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.
Why can I still see posts/comments from beehaw users?
Until they defederated us, posts/comments were being sent to lemmy.world, so we can see everything from before defederation. After defederation, we are no longer receiving or sending updates. So there are now multiple versions of those posts.
Why can I still interact with beehaw communities?
This won’t ever stop. You’ll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won’t see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities.
Those communities will quickly suck for us, as we’re only talking to other lemmy.world users. Your posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. I highly recommend just unsubscribing from those communities, since they’re pretty pointless for us to be in right now.
Why do I still see comments from beehaw users on lemmy.world communities?
Again, comments from before defederation were still sent to us. After defederation, it will no longer be possible for beehaw users to interact with the “true” version of lemmy.world communities. Their posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. They also aren’t getting updates from any other lemmy, as the “true” version of those communities is on our instance.
Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?
That’s because the “true” version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn’t defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.
The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.
This seems like it’s worse for beehaw users than for us?
Yes. In my opinion, this is an extraordinarily dumb act by the beehaw instance owners. It’s worse for beehaw users than for us, and will likely result in many beehaw users leaving that instance. They said in their post that this is a nuke, but I don’t think they fully assessed the blast area. Based on their post, I don’t think they fully understand what defederation does.
i deleted my beehaw account and registered here as soon as i read about the defederation. They’re trying to police the beehaw community way too much, bunch of softies imo…
Welcome! With a name like “beehaw” can you ever take that instance seriously? (sorry, I really dislike the instance name lol)
What does the name beehaw refer to?
Play on the hillbilly “yeeehawwwww!” ?
A lot of people are missing the point of their defederation, which is a lack of proper moderation team and tools for the sudden scale they are exposed to as one of the most popular place of discussion with the rexxit with them harboring some of the most active communities around.
Their issue is mainly bad actors, trolls and harassers coming from those big instances and overwhelming them.
Defederation is the big-nuke symptom of a wider fediverse problem, a lack of moderation tools and readiness for scale, that I also saw happen a lot on Mastodon. I followed the infosec instance and they basically ended up having to defederate the biggest mastodon instances for a few days at a time when stuff like spam and cryptobro DMs ran rampant. I’ve received many of those so I can tell you that it’s pretty real.
Construing their decision as a desire to fracture the community is missing the actual reason they’ve tried to articulate. It’s a temporary stopgap for the 4 admins who just weren’t expecting the sort of volume and associated misbehaving problems they are suddenly getting.
Overall, Lemmy is getting through a pretty intense “shit just got real” moment. Please bear with it, people are working really hard at solving this from what I can see.
This is the first time I’ve heard someone call the exodus from reddit “rexxit.” I haven’t been on lemmy too much yet so maybe it’s a common term I I’ve just missed but I love it.
I’m by no means the one who coined it. I just read it someplace else, but I find it fitting too!
I believed their intentions were good at first, until I’ve read/seen how they treat users who dissent at all, and even chastise and accuse users who ask for clarification of rules as outing themselves as a bigot. That includes admin responses to users there genuinely asking about rules with terribly vague wording…
That place is on a fast tract to becoming a shit reddit says clone; not a clone of reddit in general…
I’ve seen SRS, neogaf and resetera follow that sort of route so I get where you’re coming from.
I’ve yet to interact a lot with beehaw so I reserve judgment on that front though. As you said, I think their defederation comes from a good place, having seen the same happen to a lot of mastodon instances.
I do know I certainly won’t be interested if beehaw turns into the same kind of abuse-ridden, toxic hellhole as the above, that’s for sure.
'Misbehaving ’ that says a lot about what’s really going on
Because they have community rules? It’s pretty normal for communities and online spaces to have rules and moderate those rules and if you misbehave aka ignore said rules, you get either your comment deleted or banned. Just like in real life, if you are at my house and you don’t follow my rules and just dig holes in my garden or destroy something because it’s fun, I will show you the door. Same goes for online places. The server/instance owner/host etc makes the rules
Construing their decision as a desire to fracture the community is missing the actual reason they’ve tried to articulate. It’s a temporary stopgap for the 4 admins who just weren’t expecting the sort of volume and associated misbehaving problems they are suddenly getting.
Thanks for this explanation, this makes a lot of sense and makes me less concerned about the whole thing.
Serious question though, if a server defederates, do the communities hosted on other servers just become completely un-moderated? This seems like a serious liability for the overall community.
Serious question though, if a server defederates, do the communities hosted on other servers just become completely un-moderated? This seems like a serious liability for the overall community.
I’m not the most savvy person there but it simply means to me that the defederated server cannot post or interact with the matching server. Moderation still works on both ends, enacted by their respective teams. This is akin to a server-wide “mute” button directed to content from another server.
Someone needs to make a regularly updated map of which instances are federated with which other instances.
Edit: Ok, apparently there’s one here but there’s over 600 instances and trying to show the connections between all of them destroys your browser.
For context; the beehaw announcement
Thank you. This is what I was looking for.
I can understand wanting to have a well-moderated community.
What I don’t understand is how they expect to do that with a moderation team of just 4 people.
I guess now people will just leave Beehaw, its communities that were popular here will be replaced by others in the Fediverse and life will go on. The Fediverse is built to be resilient to such changes.
The crazy part is that they want to be able to view and comment on other instances’ posts but not vice versa.
Like why should other instances agree to that?
Hopefully beehaw dies off quickly.
Hopefully beehaw dies off quickly.
I don’t get why you hope for this? Isn’t the point of fediverse to have lot of different instances for different people?
Beehaw will continue existing as it chooses to exist, with or without lemmy.world. Isn’t that a good thing? That’s decentralization. That’s what we want more of.
It’s a really shitty thing to do a growing platform. For the 3rd largest server to defederate a week into the platform growing is going to go a long way to convincing folks this platform isn’t viable. Honestly this may be it for me.
The Beehaw admins are really in love with their ideals but I can’t help but feel like they have effectively kneecapped a new platform.
I think your points about frustration are valid, particularly at this time when there’s a lot of reddit refugees. That said, it’s Beehaw’s choice what they’re willing to put up with. I think defederation with entire instances is a very extreme response to their issues, but ultimately it’s their choice.
I think with the admins’ mentality over there, they will probably end up with a very large defederation block list. For that reason, it is probably for the best if Lemmy’s most active communities were NOT hosted there. People should put the energy into building up other communities so the platform more broadly isn’t reliant on extremely moderated instances like Beehaw.
Major communities should be on instances that welcome a wide range of views that are also willing to have a robust and diverse admin team to handle issues, imo. That would be the healthiest solution overall. Beehaw choosing to defederate now is a blessing in disguise; it’s an early statement proving that instance is an unsuitable host for any community looking to be home to a broad-reaching and diverse member base.
This is a roadblock for sure, but this platform does work. I feel like the fediverse is perfect for Reddit. As soon as chat moves from beehaw we’ll be rolling again!
Yeah, the level of entitlement is insane.
The crazy part is that they want to be able to view and comment on other instances’ posts but not vice versa
Where did you get this idea from? They won’t be able to interact with other instances from Beehaw. They clearly don’t want to based on this action.
Read their comments - https://beehaw.org/comment/262284
Site (instance)-wide limiting is exactly that.
I disagree. It’s like a poorly implemented private subreddit. People didn’t complain that that was possible before and I don’t see why they should now.
It’s quite literally free-loading off other instances though.
Not just in the content sense, but also the actual monetary cost of the image hosting, etc.
How much cost are you to lemmy.world? Are you planning to track it and pay for it?
How much cost is it to lemmy.world to federate with another instance? Are they going to keep track of it and send out invoices?
This free-loading complaint rings hollow.
On that note, is there a donations thing somewhere for lemmy.world? Would like the donate to the community so the servers can keep on scaling
Check the sidebar at https://lemmy.world/
They are fine with being a small community. They aren’t interested in growth for growth’s sake. They existed for 18 months with around 200 members and were content with that continuing indefinitely. They aren’t against growth, they simply don’t value it highly.
And yet they still have the largest communities by an order of magnitude.
The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users. And beehaw didn’t have confidence in the moderation of shit just works and lemmy.world and couldn’t keep up with banning them on their side. Thats why they defederated.
The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users.
It’s correct what you say, but the idea bugs me the more I understand it.
It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance. These other users can have nothing in common with the causing users, or might have even opposed them in their wrongdoings.
There is also a level between users and instances; communities. Maybe the problem was with one specific community, yet all other communities who happen to live on the same instance feel the same consequences.
Defederating individual communities would feel better for me, but ultimately I think a problem caused by individuals should be solved with these individuals, not with groups which are more or less meaningfully associated with those individuals.
undefined> It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance.
That’s why I always thought that the ideal scenario for federated web is to have instances that are either single-user or are down to friends-of-friends level of members (say, under 100 users per instance), so that there can be social accountability and if you have a bad actor on your instance, then it’s easy to kick them out and preserve your reputation. Bad actors will concentrate on their own instances and they can be defederated without collateral damage.
So, if Beehaw’s registration model is invite-only (that’s what I gather from this thread), then I think they probably have the right approach to federation; they are vouching for their users and they are responsible for making sure that they won’t be damaging communities across the federation.
Unfortunately Lemmy doesn’t have that kind of fine tuned control yet
I don’t think you’re technically wrong, but I think with the reddit migration it’s overall damaging to the concept of a fediverse to have a large instance defederate with two huge instances.
There are people who are just getting settled only to find out they now have to use two accounts to access the content they needed one for yesterday.
Yeah, the solution is just to leave beehaw though. It takes a few minutes to make a new account on another instance. If they really want to access the beehaw stuff they could join an instance that is still federated with them, that way they could see the beehaw posts and the lemmy.world posts.
It’s probably best just to abandon beehaw entirely though and use alternative communities in the Fediverse.
People really shouldn’t see that as a bug, it’s a feature. Reddit does something you don’t like? Too bad. One instance in the fediverse does something you don’t like? It’s incredibly easy to leave. Maybe some day you’ll be able to transfer accounts to other instances, that’d be neat.
I made a new account yesterday. The beehaw node was a choice but I did not take it. I won’t be making two accounts to access “all of this content” and this little bit over here.
I’m not sure what would change my mind but it would need to be very enticing.
Yeah having 4 mods for something this large isn’t realistic, though I also understand they have problems with the moderation tools. Hopefully they can find more mods and lemmy can get better tools. I think once that happens they are considering refederation.
As much as it seems like a bone headed decision I can understand why they made it and that they probably didn’t have much choice given the resources theu have. I suggested to them that they should consider a whitelist/invite only system of users from certain instances instead. I haven’t heard back from the mods on that but another user has already tried to shoot me down.
Edit: I have been told a whitelist isn’t currently supported by Lemmy.
It won’t. There will be likely lots of cases of mod abuse that ends up pushing users away. Moderation requires a healthy balance, not an extreme of either side. Lots of Reddit subs had similar issues, but they at least benefited from the overall growth of the platform itself to fill the previous slots with new users.
It seems like Beehaw want to create a closed community they can moderate. That kind of makes sense for their aims but they will need to defederate from more and more services to maintain that over time.
It seems a bit of a kneejerk in reaction to the influx of new users but essentially it means they’ll not be part of the fediverse, and they risk creating an echochamber. It’s rather the opposite of their stated aim of creating a diverse community, and will probably stymie their growth going forward.
they want a “safe space” lol
I am actually happy to see that Lemmy is a much safer space than Reddit. And I can understand any move to keep it safer.
This doesn’t sound in line with the moderator reasoning on the source post. They wanted better moderation tools to handle the influx of new users. Sure one can read between the lines as much as they want… doesn’t make it anything more than a wild accusation.
They said that they want to federate but it isn’t feasible with current mod tools and that they made request for more dev tools. So hopefully they can federate again soon
Yeah, just seems they got overwhelmed by the amount of posts. I think that’s fair given all of us reddit refugees
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Hey I am just going to throw this out into the ether, I have been on the lemmy instances longer than beehaw, and I have yet to find an instance whos admin team I would trust less with their stated reasoning. I would not trust their stated reasoning and if I had to guess they are trying to get Lemmy.world to change something to come into line with them. if you ask me you have dodged a bullet. I hope lemmy.world stands strong
You’re not wrong… beehaw admins literally have a list of demands.
I’m okay with letting their community push out reasonable users as it festers in its toxic positivity and hypersensitivity turned into toxic hostility to nonconformity.
It’s far from a safe place. If you so much as ask for clarification of a rule you will be labeled by their admins and toxic community as outing yourself as a bigot who doesn’t belong there.
Whether or not it’s how it started, it feels like the most toxic users from shit reddit says migrated to beehaw under the guise of a safe place for the LGBTQI+ community.
THANK YOU THIS RIGHT HERE ! Dude how the fuck is anyone else not seeing this?
I think this is the best explanation of how federation works that I’ve seen so far. Really appreciate it. So would it benefit us to use an account for me different website to get the benefit of both communities? Is there a way to be essentially logged into two accounts at once so that you can see separate federated communities all at once?
People joined Beehaw because it’s the most similar instance to current reddit. The problem is that current reddit policy just doesn’t work.
I think it’ll take time for all the reddit migration to develop a unique Lemmy culture away from reddit (there is always risk for a bad culture like what happened to Voat of course), and if they continue their current course, Beehaw will just get left behind as proof of failure of Reddit remnant on Lemmy.
Reddit actually allows downvotes. Beehaw is more of a forced safe space.
As someone just learning and exploring the Fediverse, what in your opinion would be a good reason to defederate? Also, thanks for the excellent write-up to help me understand better
Seems like they’re just using the wrong software? A private forum is more in line with what they want it seems.
Great write up! Definitely going to point this to people who ask me about how fed stuff works
Yes excellent work explaining how this all works. This fragmentation is what I feared as it will cause users to get frustrated, give up and leave these communities.
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I guess I’m glad I picked Lemmy.one – the Switzerland of US-bases Lemmy instances :)
Better than lemmy.world?
Is there even a tangible difference besides instance name and federation with other instances? (Genuine newbie question)
lemmy.world is hosted by the same guy who is hosts https://mastodon.world so for me it gave me confidence that he knows what he is doing considering they have 27K active users.
Lemmy.world has also been the most stable (large) instance due to being run on “big boy equipment” as I read, no?
That is correct. It was originally hosted on a VPS and there are plans to move it to a dedicated server although that may have already happened
Yeah, it runs on a dedicated server now
Curious too. I think we it really only matters if the server admins can keep it up and if the mod team is sane. Though I don’t know how federated modding works. What if one instance is ok with hate speech is the only option defederation? What if it is a single post instead?
Yes it will be defederation. It’s not sitting well with me that one person gets to decide this. Why the fuck am I using this if everyone is going to be anal and just defederated?
How the fuck is that beneficial?
Users need to block things themselves. They need to be responsible for what want and don’t want to see
Hmm, yeah let’s see how things pan out. 100 tiny reddits with insane admins is not a step in the right direction
That’s my biggest concern about the whole federation concept. I took a bit of time before joining this instance and ultimately did, because it seems to have none of the common restrictions (no downvotes or NSFW content for example) and also an admin that already has experience hosting a Mastodon instance.
However, we still all live in this instance. Should the admin ever decide to pull the plug, the accounts are gone.
Yes, the same is obviously true about Reddit, but the 3rd party appocalypse clearly showed one thing: Money can become an issue really quick. Our admin may have the best intentions, but as soon as the community grows to a point where stemming the cost of the server infrastructure isn’t possible anymore, we are in trouble.
And mind you we are running on proper hardware it seems. I’m sure other instances run on leftover hardware in someone’s basement without a proper data center connection.
I think this can be solved by allowing linking of accounts. If I have accounts on multiple servers that sync, then you have a failsafe if one goes down. Or you could just send host your own instance and own your own data.
I was right with not choosing beehaw. Mod tham is just like reddit’s. They don’t seemingly understand the point of the fediverse, and ruin the place with radical decisions. They should have spoken to the other communites first.
I think they might not have the capacity to deal with the influx of new users modding and server wise so they want to reduce traffic
Looks pretty dumb to me, but hey if they want a walled community they have the right to have it.
It doesn’t align with me and it makes me super happy of being here instead of there.
Thanks a lot for the explanation and also your other example comment, super useful!
As for me, I’ll simply unjoin their communities and find the same somewhere else, I feel a bit sad tho for open users there that will have to create a new account somewhere else.
