As this #RedditBlackout accelerates the Fediverse experiment, I feel the urge... the need... to chime in with my 2-cents.
My summary of the current lay of the land: Beehaw saw a wave of pornography spam and decided to shut Lemmy.world off and Defederate from this server. I'm too new to this community to fully understand the wants/needs of each individual server, but I've been around the internet long enough to recognize that porn-spam is an age-old trolling technique and will occur again in the future. Especially as small, boutique, hobbyist servers pop up and online drama/rivalries increase, online harassment campaigns (like coordinated porn spam attacks) are simply an inevitability.
Lemmy.world wants open registrations. Beehaw does not: Beehaw wants users to be verified before posting. This is normal: many old /r/subreddits would simply shadowban all 1-year old accounts and earlier... giving the illusion that everything is well for 5+ or 10+ year old accounts, but cut out on the vast majority of spam accounts with short lives. This works for Reddit where you have a huge number of long-lived accounts, but its still not a perfect technique: you can pay poor people in 3rd world countries to create accounts, post on them for a year, and the these now verified accounts can be paid for by spammers to invade various subreddits.
I digress. My main point is that many subreddits, and now Lemmy-instances/communities, want a "trusted user". Akin to the 1+-year-old account on Reddit. Its not a perfect solution by any means, but accounts that have some "weight" to them, that have passed even a crude time-based selection process, are far easier to manage for small moderation teams.
We don't have the benefit of time however, so how do we quickly build trust on the Fediverse? It seems impossible to solve this problem on lemmy.world and Beehaw.org alone. At least, not with our current toolset.
A 3rd Server appears: ImNotAnAsshole.net
But lets add the 3rd server, which I'll hypothetically name "ImNotAnAsshole.net", or INAA.net for short.
INAA.net would be an instance that focuses on building a userbase that follows a large set of different instances recruiting needs. This has the following benefits.
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Decentralization -- Beehaw.org is famously only run by 4 administrators on their spare time. They cannot verify hundreds of thousands of new users who appear due to #RedditBlackout. INAA.net would allow another team to focus on the verification problem.
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Access to both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login -- As long as INAA.net remains in the good graces of other servers (aka: assuming their user filtering model works), any user who registers on INAA.net will be able to access both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login.
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Custom Moderation tools -- INAA.net could add additional features independently of the core github.com/LemmyNet programming team and experiment. It is their own instance afterall.
Because of #2, users would be encouraged to join INAA.net, especially if they want access to Beehaw.org. Lemmy.world can remain how it is, low-moderation / less curated users and communities (which is a more appropriate staging grounds for #RedditBlackout refugees). Beehaw.org works with the INAA.net team on the proper rules for INAA.net to federate with Beehaw.org and everyone's happy.
Or is it? I am new to the Fediverse and have missed out on Mastodon.social drama. Hopefully older members of this community can chime in with where my logic has gone awry.
So we got defederated? I guess that explains the massive decline of activity here. It’s really not selling the fediverse for me if you can suddenly be cut off from the rest of the world just like that.
You've got it the other way around - Beehaw is defederating themselves from all the major instances, because they can't enforce a safe space like they want to at any kind of scale on this Fediverse model. Lemmy.world is about twice the size of Beehaw in number of users.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
That user is from sh.itjust.works, which is a 2nd server that Beehaw also Defederated from.
Sh.itjust.works is just as active as ever though, he might be using the wrong filter for his feed. Or he was primarily subscribed to beehaw communities.
Yeah, just saw that. Either way, I completely understand Beehaw's goal but don't understand how they think it's going to work in the long run.
In the long run they are hoping for more flexibility. I think it is incorrect that they are separating from “all the major instances” but they are separating from (two) servers with open account creation. I personally think an instance admin should be informed when their users are being banned from other instances, so they have the option to review behavior and consider if they would like to do the same. Sh.itjust.works at least has instance rules that should be compatible with most of what beehaw doesn’t like.
And my counter would be that they're not buying themselves flexibility with their proposed approach.
And I still don't see how anyone thinks that the manual account approval process solves anything. If I'm a bad actor, I can go out right now and create 50 accounts on every Lemmy server, come up with slightly different answers for the stupidly-simple "why do you want to join this instance" question, and have a veritable army of troll accounts approved and at my disposal within the week if I am so determined to be an asshole on Beehaw. In the end, the process is literally no different than an admin-driven manual Captcha that only achieves proving that you're not a robot.
In my mind I view this like an IT security issue. If you are trying to prevent bad actors from entering your environment, you don't just cut your connection to the internet... while leaving wide-open public access terminals in your front lobby for anyone to use as long as they verbally promise not to do bad things.
I don't know what the answer for Beehaw will be, but I know they won't accomplish it with their current plan of action.
I very much agree with giving source instances a chance to discipline/ban bad actors. Hopefully this will evolve in that direction. For now the Beehaw admins feel that the right mod tools are not yet available. They have a specific vision for what they want to build, and it is completely up to them how they go about that.
That doesn't mean everyone external has to agree or like their decisions, but it's their house, their rules.
You're correct in the old world / Reddit way of doing things. But I'm not sure if that's how it "should" be done here on Fediverse.
Even on Reddit, the mechanism of just shadowbanning young accounts is cruel. Especially as a "secret rule", it basically cut off Reddit from the younger generation. Its why Reddit tilts to millenials, because we weren't banned yet in 2008 when we made our accounts, while all accounts in 2019+ are basically shadowbanned by default. This obviously can't work either for Reddit and is probably the reason they're in decline.
The fact that we have new solutions available to us here, in the Fediverse, thanks to 3rd party servers and new server instances, is something to be celebrated.
I guess I should clarify - I don't understand how Beehaw thinks their approach is going to work at scale, because any bad actors (trolls, bigots, racists, etc.) they're trying to prevent can simply create new accounts on Beehaw and cause the same troubles directly on their server. Sure they'll have marginally more control over those accounts, but nothing is stopping people unless they put "I AM A RAGING BIGOT" in their user application.
In the meantime they'll only be preventing reasonable people who use other login servers from participating in Beehaw communities. In my mind, that's only going to lead to more bad actors focusing on Beehaw and less general population from the Fediverse to drown them out.
The process is self-selecting, is it not?
I don't think its much of a surprise that a ton of troll-behavior came from an instance called sh.itjust.works. People who find explitives funny and want to associate with that are a different cut from folks who just wanna hang out and casually talk.
I mean, you can't really classify everyone from that server just because it has a "bad word" as part of the domain name. It's likely that it's getting as many new users as it is simply because it doesn't require an approval process, which is something that many new Lemmy users probably find offputting when trying to sign up for the other servers.
Also I'm not sure how any of that invalidates anything I've said. I can appreciate their goal, but I see it rapidly meeting with the reality that all they're going to accomplish in the long run is to isolate themselves inside of an echo chamber that will be constantly harassed by the same people they sought to keep out, without the rest of the Fedi/Lemmy-verse to combat it by drowning out the assholes.
(edit) - In short, people who want to harass, will. And will come to your server to do it if they really want to. If you cut yourself off from the rest of everyone else, all you're doing is cutting yourself off... from everyone else. (All "you's" in this comment not pertaining to you, specifically.)
Ah yes. But people who will harass will be timelocked by a 1-week account creation + account proving period will cut down dramatically on Beehaw's amount of work.
And I don't think a hypothetical INAA.net instance that follows the 1-week account creation/proving period would be too much to ask for in the great scheme of the Fediverse.
How is this possibly enforced? IP bans are only marginally effective.
I guess I should clarify that I'm not arguing against anything you've said here about the 'middleman' server. I'm simply talking about the lack of foresight that I see in the Beehaw admins' approach to safe space enforcement.
For the 1st week, INAA.net allows users to talk to lemmy.world.
After 1+ week of activity, INAA.net allows users to talk to beehaw.org (and continue talking with lemmy.world).
EDIT: The idea is to make Beehaw's account-ban of [email protected] have teeth. If it takes a full week for trolls to make a new account at [email protected], then Beehaw's small admin team can handle that. What they can't handle is the 100,000+ new users that got dumped here from #RedditBlackout.
So if I read you right... your plan is to centralize the decentralization into one "login server" that other servers trust, and then those servers would shut down new user registrations and only people from the "login server" would be allowed access, and somehow only access certain servers after an arbitrary grace period? Do I have that right?
No?
Why would anybody do this? That's obviously just stupid.
Alright, then what good will a middleman login server do when people can still just register on Beehaw directly? What prevents a bad actor from creating 50 Beehaw accounts, coming up with slightly different answers to the stupidly-simple "why do you want to join this instance" verification question, waiting a few days for the admins to click 'approve' on the application, and then being able to hop from account to account to be an asshole to everyone?
Because inevitably, a right-wing conservative instance is going to pop up and Beehaw will ban those guys and vice versa.
My instance will play nice with both, so my users are going to get access to both groups and bypass those bans by just being nice people welcoming to everybody.
...I'm beginning to think you don't understand anything about the situation, or what Beehaw is trying to achieve. They don't want to "play nice" with assholes, or with any instance who plays nice with them. If they understood what you were trying to achieve with this, under their current plan of action they would also immediately defederate with your instance.
However, the fact that you're proposing this shows just how futile their efforts are. You are demonstrating a perfect example of how the Fediverse will circumvent their intentions whether they like it or not - unless they choose to not federate with any other Lemmy server and spend 100% of their time banning accounts.
In your scenario you just think that the admin(s) of INAA.net will be "the good cop" and that Beehaw will trust that you possibly could and would somehow filter out the "good" users from the bad.
But I can imagine a situation, based on my experience, where I'd do what Beehaw.org has done. Online trolls, especially porn-spam, can truly wreck havoc upon workplace office users who are behind porn filters. Its an exceptionally effective technique to harass a community and cause them to be unusable.
Solving this problem is doable, assuming that Beehaw.org is reasonable. Maybe they're not reasonable, but eventually we'll have reasonable servers that get porn-spammed / trolled. What then? Might as well start solving the issue today (because it puts us on a path to allow a reunification of Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org, albeit through a 3rd server rather than directly).
That's all well and good and I don't disagree with their goal from an ethical standpoint. I'm just saying that what they're doing with defederting "bad instances" isn't going to solve it, for all of the reasons I stated above as well as the fact that what you're proposing can be done.
As I stated elsewhere in this thread - In my mind I view this like an IT security issue. If you are trying to prevent bad actors from entering your environment, you don’t just cut your connection to the internet… while still leaving wide-open public access terminals in your front lobby for anyone to use as long as they verbally promise not to do bad things.
I don’t know what the answer for Beehaw will be, but I know they won’t accomplish it with their current plan of action.
I mean, the solution is what I listed in this topic?
Beehaw federates with INAA.net.
INAA.net federates with Lemmy.world AND Beehaw (and whoever else comes up).
It seems like your only counterargument remaining is that INAA is going to also get banned/defederated from Beehaw.org for... reasons? Just for talking with other instances? I mean, if they want to sure I guess. But I don't think that's what they're planning to do.
No, it's not. Because then IAAA.net (I am an asshole) starts up, does the same thing and lets in assholes... then Beehaw finally catches on and defederates with them too. Then NRIATAA.net (no really, I am totally an asshole) starts up... and so on, ad infinitum.
And yes, INAA is going to get defederated, because you'd be "playing nice" with assholes (or "both sides", however you want to put it). For the same exact reason that they defederated wth lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, you'd be defederated as well. Nothing nebulous about it, it's the same "...reasons?".
And yes, that's exactly what they plan to do - defederate with any servers who would potentially let in people they don't want / bad actors.
In the end, your proposal solves nothing for Beehaw and only points out the futility of their plan of action.
I think you're confused.
Lets say Beehaw.org goes fully extreme and goes whitelist federation only with a small, select group of servers. I don't know if they're on the path to this, but this is probably the most extreme stance they could take on this subject.
IAAA.net and NRIATAA.net spin up, but fail to connect to Beehaw.org due to them being whitelist only.
I put in some effort to build INAA.net. I make it user-centric, no communities, purely just an instance for people to join / get moderated and interact with other Lemmys. Once I feel like my community is confidently a "nice group of people", I send an email over to the Beehaw.org team and ask for a Federation between us. And lets say I keep my userbase strict (but not as strict as Beehaw.org), so that no spammers, porn-invasions, etc. etc. originate from my group of users.
Beehaw.org lets me in. But IAAA.net and NRIATAA.net also let me in, because they don't care about these issues.
That solves the problem entirely. IAAA.net cannot access [email protected], none of those groups. IAAA.net can't access [email protected], because INAA.net doesn't contain any communities at all, its just a collection of users who have made a promise not to be assholes on the Fediverse.
Everyone's happy with this arrangement, as far as I can tell. There's no reason for Beehaw.org to ban INAA.net.
And then Beehaw kicks you out, because your server can have people of the sort that interact on IAAA.net and who have those same interactions on Beehaw. Your plan ultimately relies on you believing that the Beehaw admins will trust your ability and judgement to weed out the good users from the bad, over themselves. It doesn't really matter how many more reiterations of it you want to say, that's the bottom line.
Drawn out to its conclusion, their plan of defederating instances with assholes on them simply is not sustainable. And based on their own language about it in their recent post I think they know that's the case but it's all they can think of for now. You're just adding layers of complexity on to what is, for now, an unsolvable problem.
"Interact" isn't the problem. Its the problem of porn-spamming the safe-for-work communities that is the problem.
IAAA.net will organize porn-spamming of undefended instances. Indeed, these groups exist in the real world and I've participated in such toxic behavior before. I know they will exist.
But guess what? 4chan and 8chan and all of them? They want users, and reasonable people to talk with too. Plenty of "normies" log into 4chan and aren't harassed or put off by the culture. IAAA.net (assuming a 4chan like environment, or even 8chan like doxxer group) will accept groups like INAA.net onto their server.
Beehaw bans sites like IAAA.net. That's also true. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they'll ban INAA.net.
Why not? I think there's a set of people out there who just want to log into a server, recognize that they're trusted around the internet, and are willing to not be an asshole who posts porn-spam onto safe-for-work communities.
Even on 4chan, if you just ask people to not post porn on the SFW sections, people largely follow the request. A couple of assholes who need to be IP-banned break the rules, but by and large, rules are followed if you just ask nicely. That's my experience. The internet is full of assholes, but those same assholes can be very nice people sometimes in different contexts.
Alright well I've said everything that I feel needed to be said, you haven't refuted any of it but just keep asserting the same things that I have pointed out as flawed arguments. So, have a good one.
I've got ideas of who asshole sites are (4chan, stormfront, etc. etc.) and nice sites, and tightly curated sites (lobste.rs), etc. etc. I've been on the internet from Usenet says and have personally engaged in ancient moderated vs unmoderated flamewars.
I have experience on knowing how people act on the internet. I'm very confident in my assessment. That your viewpoint disagrees is intriguing to me, but ultimately, I have to stick with my decades of observations on human behavior.
Not sure I agree that it's "cruel" but it is definitely heavy-handed. It's really just a way of enforcing the "lurk more" attitude of old forums at scale.
Telling 20 new accounts each day to read a few posts before making their own gets old fast. It also prevents harassment from day-old troll accounts. It's not perfect but it is a better solution than doing nothing at all.
Accounts were never shadowbanned for year long periods. I remade my accounts multiple times and never had to wait more than a few weeks before being fully active, minus a few niche subs with oddly strict rules.
Only from beehaw.org, right? I'm still seeing this from sdf.org.
Am I misunderstanding or does this not just mean you'll have to choose your registered instance to match your needs, and if some instances you like are too widely considered problematic to access from a broadly useful instance you may have to have another identity there.
Somewhere like beehaw.org appears to be an instance that's likely to exclude fairly aggressively, so that's a consideration for whether you want that to be your home.
Sadly, it's more complicated and far-reaching.
You might also consider if you want to invest in communities hosted on an excluding instance. If they exclude your instance in the future, you will lose access to that community. Everybody should be interested to have communities of common interest outside of excluding instances.
And you might want to consider the reputation of the instance you make your home. If other instances decide to defederate your instance for whatever reason, you lose access to their communities.
So it's not just a decision of which home instance aligns with my goals, but also do my goals align with the instances who host communities which I hold dear, and how is my home instance seen by other instances to prevent problems in the future.
The character creation of most RPGs is less sophisticated and has better graphics. Fascinating and saddening at the same time.
Yep - the nature of hosts needs to become clear and stable, and many people are going to need multiple identities if they want to access anything that anyone else objects to.
You have it all exactly right.
Beehaw has a code of conduct that's relatively strict. People who sign up on Beehaw do so because they are looking for a more controlled atmosphere.
They've been trying to host a dinner party, and the college kids on spring break keep trying to crash it. So, they just closed their door. This isn't a problem. This is how freedom of association just works.
People clutch pearls over defederation every time a major instance gets defederated. It's always the same thing, too: "Why am I even here if I can't see everything??" But you can't see everything from Reddit -- it doesn't federate with Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram... And you can't see averything from any of the other centralized social media sites for the same reason.
They're all defederated from each other.
It's only a problem here because people conflate the websites they're using with the server software used to run them, and then feel entitled to direct access to anyone and anything using that software. Which... Is a mood, I guess.
To use a Reddit analogy, it's basically a subreddit that's decided to go private.
I don't see how one out of 160+ servers not connecting to sh.itjust.works would cut you out from the rest of the world.
I think of it more like being cut off from 1/160th of the fediverse. Unfortunate, but in the end a type of community I don't think I'll miss since our values don't align.
Beehaw is in the top 3 Lemmy instances, so I wouldn't say it's 1/160th. Probably more like 1/5th. Or maybe even 1/4th because of how much better established the server was before the reddit exodus.
I know what you mean, and from that point of view I agree. I have different values and so I use different measurements; A connection to a small instance is equally valuable as a connection to a big instance. It's not about the amount of content but building a new paradigm of social media.
I feel the same
This is your first comment in 3 days since making the account, and you want to discuss a "massive decline in activity".
I hate when people make this accusation but I'm seriously detecting a paid reddit shill. Why did you only save one of my posts and then comment this defeatist shit, in the past 3 days?
Truth is, it would cost almost nothing for reddit to pay a few trolls to come here to both spam and post divisive messages. Better a few million bucks now than a few billion down the road.
Anyone else think this is weird or am I tripping? Like the one and only comment in 3 days is just perfectly engineered to discourage people from the fediverse.
I visited a few different times and even lurked for a bit before figuring out how sign up - doesn't mean someone is a shill if they did the same.
...but I also didn't understand enough to verify if traffic is lighter or heavier since I am just now getting how the underlying pipes and tubes work.
In that case I apologize, I had sent you a private message earlier about the sorting algorithm but you must have missed it.
I'm still keeping my eye on you though...
I'm not the original one you responded to, so keep a closer eye haha!
Bruh I need to go to bed 🫠
Lmao! 🤣
I'm keeping my eye on you, but only in the hope that you post nudes.
It took me a while to figure out how to make an account here but I’m more of a lurker than I am a commenter. I originally tried to sign up with beehaw but never heard back about my application so I was happy to see that I could still access their fairly large community from here. Can you not see how someone might be disappointed that a large chunk of the community is now gone from here?
As another commenter suggested, my feed settings were limiting me. Hot and Active constantly show posts that are 2-3 days old, making me think everything went stagnant. I was also using Mlem and didn’t know I had any replies until I opened up shitjustworks in my browser. I mostly switched to lurking on Squabbles now.
Although I could see Reddit being scummy and hiring some trolls, that doesn’t mean that everyone with some concerns about the fediverse means they’re automatically a Reddit shill. I was an Apollo user and won’t be going back to Reddit once the app dies for good. Currently I only open it to check RedditAlternatives to see where most of the community is going.
In that case I stand corrected, my apologies. I would still encourage you to comment more because you need to contribute if you want this platform to succeed. Sorry for coming off so aggressive.
I think the browser is best for now, it still has its own glitches but more functional than the apps for me. Sorting by new or top day and subscribed. Yeah I'm still looking out for trolls and shills because it definitely seems like a possibility. If I were spez I'd be hiring some off the books to protect my job. If this whole shitshow takes a chunk out of reddit's IPO, he's done there.
As for being disappointed about the loss of Beehaw, have a look at the relative size of the major instances.
Notice how we have about one third of the total users and posts/comments that beehaw does. And this server is less than two weeks old. They were only a large chunk of the community before the reddit exodus. Right now, they're at best a medium chunk. In a month, they'll probably be a small chunk. Onward and upward my friend.