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.
I honestly think it’s ok to do this. Segregating instances that serve different goals in the Fediverse is not always a bad thing. As an example, the Mastodon creator having the same experience led to him implementing this very feature over there in the early days.
Yes, it does create inconveniences, especially now to all the new users that are already struggling with the concept of instances in general. I remember I did, and I was wondering, isn’t that looming threat of defederation, taken together with the decision paralisys when being forced to select a home instance enough to make the whole service unusable for most users?
But thinkig a bit further ahead, I’d honestly still MUCH prefer this to the other outcome, which is those other, offending communities inevitably ending up being banned because the one big, overly cautious, profit-driven company under which all non-federated content lives has to sanitize its content for the advertisers.
So, yes, it might be cumbersome for some users who expected to use the service by cross-federating, for example by creating an account here and then subscribing to something like noncredibledefense on sh.itjust.works. They did both in good faith, probably being driven here because the sensible policies and promise of the protected stewardship on Beehaw seemed like a good home base, but also subscribing there because it’s the best replacement community of the popular subreddit, and it sucks.
But to those we can say: The equivalent of a kiddy pool is not the same place as the deep ocean, so don’t expect to access both with the same account! So to alleviate that, just go over to those instances and create another one – I know I did just that right when reading this post, because I definitely plan on subscribing to communities over there as well.
And yes, it would be nice if a more long-term solution was found to the above-mentioned problems of federation. Conceptually, I doubt it ever will, and I also don’t buy the argument that federation of different instances is “just like email”, because obviously, problems like this don’t manifest with your email inbox.
But practically, these issues will be less impactful once things have stabilized a bit and the inevitable culling of instances sets it, eventually there’s gonna be a couple big, established “standard” instances (some of them maybe even run by profit-driven companies!) that people know what they stand for and what to expect when signing up, and the federation as well as the paralysis will not be so important anymore.
Just keep in mind that, for most of us, these are the very early days on Lemmy, and hiccups along the way are to be expected, it’s all (along with the whole Fediverse!) still very much “in beta” right now.
Ultimately, we’ll probably have to learn to getting a bit more flexible with our instances and accounts on them, just like alt accounts on singular websites.
No hard feelings!