From what I have seen so far not likely. Though it would be nice if users were given some type of warning when attempting to post/comment/reply to defederated instances.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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I believe we should de-federate just to save confusion for new members.
for instance, a new user going to "communities" (all).. 4 of the top 9 communities are homed with Beehaw
But there is no indication to the user that you wont actually be interacting with all of those people, you will be joining a community that may say x number of members but will actually be restricted to your local instance.
Its confusing.,
It also restricts alternatives to those rooms from establishing and growing.
I honestly think its crucial we de-federate asap.
Well make our own communities with blackjack and hookers!
Yeah one way federation while still providing content doesn't feel too good. Defederate would make sense. Purge Beehaws content from the database (admins can do that directly with the postgres I assume). If they decide to open up in the future then just refederate. Will be all good. Beehaw is trying to have a specific style of community so they are doing what is best for them. That's the flexibility of this framework.
We're seeing the pains of the sudden and quick growth in lemmy from rexxitors (which I am one). It's exposing the current limitations of the software. Basically defederation between 2 instances should be more transparent. Like it should be a banner on the local instance when you're in one of their communities or posts. I only found out from a post in another community.
I personally am not going to get bent out of shape about it. New communities can pop up to take their place. Better mod tools can be developed to help. The lemmy software will improve over time.
It's not really a limitation of the software, it's all up to each instance to decided how they handle things. Instance admins can code in a banner as you describe and they can make defederation transparent such as how Beehaw lists all linked and blocked instances. Every instance can do this, they just have to choose to implement it.
Beehaw didn't come up with /instances. That's builtin to all Lemmy instance. It's part of the Lemmy source code. Designed, written, and tested by the Lemmy devs. It's part of their design for transparency.
Instance operators aren't software engineers. I have no doubt some are, and I have no doubt most are not. I also doubt that most are familiar with rust, typescript, postgres in addition to the Lemmy API along with ActivityPub. I'm sure the average admin can "code in" a banner involving some or all of that just like the average person can rebuild an engine, install custom shocks, and weld together a roll cage. But let's say they do "code in" a banner that only displays itself depending on federation status. Now they have a separate patch set that has to be maintained and tested with each update to Lemmy. And published too because Lemmy is licensed under the AGPL.
So yes, this very much is a limitation of the software. The user should be informed, "you can't comment or interact with this other instance." Was this an oversight of the devs? I would say no. As a software engineer there are some things you don't even think of as problems until they pop up as problems. It's part of the engineering process and evolution of a code base.
And my intention from this long winded comment isn't to rip your head off. Even if I come off like that sometimes ๐. It's me speaking from my knowledge and experience as an engineer.
To be fair, setting up an instance with your own patch is how improvements are made in the first place. Only a day after I set up my own instance, I forked the repo and started tinkering. Same case with lemm.ee. I'm a software engineer by profession but this is the first time I've touched Rust and inferno (I use typescript but with React/NextJS, inferno is new to me and pretty interesting). What's funny to me is that lemmynsfw.com was the first highly populated instance I saw which is actually running their own patch. But hey, porn has always had a heavy hand in driving tech. Half of the best features of YT were ripped right out of PornHub.
Mind you, while lemmy-ui will probably be easy to pick up for most frontend devs working with a modern tech stack, I'm sure the main Lemmy repo will drive a lot of devs away just because it's in Rust. But I can see why it's like that. Lemmy is barely a blip in terms of CPU and RAM. The big factor for most instances is really just going to be storage space.
That's true. This is one of those things where they would probably accept a pull request. Assuming it's just a ui fix.
Someone already opened an issue on it.
Yup. I saw the announcement post when it came out. Agreed, literally no reason to get mad. Always another server to jump on. Again, that's a perk.
To be fair I don't mind that .world should just keep federate it may be one way but content is content some people just lurk anyway. Its probably what makes .world attractive aside from no requirement in registration.
It is an interesting conundrum. I feel it's a catch 22. Some people will be upset, some won't.
I think someone else hit it on the head with the suggestion that there should be some sort of warning that the community is essentially view only and cannot be interacted with. If it has that, then everything should be good.
Maybe a solution would be a user preference, "hide content from defederated instances". I know I would be very annoyed to keep seeing threads that I couldn't post in, the whole point of a site like this for me is user interaction.
Users can block instances without defederating. In kbin you can go to kbin.social/d/fediinstance.domain and block it.
Idk how it works or the syntax for lemmy though
Oh, nice. That's probably 90% of what I was hoping for already.
I really like the fact that this is even possible. Let them do whatever. I guess the chips are gonna fall or whatever lol
Exactly. ๐ฏ
I guess I just don't see the point in what they're doing. Like I get that it is too much too quick and is just personally overwhelming to them. Makes total sense, but this action seems to defeat the whole purpose of the thing. Wouldn't just finding more moderators or building better systems be the solution?
I think they are building better mod systems, but they are not in place yet. Or at least that's what I understood.
I'd much rather keep seeing their content than not. The number 1 reason reddit is useful to me is because of the extremely specific and human information there is. I'd rather be able to look for stuff in one site even if part of it is read-only.
You want to know if pc component A and B work together? Some random person on reddit will have tried it. The normal google results quickly go into auto-generated stuff like the "versus" pages that just compare specs and are completely useless.
I think it might be useful to have a clearer UI about what is happening. So every user that sees content there and wants to participate can go and try to create a user on beehaw. I imagine at some point everything will settle down and federation will be back.
They've said very clearly this is not an optimal or even a permanent solution.
Lemmy/etc are lacking moderation tools that other platforms like Mastodon have. They are not seeking isolation from the rest of the fediverse, but they do need more effective moderation ability, and right now the only viable solution they could settle on is temporary de-federation.
That said, obviously lemmy.world doesn't have to just sit in a weird half-federated state. It's just worth understanding why they're doing what they're doing.
Absolutely, I don't think this needs to be a permanent rift or divorce between the two instances, and I don't think there should be any bad blood - only understanding. But at this time of rapid growth I do think the defederation question is an important one to consider
I didn't think this made the beehaw stuff read only. I thought we got a snapshot from the moment they defederated, and it doesn't update after that. .world users can comment, but that's only on the snapshot that .world is storing. as time goes on it veers further and further from the 'real' content stored on beehaw.
If I understood it correctly, it's actually the other way around. Beehaw has stopped getting posts and comments generated on lemmy.world but lemmy.world keeps getting comments and posts from all instances, including Beehaw's.
As far as content coverage goes this is hurting Beehaw more than lemmy.world.
Beehaw's admins basically hit a mute button on lemmy.world because they're overwhelmed and it's easier for them than to attempt to moderate all the posts and comments coming from it.
We can probably expect more of this type of thing as Lemmy goes through growing pains.
No, it's how I said it. I just checked - there are a couple posts from Ruud's beehaw account over there discussing it. If you visit the conversation with an account not from lemmy.world, there are a number of posts that show up that we can't see.
It should and any users should refrain from making alts on other instances and participating in beehaw's communities because you will be empowering them to repeat this again.
Instead you should join communities on other instances. There is an argument to join communities here on lemmy.world and on just.works that got de-federated as a counterbalance to any pressure from beehaw on other instances to de-federate them as well.
Can someone give me some context here? Did beehaw.org do something to make things go one way only? If so, why?
Yes they did. The Beehaw instance has stopped listening to lemmy.world (and others), while lemmy.world still listens to Beehaw.
The Beehaw admins only want highly moderated content on their server and said they weren't able to moderate everything coming from large open instances.
I dont think this is quite right - lemmy.world can't listen to Beehaw either, it just still has the synced copies of the Beehaw communities loaded on it. So lemmy.world users can still see posts and comments from before the defederation and can even comment themselves but nothing gets synced between the two instances. Effectively there are separate instances of those communities now, one on Beehaw and one on lemmy.world. To be honest this way of managing defederation feels a bit misleading as it gives the impression there is still a connection, IMO when you browse a community that originated on a defederated instance it should be something really obvious and upfront.
Ah sorry for my misunderstanding. So, instances actively send their fresh data to the other instances; it's not a passive thing like one instance that looks at another (like we do through a browser)? What prevents the lemmy.world server to access fresh data from Beehaw? It's public after all.
It really is the nuclear option and I hope it is only used in the most extreme cases.
.world should defederate so the replacement communities here get a chance to grow out of beehaws shadow. Anyone who wants to keep browsing those particular communities can use their beehaw account, and you should be multiboxing lemmy anyways
I dont think beehaw will refederate even if better mod tools are added or they decide to get a few more mods. The divide here seems ideological and at a intended user level than a real result of growing pains.
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