Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.
I’ve been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to “lemmy” as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.
For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw’s communities are “owned” by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances’ content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw “owns” the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.
This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.
Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren’t going to read technical documentation?
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
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It’s unfortunate that a handful of replies here are demonstrating exactly why the Beehaw community leaders felt they had to make this choice. 😞
If Lemmy instances are like web forums, federation basically gives us a “Sign in with your [home instance] account” option. (That’s not technically accurate at all, I’m only talking about the user experience.) It reduces user friction and helps people participate more widely. They just stopped allowing that from certain instances because they think adding a bit of friction back in will be healthier for the Beehaw communities. If you’re on one of the defederated instances, you aren’t banned. Yeah, it’s inconvenient for you, but you just need a different sign-in (at least for the time being).
From an end user perspective, I want a singular UI to browse all my various Lemmy identities in a cohesive manner. Not logged in on multiple tabs, trying to keep my subscription lists synced or otherwise organized. This is where a good app front end could smooth a lot of user friction out of the process.
People also need to be mindful that the concept of the fediverse isn’t a simple one, not to the majority of people who use Reddit / other sites. We want to try and streamline the process of searching for, signing up to and contributing to content, at least if we want these platforms to continue to grow.
We don’t need the 400+ million that Reddit has but having more interested users will help generate more content / engagement
This is a bad take because you used the most extreme example of why defederation is a practical necessity to justify a significantly less serious issue. I personally would want the bar to be much higher for this kind of thing.
I also don’t “misunderstand” anything here. I just strongly disagree with the decision. What’s next, beehaw gets upset that other instances allow downvoting?
Hi, Beehaw user here. You can downvote me all you want and they’ll never appear on my instance so that won’t be an issue. I could be sitting at -50 on your instance and it’ll always appear as 1 on mine.
Honestly though, I’m a big fan of the defederation decision (at least for now). It’s only a temporary measure until Lemmy gets more powerful mod tools and then they’ll refederate when they can more easily moderate the trolls and bad actors. This is one of the features of the fediverse, got an instance that’s producing a large amount of trolls? Not anymore! Insta-community clean. The only people I’ve ran across that don’t like it are normally the people that end up getting banned tbh.
Edit: For reference to the vote scores, on Beehaw this is currently sitting at 44 upvotes for me. If anybody is viewing from an instance with downvotes, that’s how it appears for Beehaw users.
Personally, I think there is way too much overreaction to the defederations. I agree with admins’ reasons, and it is clear that the minute there are sufficient moderation tools available, that the impacted servers will be re-federated.
The pressure is now on the developers to start pushing more iterative moderation tools - something that wasn’t a priority before Reddit decided to implode, and now looks like it needs to be reprioritized. This is a project/project management issue.
The problem isn’t the decision to defederate, it’s that the only solution to handle bad actors is binary. It’s like shaving your head because you have over-dried out hair, when you’d rather just cut the split ends.
I am willing to be patient because I see Lemmy as a long-term engagement. I’ve been off Reddit since the AMA and haven’t had any desire to go back. I’d rather invest the time here and show the devs that prioritizing more iterative mod tools is a good ROI for them.
Completely agree, I don’t like that defederation is the only tool but glad that it’s there at least. Looking forward to when those more powerful tools can be developed for the mods but this works as a bandaid for now.
The only interaction I’ve had with Reddit is going through my saved posts and bringing over to Lemmy what I think is worth it. Next up is deleting the account and editing all the comments.
I like this choice of words. The wounds suffered by reddit are aggressively self-inflicted.
“Community organizers keep promises about their community management goals. Outrage ensues.”
You clearly misunderstand the decision to defederate if that’s your counterexample. It wasn’t about beehaw “disliking a thing other serves do” it was about unjustified moderation time, a lack of mod tools, and a worsening of the community values that were trying to be achieved.
I recommend if you’re interested, reading the community philosophy on beehaw to better understand why trolls in the space warrant quick action.
I do not think that anyone “likes” de-federation. In the end though people coming in from other nodes are guests in our forums. We do not have to put up with bad behavior. Moreover instances that allow their users to engage in this bad behavior take some responsibility too. They are your users after all. So if your instance gets banned look to your instances users, and also the admins and their policies that allow those users on that node. Do not under estimate the troll problem. Moderation is required and if it cannot be done effectively then other actions have to be taken like de-federation.
Then again, your coming from lemmy.ml and are not de-federated so why do you care. It is also a bit rich when lemmy.ml has not accepting subscriptions from behaw since I joined. Maybe you should complain about that too.
Nice slippery slope fallacy. Try arguing in bad faith somewhere else.
This is so cool, these discussions remind me of events in the Bobiverse books where the spirit of these topics are similar. Also the start trek instance is totally getting this right from my perspective of things (startrek.website). Of course there are many ways to approach this as « right » is one’s opinion.
Signing up for social networking so you can start yanking tech support and reading man pages right away? Is this some elaborate masochistic exploration that we don’t know about? What the vuck are you all talking about…
People need to understand what lemmy is. This is not monolithic social media like facebook or reddit. People need to understand that, or the mismatch between how they think it works and how it actually works is going to cause a lot of mental anguish that could be avoided.
As they say in software development, 8 hours of debugging can save you from one hour of reading the manual.
I’m reading this on kbin(new transplant from an old Reddit account) and I have little idea what this is about lol
Here’s an analogy, hope it helps:
Kbin.social and beehaw.org are like really advanced email servers (e.g. outlook.com, gmail.com)
The content you’re seeing on kbin is like viewing an email sent from another server, in the case of this thread you’re getting content from beehaw.org.
These aren’t just normal emails, they’re super advanced emails with comments, replies, categories, votes etc.
The content is downloaded to the kbin servers for your viewing pleasure, and you can send an ‘email’ back to beehaw by engaging in their posts/communities like you’re doing now. That will send what you’ve done back to beehaw so it’s all synced up for their users.
If beehaw ever goes down/gets unlinked from kbin you’ll still have the old ‘emails’ (content) but you won’t be able to engage with them anymore. Like if someone deleted their email account it doesn’t delete all the emails they sent to other people.
Sure, and I should’ve been more clear and said people need to understand what the Fediverse is.
This is, ultimately, about what federation means and how this platform operates. Its deficiencies, and the way things work currently to address those deficiencies. What I have posted is just as true for kbin as it is for lemmy.
Personally, with a background in software/programming, but little to no knowledge about how ActivityPub and the interactions between federated instances work, I really appreciate this post and the discussions. Learned a lot today!
Thanks, I really appreciate that. Education was the foremost goal of this post, and I’m glad some of that may have come through
As we are seeing the same issues with Lemmy and Mastodon I’m starting to think there is something fundamentally wrong with ActivityPub.
Because instances pull content from others they have a responsibility in the content, so instances with different rules can’t really work together.
If on the other hand we had a lighter integration between instances, like for example RSS to consume from multiple instances and only having federation for identity management (like OpenID or OAuth) I feel like we could avoid a lot of drama.
know very little about the programming but it feels like there would be some sort of SSO multi-instance user account syncing solution.
Make an account on one instance, say Lemmy.World, and from that account request access to the other instances that you would like to join. Your account would get cloned and synced to the other instances that you get accepted to and posts/comments in that instance would be stored on that instance account as a secondary instance.
Posts could be cloned to all federated clone accounts or you could designate a secondary backup acount in case the primary server goes down. Maybe there could be a limit of instances you join like 3-5 cloned accounts to reduce duplication of data and maybe only clone messages, not media or something unless specifically requested. It would also allow for folks to continue posting and browsing even if their primary instance is overloaded or down which would improve the end user experience.
Again I only have an approximate idea how this works so this may all be dumb…
In practice this would be difficult to implement because each instance has its own take on how to shape the code for their site. There’s no obligation to create an instance so that it will be compatible with everyone else’s instance, and in fact I would guess that would be effectively impossible.
Let’s say Instance A allows porn, and a user on A wants to create an account on Instance B, but Instance B doesn’t want any porn on their server. At minimum, a way to keep any porn on that user’s account from syncing to B’s server would have to be implemented.
This is only a single case. There will be plenty more small issues like that to have to work around, so it will take a lot of time to get all that logic designed, implemented and tested.
The cloning of an account might also involve a not-insignificant amount of data being transferred. What if the receiving server wants to limit the amount of data storage for a new account so that they’re not burdened with storing tons of data for new, unknown users? How do you then determine what subset of that user’s data to import?
Maybe these things will happen with enough time, but for now I think it’s best for now at least if everyone thinks of each instance as its own separate website that can communicate with other similar sites rather than a set of cloned sites where which one you pick doesn’t matter.
Please don’t take this as argumentative, as we need people to share ideas like yours! I just keep seeing messages that give me the impression that people have expectations for the Threadiverse that aren’t currently realistic given what the state of the software is now.
Yeah I figured there would be technical challenges. I imagine the data load would be fairly large, but since its a growing platform data growth is going to be an issue either way.
Maybe the better solution is an app that you can log into multiple accounts with anditt merges your feeds.
That probably is the best solution because it keeps the moderation burden off of the individual sites.
So for newcomers to the fediverse (also, hi!), mastodon has gone through debates and events too. People my differ on this, but I think the whole phenomenon is just a part of the fediverse and that it’s fundamentally a good thing.
Where it causes drama or friction, I think it is essentially a different kind of friction compared to what happens on big-social platforms. And while it can have its problems or be mishandled, the problems, IMO, reflect real-life social dynamics more, and are therefore healthier than being subject to and at the whims of big-corporate overlords with many more interests other than true cultural and human engagement and interaction. Sometimes, people and whole groups of people just don’t want to know each other. Free-speech and political discourse ideals aren’t the catch all analysis here. This isn’t the news papers or an academic journal, it’s social media.
Bubbles are problematic but so are firehoses and incessantly unpleasant social interactions … grouping and excluding is what we do … it helps to match our finite minds and lives to the magnitudes of reality.
Beyond this, I think many are just not accustomed to real-life human dynamics playing a more structural role in their major social media life. There’s an adjustment that needs to happen. And this goes both ways, for those against and those in defence of defederation actions, where attacks on defederation may miss the point and defenders may not see that there are sometimes better ways to manage problems.
Many of the attacks of defederation are along the lines of “this will stifle growth”. I get it, and I’ve said the same myself elsewhere. But, one, not long ago no one thought any of this would “grow” and yet here we are, so maybe save the prognostications and try more substantial and constructive critiques. And, two, much of the above about transitioning to different modes of online socialising necessitates friction, where the fediverse is not simply your substitute for big-social waiting for the special moment you decide big corporations have crossed your line, rather, it’s a different system, problems and all. Now, by all means, critique the fediverse (I sure do), but, I would recommend doing so with some of the above as part of your frame of reference.
For my money, the biggest problem right now is account mobility. Your account is stuck and limited to an instance. Mastodon has migrations but it’s really just importing your settings and followers to a new account on a new instance rather than truly moving your account to a new host. This is baked into the current structure of the fediverse. Instances are first-class citizens, users are second-class. It is truly accurate, though somewhat pejorative, to use “feudal-verse” instead, because that is actually what it really is.
In terms of defederation, the problem this causes is that you can find yourself at odds with the federation policies of your instance and want to leave, which is obviously a PITA. More deeply, it’s hard to know the federation policies of an instance before you join, or how they’ll respond to some situations, so events like beehaw can be a little “shocking”, and sometimes hurtful, because you find yourself labelled by your instance when you in reality have little alignment it, at least on the matter at hand.
Thing is, belonging to an instance or a community of some sort, finding a “home” of sorts with a group of other people, is probably a good thing, in line with my comments about healthier and more “in real life” dynamics. The issue is that instances and us being forced to join them is somewhat arbitrary, and once you end up having multiple accounts, just a PITA and ultimately bad UX.
What the fediverse really needs, IMO, is both grouping/community mechanisms and for our accounts and their hosting to be decoupled from these groups/communities.
Lemmy/kbin and the threadiverse as a whole do well in this regard by having sub-reddit/forum like structures. Mastodon and the microblogs struggle as they are quite bad at communities (as the BIPOC communities found out it seems). But, as it stands, the threadiverse still couples community hosting with account hosting, and so we have the beehaw defederation issue (which I should say is interesting to see as communities or reddit-like structures haven’t been popular on the fediverse until now-ish).
Technologically, my suspicion is that this whole fediverse thing goes to another level once a coherent protocol provides for optional independence between account hosting and community hosting and, arguably, independence between the prior two and platform format. We have “self-hosting”, but at the moment it’s a bit of a hack, still binds you to platforms and hardly provided as a convenient service (check out Spacehost, an upcoming service for this: https://spacehost.one/).
I wonder about self-hosting scales and suspect it’s awfully inefficient, and so, technologically, I suspect some hybridisation of the architecture is required, where the whole web2.0 idea of user->server->platform just melts away.
In reality, the only real innovation of the fediverse is to parallelise the “server” part
user->server->platformso that a single user on a single platform can be achieved with horizontal scale and a distributed work load.This has the effect of FOSS social media being a thing (here we are and it’s awesome TBH), but isn’t really revolutionary from a user perspective. Once multiple platforms communicate over the same protocol, it starts to get revolutionary, but that’s only started as anyone who’s tried to mix mastodon and lemmy can attest to.
Wow thanks for such a verbose post.
That’s given me a lot to chew on