wider Fediverse composed of sets of federated instances which aren’t federated with other sets is possible. A largely open Fediverse with limited walled off instances is also possible. I know right now the latter is probably preferred to encourage growth, but in the long run? (these are not the only conceivable arrangements either, but this post is long enough already)
I think in the short term its very a) short sighted and b) damaging to the whole lemmyverse.
It only highlights to both new users and naysayers the fragility of the whole thing. One (small) group of people can decide to press the nuclear option and suddenly thousands of genuine users both on their server and others are penalised and lose out.
For one of the “big four” instances (.ml, world, shitjustworks and beehaw) to pull the plug so soon after the “blackout influx” will not inspire confidence in users. New users who signed up to beehaw (on advice that .ml was struggling for capacity) suddenly a few days into their interactions find themselves locked out of communities they had joined. Equally people who joined other instances but were enjoying gaming@beehaw or politics@beehaw which were the two biggest gaming/politics communities, suddenly also find themselves locked out.
Yes, this is on one hand the benefit of the fedeverse, but for new members, this just demonstrates that a small group (by the sounds of it 4-5 people) can make a snap decision, and effect thousands of users.
It seems very short sighted and damaging to a lot of the goodwill built up over recent days
It is an incredibly fragile system, and it’s honestly hard for me (as a reddit refugee) to see how instances scale from a few hundred or thousand users to hundred of thousands or millions. I was absolutely floored to read that lemmy.ml was hosted on a $100/month virtual server up to the blackout.
I get why beehaw would isolate themselves, at least while they figure out how to manage the massive traffic spike. It may well be that such communities, by their very nature, are incompatible with hundreds of thousands of users. Maybe even with tens of thousands. The flip side of fragility is that you can have multiple…worlds?..within the lemmy universe. Smaller instances or clusters of instances that find themselves incompatible with other clusters.
It’s kind of an accident of timing that beehaw was big as the reddit influx started. I suspect their philosophy is not compatible with the average redditor, and if beehaw hosts a lot of popular communities, those communities will either migrate or alternatives will rise on more open instances. In three months, no one will remember gaming@beehaw.org
What interests me is that there is still a gaming@beehaw.org community on lemmy.world. Locals can post there, see new stuff, etc. It’s not “dead.” Maybe no alternative will rise because no one notices.
i think the root of their issue is having only 4 moderators and creating all those communities for general catchment like gaming, politics, music.
and yeh, i actually think that for the short term lemmy.world need to defederate with beehaw. Because the problem is, world users are still using those communities not realising that nobody outside of .world can see them, and that includes people from .ml and itjustworks, because the federation link is broken.
Beehaw admins have said they want to refederate when Lemmy has better mod tools so I wonder if potentially those .world users isolated interactions with beehaw content on the .world instance will ultimately be synched back together with the beehaw version someday.
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It seems like you are expecting a lot from people who are doing this in their spare time on a voluntary basis. I don’t think any of the Beehaw admins are developers or can afford to hire developers to create their own mod tools. They are limited to what is possible with Lemmy as it exists now so to me this doesn’t seem like a cop out at all. It’s a shitty situation definitely, but I don’t get blaming them for it when it’s not really their fault that Lemmy doesn’t work the way we want it to yet.
Is it fragility or malleability, though? This platform readily diverges by design, and if that’s a problem for the health of the Fediverse, then it’s a fundamental problem with the design.
well, in the short term, losing the biggest gaming, politics and open source communities from the fediverse at large is fragility.
At least from a new user perspective, There will be a ton of users on defederated instances wondering why suddenly threads are half empty or only populated by people on their instance, and a bunch of people on beehaw wondering why they now cant access the communities they have been participating in
I certainly agree it’s less than ideal, although I think a large part of that has to do with Lemmy not being fully mature as a software yet. In some future where development has progressed and some features ~ the ability to move instances as a user without creating a new account, for example ~ are available I think this would be easier to smooth out. The whole situation with one instance de-federating the other but not vice versa is also rather confusing (ultimately comprehensible, but still weird) and probably could use some more thought.
That said I don’t think this is otherwise a fundamentally different occurrence than if the same thing happened in the future with two other relatively large communities. It’s a little flashier and (maybe, dependent on how the Fediverse develops) more central because of the newness, but otherwise… yeah. I think the Fediverse just needs to have the culture and tools to handle this kind of split, otherwise its design philosophy just doesn’t work.
Lastly I would argue that this does not indicate fragility quite as much as you might suppose. The beehaw team could also have decided they didn’t have the resources to handle membership in the Fediverse and withdrawn entirely. This is a little more bend than break, from that perspective - from my section of the Fediverse I can currently still fully interact with beehaw.
From your perspective you are “losing” these communities but from their perspective they are “protecting” their communities from overwhelming amount of external users that aren’t being moderated. If they didn’t do it then they would possibly “lose” the community instead.