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.

    • Gil (he/they)@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I understand being frustrated and disappointed, but as the post says, there is a particular rationale being used to make this decision and it wasn’t taken on a whim nor was it the first course of action. The most critical aspect of this decision was quite simply the limitations of Lemmy’s admin/mod tools.

      If this instance wanted to be closed off and heavily moderated it should have been clear at the start, a lot of people were relying on communities here and suddenly closing them off is going to harm Lemmy as a whole.

      Beehaw has very clearly communicated its goals and guiding philosophies in the posts linked in Beehaw’s main sidebar, which are just a few of several others. Likewise, its admins have thoroughly explained what motivates their choices with respect to this community, time and time again. It cannot have been more clear that Beehaw wanted to provide stronger moderation than what exists in other spaces in the Lemmyverse currently, although the ‘closed off’ part is debatable - it’s two instances, which have the possibility of refederation in the future with changes to Lemmy’s codebase.

      Seeing everyone in the comments pointing fingers and calling us toxic evil trolls is also ironically very toxic.

      Personally, I haven’t seen many such comments at all (& they may have been removed/deleted), aside from some Beehaw users venting about running into some unsavory types from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. That isn’t to generalize users from those instances as this can happen when instances grow large and their registration policies are lax (i.e., lacking verification steps/other security measures meant to deter those types). But looking at discussions with the mod team and at feedback from the community, it was clear that a lot of negative traffic was coming to Beehaw from there - in addition to all the positive interactions which came out of those two instances - and it just so happens that their size made it very difficult to moderate all those bad actors.

      Most of the content on this instance wasn’t made by beehaw users.

      Speaking candidly, we are not striving for sheer quantity of content or for a great mass of interactions here, and what proportion of our content is made by Beehaw users vs. not just isn’t really a priority. The main goal of Beehaw is to provide an inviting, tightly bound community for discussion, especially one which is safe for marginalized people and nice people to participate in and where they can have the expectation that the space won’t be overrun by jerks, and this decision was made in light of that purpose.

      • simple@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        Fair enough, it is Beehaw’s decision in the end. It’ll just take a little bit of time before people group up and settle in other communities.

    • GhostMagician@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I enjoyed lemmy.world communities like Nintendo@lemmy.world, Android@lemmy.world, RetroGaming@lemmy.world, and Skyrim Mods@lemmy.world. Especially Skyrim mods that I used recently.

      So I’m really sad to see this happen.

    • Nicktar@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think anyone is calling you toxic (I honestly haven’t read all the comments). The decision was made due to the fact that the two instances in questions have and allow a huge influx of unvetted accounts and with that all those users also can walk in here. With this crowd comes a small percentage of toxic people that sre still to many be filtered out on this side using the current moderation tools.

    • nivenkos@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      The moderators would rather have absolute power (controlling registration, community creation, all moderation, etc.) in their small fiefdom than foster a growing and open community. It’s sad, but hopefully lemmy.world will grow more.