cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one:

we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.

we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is–particularly with federation in mind–basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we’re being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).

an unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.

aside from/complementary to what’s mentioned above, 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

as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:

There’s a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it’s not just that, there’s a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it’s really hard to trust and support who’s around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there’s more hostility around them. They’ll even shut themselves off when there’s fake nice behavior around. There’s a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it’s not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can’t even assess that for people who aren’t from our instance, so we’re walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn’t sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.

Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren’t open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.

and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it’s in effect. but we hope you can understand why we’re doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.

this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.

thanks for using our site folks.

  • @arpOP
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    51 year ago

    I know this is not strictly relevant to lemmy.studio, but I just thought that this sets an interesting precedent and is probably quite a blow for lemmy as a reddit replacement.

    • @Scaldart@lemmy.world
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      61 year ago

      The admins of Beehaw have been on one since its inception. Not that I mean to shit-talk them at all—I have a great degree of respect for what they are trying to accomplish, and the community springing up around them seems to be largely positive. But, that said, one of the reasons I chose not to register there were the constant tirades. This is just another one of those. They’re attempting very hardly to curate something that doesn’t, in my opinion, really jive with the idea of federation.

      As an extension, it seems like Beehaw would be much better suited to becoming its own web forum rather than a part of Lemmy. Now, again, that’s not to say they can’t exist successfully on Lemmy, but whether it is one instance or another, it will be a game of whack-a-mole with bad actors, even if they end up pursuing a white-list approach. That’s just the nature of something like this. You have to have the core community, yes, but you need enough instance mods and admins to handle it, too.

      Hopefully they’ll get it all figured out and swing back around. But, as with anything, we shall see.

      • @arpOP
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        41 year ago

        Yeah, if I understoof correctly, they are quite strict in their administration policies, so that probably just doesn’t work with the vibe of the rest of the fediverse that well and they might become more and more isolationist over time, so, yeah, i agree with your web forum point!

          • @arpOP
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            1 year ago

            i’m not too sure, but I think you should to be able to access both from your instance. You can always check the instances page!

            EDIT: i was wrong - yeah, you can’t view or comment on beehaw.org content