As if being a federated network wasn't enough of a hurdle for new users, now we have instances blocking each other already.
Lemmy has a great chance achieving what mastodon couldn't, because its the community that matters, not specific users, but with instance blocking each other, any hope of creating a community to rival reddit is going to be thrown out the window.
> any hope of creating a community to rival reddit is going to be thrown out the window.
I haven’t been following lemmy, can you elaborate on this? Isn’t the idea of blocking instances part of the point?
Like if I made “GoatseLemmy: Where Every Post Is Goatse” I wouldn’t expect content on it to be available for everyone without any input from admins that pay to run other servers.
What gives you the impression this represents infighting?
Genuinely, I think you will be relieved to read the announcement in TFA whenever it succeeds in loading for you; they just can't handle the moderating burden that the traffic from those servers brings, and given the almost completely unrestricted ability to create accounts in those instances it shouldn't be surprising. Beehaw would like more granular control but that isnt available (yet?), and they'd refederate once everything cooled down.
As if being a federated network wasn't enough of a hurdle for new users, now we have instances blocking each other already.
If you cant make decisions about the sort of traffic your server receives and choose to defederate for pragmatic reasons then your service is not decentralized in fact.
Put another way - if your ideal service is identical to reddit, and each instance is connected to all, then your service is just as centralized. It just has an unusually fussy and bespoke database design.
Why not? All that practice, they must have gotten pretty good at matrimony.
But more seriously - I don't see how you can remain marri.. federated, when one or more instances operates as a much more popular open relay.
I don't have the words for this, so please interpret charitably and correct candidly, but there is an expectation that each instance performs its own vetting and policing, so everyone can work together as individual fiefs without a central authority, and each piece can be as big or as small as it needs to be to sidestep that 'small unreachable team with enormous surface area' thing that we're doing so much of everywhere else? Yes?
If I have that right then this seems like a perfectly appropriate time to block with a similar emotional tenor as closing a water main to deal with a leak.
IMO mastodon failed to replace Twitter because high profiles didn't migrate.
but in Reddits case, you follow an interest instead of a specific person, meaning if enough people are active in the tech community on Lemmy it can replace reddit much faster than mastodon can replace twitter, as it doesn't matter which users migrated.
Reddit also bans subreddits, the difference here is that you have more than one option if you don't like the communities that your instance is banning.
Reddit bans individual subreddits. They don't ban whole swathes of subs that happen to be stored on the same server, along with all the users stored on the same server.
When you say "community", do you mean you want everyone to be in there? Or do you mean certain people who make up an actual community? Because moderation is an important part of growing a community.
Maybe they don't want to be a single community equal to all of Reddit. The goal is to be a way to host the equivalent of a subreddit, which is not the same as a place for that. There are many places, and many - including me - believe that's how it should be.
Also, blocking nodes in a distributed social network is neither new nor unhealthy. Usenet has killfiles. IRC has k-lines. Far from being injurious in themselves, they're essential tools to prevent some rando from setting up a bogus instance and using it to spray garbage all over everything. I already had to block one obvious ex-Redditor who had done exactly that on Mastodon, shitting all over a thread that had been going well until then. I was utterly unsurprised to see that they got defederated shortly afterward. That's what should happen when people can't stop misbehaving.
Do I wish that the fediverse had better moderation tools, both separate from defederation and for coordinating defederation decisions? Of course I do. AIUI coordination is done now - when it's done at all - with an ad hoc system based on tags, of all things, and that's a bit absurd. I have some ideas about how a better system might look or be implemented, but I certainly don't fault anyone for using the tools they have during a period of such rapid growth.
I don't really know how this all works, but can't I (a hypothetical human) just create a user account on each disconnected sub-graph? Why is this significant?
> can't I (a hypothetical human) just create a user account on each disconnected sub-graph
Managing multiple identities is challenging. It’s solved-problem challenging, but that implies a single client which sort of defeats the purpose of de-centralising the back end.
Imagine your mom emails you and asks why she can't access her favourite subreddit anymore and you have to explain she now has to make 2 different accounts to access different subreddits. I mean 'instances'. I just picture my own trying to wrap her head around "why".
It sounds like a minor hurdle to our demographic but most people are super lazy and bad at juggling online authentications. I would never recommend Mastodon to any non-tech person for that reason (beyond the other UI issues) unless there was a specific niche community they were interested in.
Well, if your mom asks you why she can't view a banned subreddit you can only tell her "tough" or "that community went to that other website", so you can say the same here.
But you also have the option of using an instance that didn't ban the community you're interested in, which you don't with reddit.
Alternatively, one account on an instance that still federates with both halves of the split could still see content from both sides? One could even do this by running their own instance? Or is there something preventing this?
I think this is 'significant' due to a large volume of people who want Lemmy to be their reddit killer and replacer, regardless of the goals of the project itself.
Yes, and what's more, you don't need to use a single account to manage an identity and all feeds like you would with a microblogging account, so it's not even a significant source of UX friction. These sorts of applications are tailor made for multiaccount usage, most reddit users even have more than one account to manage different communities.
Is there simply a lack of intersection between folks who care about UX and those who care about distributed computing? (And haven’t been sucked into web3.)
> this is rather common for open source, community-driven projects
Fair enough. It might be that a community back end and commercial front end are the uptime solution. In the back, people with principles. In the front, someone who actually cares about the people on the other side of the screen.
I interpret that as a complaint about the UX, but I have almost the opposite take. The UX has its quirks, certainly, but - as a professional in distributed systems and a veteran of online forums going back to Usenet and even a bit before - I'm actually more concerned about the distributed-system parts. The inconsistency in what you'll see if you try to view a thread, depending on which instance you're looking from, is reflected in the UX but is fundamentally a problem with how Mastodon in particular connects to other instances and processes queues. The O(n^2) communication pattern that the fediverse generally seems to fall into - relays exist but seem very little used and not organized among themselves - is what I think will limit growth well before Twitter or Reddit scale. I don't think the problem is that the people who designed ActivityPub and the fediverse were experts in one area and novices in another. They were (trying to be kind here) still learning across all of the relevant areas. Some of them might be approaching expert level now, and other experts might have joined since the early days, but that only means the work to fix the protocols and implementations of those protocols can begin.
I really just don’t understand the lemmy and mastodon thing. It looks like the same interface even on different servers and can’t you just make an account on another server? It doesn’t really make sense and I don’t see why I should care
With Mastodon and other microblogging software it makes sense, since the primary focus on those media is identity. You create a persona, you create and distribute content.
With Lemmy that's not the case. It's about sharing information and discussing it. So federation is less crucial, but it does add one powerful benefit: the network itself can have network effects and grow to critical mass, leveraging the same benefit Reddit had over disparate forums and the like. It's not a necessity from a user perspective, but it makes it feel like all the information is in one place and so users prefer it anyway.
Honestly, isn't that fine ? It means that the community has control and not a singular company. Just important to never let any single instance get as big as a company.
The issue is this instance seems to be the largest, with many established subreddit on it.
Now people will have to split between multiple clones on other instances.
Just as there is no simultaneous conversation about, say, walnuts in offline life, so there are multiple communities that discuss walnuts on boards with all the predicates and social constructs those communities have, from focuses towards, say, farming to environment to cooking, objective focuses, or social focuses in belief, location, language, of community. And no one's prevented from starting their own walnut focused board or even community.
That Lemmys are choosing to not try to be super catch-alls from the start I see as healthy for communities.
For search/discoverability, multiple boards each dedicated to walnuts may not aid discovery, especially in tails where signal is strong, perhaps oldskool directories/newskool directory of search/filtering could start to come in useful.
Wait, isn't one of the benefits of such federation that (the equivalent of) subreddits _don't_ live on one specific instance? So if an instance goes down for whatever reason, that subreddit still maintains its existence since it's shared across other instances.
Yes, I can't help but feel like this is just people learning how federated systems work. If you own the instance, you always have the power to block connections from any other instances. The whole point is that instances have control, and if you want control, you have the option to run your own instance. It's a distributed system of reputation.
yeah, really - working as designed. If a remote site starts letting a bunch of people behave badly, then you can block them all at one go. If the remote mods clean up their act then maybe you'll talk to them again. Any user on your site who disagrees with this is perfectly free to move to another site with a policy of "100% free speech except for what the government makes us block".
It feels a little surprising for it to happen this quickly, that's all.
Stuff gets murky when admins ban other instances based on the instances that those other instances federate with.
So if you have instance A which is federated with instance B, and if instance A sees instance C as hostile, it obviously defederates from instance C, but it would become problematic if instance A would also defederate from instance B simply because instance B is federated with instance C.
(...) our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:
these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don’t care about what our instance stands for
“Lemmy instances are already blocking each other“ is a kind of weirdly editorialized headline here. It kind of implies that there was some sort of promise that fediverse servers weren’t going to block other servers, and that promise had been broken or something.
“Beehaw de-federates from two other servers following influx of trolls” would be more accurate.
Why's that? The typical user problem isn't "see all the content", it's "see some good content". As long as the two halves have critical mass, it could well be fine. For example, the fact that Reddit and Twitter were separate networks didn't prevent both of them from growing pretty well.
In the past several years I've noticed a viewpoint gaining popularity, which is that if you can't be the biggest fish in the pond it's not worth bothering with, which is a quite odd to me. You even see it in online games where the majority of players all pile into a single server, then complain about the problems they've brought upon themselves by doing that (lag, instability, etc) instead of inhabiting a few moderate population servers.
It feels closely related to the reluctance to use two different chat applications to talk to two different people. It's not really a big deal, but you still get so much resistance from people. As if their phone is only capable of running a single application. The network effect related control of user groups as a result of this strange pointless idea is so corrosive.
> the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances
This is a key dynamic. People are used to social media sites being kept livable thanks to a team of paid professionals and fancy ML tooling, often supported by volunteer labor. But here the volunteers are in charge and many of them have other things to do than deal with people's bullshit just to keep the user growth graph going up and to the right.
This title seems intended to position this as some sort of infighting and I think is heavily editorialized - the thread title is
ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
The actual reason is that the defederated servers have open enrollment and have grown large enough that the small fraction of their traffic that is abusive and requires moderator attention is dominating beehaw moderators attention.
This isnt a moral judgement - they just don't have the plungers or the juice required to deal with the sewage, so are defederating to protect their own time and attention until those instances get a chance to settle down.
This is fine, that's the point of federation. Beehaw's stated goal is "Aspiring to be(e) a safe, friendly and diverse place." so it's understandable they would want to be more selective with who they federate with to create a "safe space" for those that want that kind of environment.
The problem is that it's still a feudal system like Reddit's is, with power concentrated in the administrative nobility.
The only major difference with Reddit is that the latter has an additional, all-powerful layer of royalty that holds control over these lesser lords. Whereas Lemmy has them all fighting each other.
Either way, the peasantry just has to put up with whatever nonsense battling the ruling class involve themselves in.
In theory, the idea of distributed, or at least decentralized online communities is something I like and want to see a return to. However, I think the folks championing this stuff need to set more realistic expectations.
Anyone whose spent awhile in a hobbyist forum or IRC network has likely experienced that they're just as, if not more prone to moderator drama than even Reddit. Wait until an admin rage-deletes a whole instance over an argument with someone or one community brigades/DOS's another and then you'll get to see the dark side of the "good ol'" community-run forum days.
Honestly, I don't think a centralised app is really a good solution in this space. It's going to be big, it's going to be expensive, and as soon as someone tries to pay for it, they're going to end up repeating all the same mistakes.
I actually think a large problem with lemmy is that it's already too centralised. Each instance is trying to be a reddit. Which is all very nice, but it also means each instance is effectively in competition. I think each instance should be trying to be a subreddit.
The way it'd work in my head is that you'd have two types of instance. Front-end instances that are effectively curators/aggregators & identity providers. They effectively get to present you your front page and r/all. And this is entirely "if you don't like their curation choices, pick another". So here you'd get to pick if your instance is tech-focussed, foss-focussed, as-big-as-possible, family-friendly, politically charged, etc.
And honestly, the only thing stopping that instance from being an app that's not much more than an rss feed-reader, is that I've saddled them with being identity providers too. Which is not the world's biggest hurdle.
The second type of instance would be one subreddit. So moderators are instance administrators, you're trying to build one community in one place, etc. You're just trying to build one community in your one niche/topic, - and you're not trying to compete with other instances who are also trying to be everything to everyone.
I think this would present a lot of benefits. Front-end instances would naturally discover subreddits through the subscriptions their members make. For users, discovery would be through cross-posts, and curation amongst the subreddits their home instance already knows, etc. They can choose their own funding model, ad model, membership model, etc. And if they make choices that are wildly unpopular with their members, they can move to an instance with different ideas/ownership/spez without losing their communities in the process.
For subreddits, administrators can control their costs by, eg, choosing only to host text posts instead of images & media. Brand-owners can own their own communities/identities - ubuntu can run r/ubuntu on their own infrastructure with their own moderators, etc. And we should see a lot less pissing patches like the linked post, because subreddits aren't directly leaning on each other. Hell, there'd be nothing stopping youtube exposing their channels as pseudo-instances.
What I'd really love to see is a return to a world where one person can host their niche community on a $5 VPS - and still get all the benefits of being a subreddit. And at the same time, foss communities & company support forums can join right in without it being a huge risk to themselves, etc.
Asking for centralization is asking for another model where we put all our eggs in one basket, and then wonder why that basket has to kowtow to VC to pay for it all. What worries me is that right now, we're very focussed on breaking free from that, and no-one's exploring what we could actually gain from the alternatives.
And while this risks sounding incredibly hand-wavy - it's really just the forums we all grew up on, sharing a common API.
Yup, I've talked about this a lot to some of the people building some of these things, and I am also convinced that HN like link aggregator type sites that are single community servers are better. There's one federating (Soon™) one called Brutalinks that looks pretty cool. I think the need to have multiple communities on one site is a unique need for centralized services like reddit, and something like categories and tags for different servers in a federation is the proper way to go.
Especially in the tech world, it would make sense for r/php to be hosted and run by the offical php.net guys, r/laravel by the laravel.com crew, r/vuejs by ... (you get it).
However it'd be hard for the subreddit hosters to manage which user-facing instances are allowed to post. If shitposters could just fire up new personal instances every time they were banned, then subreddit hosters would just be playing whack-a-mole and get fed up with it.
They'd almost have to require that users post from instances with good reputations - and now we've just reinvented e-mail's problem of forcing users into using one of the big providers in order to be able to send/post anything.
This is the fate of any federated social, maybe now it is not a big problem and the feature is used properly to moderate spam, but soon it would probably end up like Mastodon, where you can have multiple accounts on different instances, but there are always some instances you cannot access because the moderators have banned a huge list of servers (usually for political reasons) where you have your account, not even .social/.online are safe, and let's not even talk about the biggest Japanese ones.
It happens to be common among these Lemmy sites, we are in early days with this software and it was built and run primarily by communists. Expect the ideological monoculture to slowly erode as weeds, to continue the analogy, begin to take root.
I run my own instance of Mastodon just for myself - and am thinking of doing the same for Lemmy. I, of course, can do that because I have the skills - most don't, so they must rely on sites like these for their accounts.
I've been working on an alternative that is, ultimately, a standalone and lightweight ActivityPub server that handles only one account at a time. The idea would be to serve an account as - in essence - it's own container. If a person just wants to run an instance for themselves off an old laptop in their livingroom (which is how I run my Mastodon instance), they can do that themselves if they have the skills - which I would strive to be minimal.
But, if they needed to rely on someone like beehaw, they could sintead join a "collective" - a central site on one domain that handles all incoming and outgoing messaging, DDOS protection, CDN caching, and even blocklist handling (e.g. reading a user's blocklist and blocking at the outermost layer) then passes what gets through to the individual service running on the backend. A collective could apply a site-wide blocklist, but the users would be able to opt back in because, at the end of the day, they are the ones who are actually federating with these other instances - the collective is, in essence, a firewall or "management layer", akin to an APIM for APIs.
Obviously, I'm not done building this, but I'm going to try and accelerate my work once I get some paid work off my desk. Why wouldn't something like this work? If an account wants to stay connected to a problematic server for whatever their reasons, how would that impact the rest of the collective if federation is handled at the user level?
Or, perhaps a better question, what's wrong with handling federation at the user level? Should I not be able to follow any account or block any account I want? Why must this fall on the backs of the admins?
I've just learned about lemmy today (so not exactly an expert...), but the fact this event is positioned as a negative seems like a harmful take.
This decision makes perfect sense. Beehaw requires applying to sign up with a sort of cover letter. If their community is more restrictive, they should only federate with similar-minded nodes.
I'm wondering, if the current Reddit civil war between spez and the mods would be best handled by a similar arrangement. Create two federated, in a loose definition of the word, Reddits...one run by Reddit and mods spez approves, and one run by the same way its run now. Users could choose which version to use. Posts and comments come from the same source, but mod actions are unique to each version.
I used federated services like Mastadon before its own "Eternal September" and it feels to me, subjectively obviously, as someone who was on the Internet when Gopher, Telnet, MUDs, and USENET were basically it (except email) that there's this new obsession with moderation and walling off networks.
Whatever happened to self-moderating? I have higher standards for my speech and on-line conduct than any TOS. Many others do too. Plus, I know how to use software that allows "kill-files" and won't use any that doesn't give me the ability to "moderate" others if I want by just filtering it.
Vetting? It's a global network. If you want vetting spin up a Linux on Linode or something and invite only,ssh only, and create a forum.
Self-moderating is an enormous effort. People want to leverage each other's work: if this guy says it's bad, it's probably bad.
You see a similar effect in spam. It would be a vast waste of your time to roll your own spam engine. Killfiles aren't sufficient; they spawn new accounts instantly. Spam used to dominate email, until big email hosts developed ways to shunt it off. And that requires constant management as the spammers find ways around those filters.
I'm glad for dang's moderation here on HN. I wouldn't come here if I had to roll my own killfile. It doesn't just keep the worst offenders away. It also keeps the conversations on topic, rather than degenerating into flame wars.
Moderation is of course imperfect, just as spam filters are. But without it, I find any open communications medium unusable. The loudest and most obnoxious voices dominate, effectively creating a different kind of censorship that keeps out the things I actually want.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadLemmy has a great chance achieving what mastodon couldn't, because its the community that matters, not specific users, but with instance blocking each other, any hope of creating a community to rival reddit is going to be thrown out the window.
I haven’t been following lemmy, can you elaborate on this? Isn’t the idea of blocking instances part of the point?
Like if I made “GoatseLemmy: Where Every Post Is Goatse” I wouldn’t expect content on it to be available for everyone without any input from admins that pay to run other servers.
The point of federation is to have the technical ability to post and follow across compatible servers.
The point is not to require every instance to accept posts and followers from every compatible server. If anything, that's the opposite of the point.
Thats a problem because beehaw seems to be the largest with many established subreddit communities, which limits the usability of smaller servers.
Genuinely, I think you will be relieved to read the announcement in TFA whenever it succeeds in loading for you; they just can't handle the moderating burden that the traffic from those servers brings, and given the almost completely unrestricted ability to create accounts in those instances it shouldn't be surprising. Beehaw would like more granular control but that isnt available (yet?), and they'd refederate once everything cooled down.
As if being a federated network wasn't enough of a hurdle for new users, now we have instances blocking each other already.
If you cant make decisions about the sort of traffic your server receives and choose to defederate for pragmatic reasons then your service is not decentralized in fact.
Put another way - if your ideal service is identical to reddit, and each instance is connected to all, then your service is just as centralized. It just has an unusually fussy and bespoke database design.
Having the right to divorce your spouse is important. But nobody wants to date someone whose been married 4 times.
But more seriously - I don't see how you can remain marri.. federated, when one or more instances operates as a much more popular open relay.
I don't have the words for this, so please interpret charitably and correct candidly, but there is an expectation that each instance performs its own vetting and policing, so everyone can work together as individual fiefs without a central authority, and each piece can be as big or as small as it needs to be to sidestep that 'small unreachable team with enormous surface area' thing that we're doing so much of everywhere else? Yes?
If I have that right then this seems like a perfectly appropriate time to block with a similar emotional tenor as closing a water main to deal with a leak.
Why would you expect that? Don't Mastodon instances also routinely block each other?
but in Reddits case, you follow an interest instead of a specific person, meaning if enough people are active in the tech community on Lemmy it can replace reddit much faster than mastodon can replace twitter, as it doesn't matter which users migrated.
Also, blocking nodes in a distributed social network is neither new nor unhealthy. Usenet has killfiles. IRC has k-lines. Far from being injurious in themselves, they're essential tools to prevent some rando from setting up a bogus instance and using it to spray garbage all over everything. I already had to block one obvious ex-Redditor who had done exactly that on Mastodon, shitting all over a thread that had been going well until then. I was utterly unsurprised to see that they got defederated shortly afterward. That's what should happen when people can't stop misbehaving.
Do I wish that the fediverse had better moderation tools, both separate from defederation and for coordinating defederation decisions? Of course I do. AIUI coordination is done now - when it's done at all - with an ad hoc system based on tags, of all things, and that's a bit absurd. I have some ideas about how a better system might look or be implemented, but I certainly don't fault anyone for using the tools they have during a period of such rapid growth.
Managing multiple identities is challenging. It’s solved-problem challenging, but that implies a single client which sort of defeats the purpose of de-centralising the back end.
It sounds like a minor hurdle to our demographic but most people are super lazy and bad at juggling online authentications. I would never recommend Mastodon to any non-tech person for that reason (beyond the other UI issues) unless there was a specific niche community they were interested in.
But you also have the option of using an instance that didn't ban the community you're interested in, which you don't with reddit.
"You don't need an account on social media unless you want to interact with people on the internet"
This whole defederation thing is going to guarantee a win for centralized services.
Fair enough. It might be that a community back end and commercial front end are the uptime solution. In the back, people with principles. In the front, someone who actually cares about the people on the other side of the screen.
Which is unfortunate because I think some neat projects flounder for lack of good onboarding.
With Lemmy that's not the case. It's about sharing information and discussing it. So federation is less crucial, but it does add one powerful benefit: the network itself can have network effects and grow to critical mass, leveraging the same benefit Reddit had over disparate forums and the like. It's not a necessity from a user perspective, but it makes it feel like all the information is in one place and so users prefer it anyway.
At least wait for people to settle in first!
Just as there is no simultaneous conversation about, say, walnuts in offline life, so there are multiple communities that discuss walnuts on boards with all the predicates and social constructs those communities have, from focuses towards, say, farming to environment to cooking, objective focuses, or social focuses in belief, location, language, of community. And no one's prevented from starting their own walnut focused board or even community.
That Lemmys are choosing to not try to be super catch-alls from the start I see as healthy for communities.
For search/discoverability, multiple boards each dedicated to walnuts may not aid discovery, especially in tails where signal is strong, perhaps oldskool directories/newskool directory of search/filtering could start to come in useful.
Should have waited another 12 hours to get it confirmed that it's never going to pan out
It feels a little surprising for it to happen this quickly, that's all.
So if you have instance A which is federated with instance B, and if instance A sees instance C as hostile, it obviously defederates from instance C, but it would become problematic if instance A would also defederate from instance B simply because instance B is federated with instance C.
https://archive.ph/UooY2
“Lemmy instances are already blocking each other“ is a kind of weirdly editorialized headline here. It kind of implies that there was some sort of promise that fediverse servers weren’t going to block other servers, and that promise had been broken or something.
“Beehaw de-federates from two other servers following influx of trolls” would be more accurate.
Beehaw is the second largest instance by number of users - and LemmyWorld is the third.
Them defederating from each other effectively shards the network into two halves, making the whole thing useless.
Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
Why's that? The typical user problem isn't "see all the content", it's "see some good content". As long as the two halves have critical mass, it could well be fine. For example, the fact that Reddit and Twitter were separate networks didn't prevent both of them from growing pretty well.
This is a key dynamic. People are used to social media sites being kept livable thanks to a team of paid professionals and fancy ML tooling, often supported by volunteer labor. But here the volunteers are in charge and many of them have other things to do than deal with people's bullshit just to keep the user growth graph going up and to the right.
ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
The actual reason is that the defederated servers have open enrollment and have grown large enough that the small fraction of their traffic that is abusive and requires moderator attention is dominating beehaw moderators attention.
This isnt a moral judgement - they just don't have the plungers or the juice required to deal with the sewage, so are defederating to protect their own time and attention until those instances get a chance to settle down.
The only major difference with Reddit is that the latter has an additional, all-powerful layer of royalty that holds control over these lesser lords. Whereas Lemmy has them all fighting each other.
Either way, the peasantry just has to put up with whatever nonsense battling the ruling class involve themselves in.
Anyone whose spent awhile in a hobbyist forum or IRC network has likely experienced that they're just as, if not more prone to moderator drama than even Reddit. Wait until an admin rage-deletes a whole instance over an argument with someone or one community brigades/DOS's another and then you'll get to see the dark side of the "good ol'" community-run forum days.
I actually think a large problem with lemmy is that it's already too centralised. Each instance is trying to be a reddit. Which is all very nice, but it also means each instance is effectively in competition. I think each instance should be trying to be a subreddit.
The way it'd work in my head is that you'd have two types of instance. Front-end instances that are effectively curators/aggregators & identity providers. They effectively get to present you your front page and r/all. And this is entirely "if you don't like their curation choices, pick another". So here you'd get to pick if your instance is tech-focussed, foss-focussed, as-big-as-possible, family-friendly, politically charged, etc.
And honestly, the only thing stopping that instance from being an app that's not much more than an rss feed-reader, is that I've saddled them with being identity providers too. Which is not the world's biggest hurdle.
The second type of instance would be one subreddit. So moderators are instance administrators, you're trying to build one community in one place, etc. You're just trying to build one community in your one niche/topic, - and you're not trying to compete with other instances who are also trying to be everything to everyone.
I think this would present a lot of benefits. Front-end instances would naturally discover subreddits through the subscriptions their members make. For users, discovery would be through cross-posts, and curation amongst the subreddits their home instance already knows, etc. They can choose their own funding model, ad model, membership model, etc. And if they make choices that are wildly unpopular with their members, they can move to an instance with different ideas/ownership/spez without losing their communities in the process.
For subreddits, administrators can control their costs by, eg, choosing only to host text posts instead of images & media. Brand-owners can own their own communities/identities - ubuntu can run r/ubuntu on their own infrastructure with their own moderators, etc. And we should see a lot less pissing patches like the linked post, because subreddits aren't directly leaning on each other. Hell, there'd be nothing stopping youtube exposing their channels as pseudo-instances.
What I'd really love to see is a return to a world where one person can host their niche community on a $5 VPS - and still get all the benefits of being a subreddit. And at the same time, foss communities & company support forums can join right in without it being a huge risk to themselves, etc.
Asking for centralization is asking for another model where we put all our eggs in one basket, and then wonder why that basket has to kowtow to VC to pay for it all. What worries me is that right now, we're very focussed on breaking free from that, and no-one's exploring what we could actually gain from the alternatives.
And while this risks sounding incredibly hand-wavy - it's really just the forums we all grew up on, sharing a common API.
Especially in the tech world, it would make sense for r/php to be hosted and run by the offical php.net guys, r/laravel by the laravel.com crew, r/vuejs by ... (you get it).
However it'd be hard for the subreddit hosters to manage which user-facing instances are allowed to post. If shitposters could just fire up new personal instances every time they were banned, then subreddit hosters would just be playing whack-a-mole and get fed up with it.
They'd almost have to require that users post from instances with good reputations - and now we've just reinvented e-mail's problem of forcing users into using one of the big providers in order to be able to send/post anything.
Too bad we can't have nice things
… but also kinda creepy.
I've been working on an alternative that is, ultimately, a standalone and lightweight ActivityPub server that handles only one account at a time. The idea would be to serve an account as - in essence - it's own container. If a person just wants to run an instance for themselves off an old laptop in their livingroom (which is how I run my Mastodon instance), they can do that themselves if they have the skills - which I would strive to be minimal.
But, if they needed to rely on someone like beehaw, they could sintead join a "collective" - a central site on one domain that handles all incoming and outgoing messaging, DDOS protection, CDN caching, and even blocklist handling (e.g. reading a user's blocklist and blocking at the outermost layer) then passes what gets through to the individual service running on the backend. A collective could apply a site-wide blocklist, but the users would be able to opt back in because, at the end of the day, they are the ones who are actually federating with these other instances - the collective is, in essence, a firewall or "management layer", akin to an APIM for APIs.
Obviously, I'm not done building this, but I'm going to try and accelerate my work once I get some paid work off my desk. Why wouldn't something like this work? If an account wants to stay connected to a problematic server for whatever their reasons, how would that impact the rest of the collective if federation is handled at the user level?
Or, perhaps a better question, what's wrong with handling federation at the user level? Should I not be able to follow any account or block any account I want? Why must this fall on the backs of the admins?
This decision makes perfect sense. Beehaw requires applying to sign up with a sort of cover letter. If their community is more restrictive, they should only federate with similar-minded nodes.
I'm wondering, if the current Reddit civil war between spez and the mods would be best handled by a similar arrangement. Create two federated, in a loose definition of the word, Reddits...one run by Reddit and mods spez approves, and one run by the same way its run now. Users could choose which version to use. Posts and comments come from the same source, but mod actions are unique to each version.
Not that Reddit would ever do that.
Whatever happened to self-moderating? I have higher standards for my speech and on-line conduct than any TOS. Many others do too. Plus, I know how to use software that allows "kill-files" and won't use any that doesn't give me the ability to "moderate" others if I want by just filtering it.
Vetting? It's a global network. If you want vetting spin up a Linux on Linode or something and invite only,ssh only, and create a forum.
You see a similar effect in spam. It would be a vast waste of your time to roll your own spam engine. Killfiles aren't sufficient; they spawn new accounts instantly. Spam used to dominate email, until big email hosts developed ways to shunt it off. And that requires constant management as the spammers find ways around those filters.
I'm glad for dang's moderation here on HN. I wouldn't come here if I had to roll my own killfile. It doesn't just keep the worst offenders away. It also keeps the conversations on topic, rather than degenerating into flame wars.
Moderation is of course imperfect, just as spam filters are. But without it, I find any open communications medium unusable. The loudest and most obnoxious voices dominate, effectively creating a different kind of censorship that keeps out the things I actually want.