Alt text:
A three panel meme of someone riding a bike.
- First panel: Someone riding on a bike. “Reddit is imploding, quick let’s get on Lemmy”
- Second panel: The bike starts to tip over on its own. “Oh shit there’s too many of us, we’re being defederated?”
- Third panel: They’ve fallen on the ground by the bike, holding their knee in pain. “Fucking Beehaw”
The Beehaw admins have just been doing exactly what they said they would in their signup page and community guidelines, yet a large number of people seem to have gotten surprised that they kept their word.
I can’t speak for everyone on BeeHaw but the reason they do stuff like this is a feature rather than a bug for me, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but the good thing about the fediverse is that the only parade we can really piss on is our own and there’s a diversity of instances to choose from which is a good thing. One ‘master instance’ would defeat the point of federation pretty catastrophically.
I think past 10 years social media has been “grooming” the average internet user into becoming enraged at the slightest deviation from status quo and that’s what we’re seeing here. Rage means clicks means revenue for companies. People now become oddly obsessed with the silliest of things - well MY instance is superior, well MY video game is superior, well MY phone is superior. You get the idea. We all need to take a deep breath and chill the fuck out.
Assuming the surprised people even read the guidelines.
You couldn’t even trust redditors to read past the headlines!
We’ve had users from other instances complain about it, not even recognizing that they are doing so on our thread, to our users, on our instance. Every single one of these users is not following our rules - they’re extremely emotionally charged and telling us that we’re terrible people (bad faith, not nice).
I understand that the fediverse can be difficult to understand and that the user interface is not the most user friendly, but also why are they so upset about what’s happening somewhere else that they have no control over? The strength of the emotions they are feeling over such an abstract idea (an instance they are not on defederating from another instance that they are also not on) that doesn’t even effect them, is just bizarre to me.
Bold to assume people can actually read!
Yeah this is 100% why I signed up for beehaw. This is the sort of administration I was hoping for, not some betrayal.
Likewise! Keep the place nice, and nice people are going to want to stick around.
Yes. This.
Maybe it’s because I have experience in the fediverse but I specifically searched for an instance like beehaw, joined knowing what they were about and what kind of behaviour they allowed and which they didn’t allow, and expected them to follow through and respect their own rules and guideline.
I’m not disappointed nor I’m surprised. This is what I signed for and how I expected the admins to conduce themselves and the instance.
I choose the fediverse over centralised social media owned by corporations and billionaires because instances with administrations like Beehaw’s, that do not accept nor promote shitty behaviour) exist here. Because here it’s easier to avoid people who only want to troll or cause controversy than it is in sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc that facilitate that kind of negative interaction.
I’m not on beehaw, but I’m also not on an instance defederated from beehaw
I read the list of instances blocked by beehaw, and I’ve gotta say you’re not missing anything
Exactly!
Beehaw recently defed with lemmy.world, it’s the second largest lemmy.
it feels like cutting yourself off from the center of the universe.
imagine coming into a lemmy for the first time and finding oh, I have to maintain like 17 accounts to actually see the whole threadiverse
Feel free to contribute to lemmys mod tools to expedite the process.
Except Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
Which is temporary, and due to the overload caused by Reddit’s drama. Nobody is mad at anyone else, the admins of all three instances are working together to get stuff running again.
Crack open a beer, lean back in your favorite comfy chair, and be patient y’all. And if the FOMO is tearing your soul to fragments, mosey over to Reddit for a while. It’s still there.
One instance out of 750+ got overloaded and had to block some of the flood for a bit. Welcome to the Fediverse!
I use Lemmy.world regularly and I have never seen any toxic content. Also, most of the instances have very loose requirements to join so why did it only decide to defederate 2 instances?
I did, when I tried going over there. The discussions definitely felt… redditier, in a bad way, to me. More immediately jumping to rage and personal insults.
But mainly the problem as I understand it is that lemmy.world has open sign-ups, whereas beehaw.org has strict, admin-approval sign-up. Beehaw.org was getting flooded with users from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works who got in through their open sign-up and were then coming into beehaw, being assholes, and creating too much moderation work for the tiny volunteer mod team - they couldn’t moderate such a large and unregulated influx well enough to preserve the safe space or community feel of beehaw communities. Especially when banned individuals could just make new accounts and come right back again.
There was another post though where they said they’ve talked to the sh.itjust.works admin and are likely to work something out with them in the future to allow for re-federating, though not yet. But that the lemmy.world admin (at the time of the post) had not responded, iirc.
“Funny” that people think “Reddit is mistreating the mods, who do free work for them making the place bearable! Let’s jump ship and go to [whatever we call this federated-not-Reddit-thingle]!” and then come here and mistreat mods and make the place unbearable.
But that the lemmy.world admin (at the time of the post) had not responded
This has changed now! Everybody’s talking to everybody else at this point. None of the admins are upset at any of the other admins or anything, everyone’s chill except for (some of) the users
There is an admin post explaining this but basically it’s because a disproportionate amount of time spent moderating was due to content from those two instances.
The modlogs tell a different story. Hopefully they will be willing to start vetting users so this doesn’t decline into reddit 2.0
I’ve had the complete opposite experience, which is why I migrated to beehaw. I’m glad you’re not having any issues over there so far.
Loose is not the same and open. The two that have been defederated had open, which means that the problematic users could easily avoid all of the limited moderation tools that are currently in place on Lemmy.
If people properly understood the Fediverse and the fact that there are a lot of instances (or communities if you prefer) that cater to certain subject matter and discussion types, this whole attack upon Beehaw would be moot.
Why can’t some people grasp the fact that there are people who want civil and friendly discussions in a welcoming community? I’ll tell you who, those Redditors that made Reddit toxic in the first place!
My initial Lemmy account is on another instance, and some reactions I have seen to Beehaw defederating it have me… Displeased. Maybe it’s because I am an internet grandma who used to use three dozens phpbb forums at the same time, but protecting one’s community is entirely fucking okay and the “snowflakes” talk is exhausting.
100% agree and I just can’t understand why so many are going nuts over it the way they are. They’re so reactionary and ridiculous it makes me wonder if they read the actual reasons why (or even understood them.)
Aaaand that’s why they’re out. boot emoji
The reddit influx brings good but also redditors’ usual bullshit along with it.
I love that beehaw is looking out for us and maintaining a space where it feels like people with differing opinions can actually talk about things with nuance and without feeling like they’ll set off a landmine at any minute.
I’m still in disbelief, for some reason we can have a nice place here
The dumb part is Reddit could’ve had it too if they had a sane management/board of directors.
Don’t let the bootlickers fool you that spez was just along for the ride and duped into modding shitty subreddits or keeping it open under the guise of free speech, he actively enjoyed that content too.
I think past 10 years social media has been “grooming” the average internet user into becoming enraged at the slightest deviation from status quo and that’s what we’re seeing here. Rage means clicks means revenue for companies. Open internet doesn’t need revenue and doesn’t encourage rage.
People are used to absolute convenience but don’t realize it always comes with consessions
To me it feels like the tantrum you see when someone who behaves badly is called out for it. They all almost immediately try to flip it around like they’re the victims. Pretty much just thinking of it as a toddler throwing a tantrum and it’ll make a lot more sense.
I think there’s something to that idea. To my mind, what’s driving that is a kind of internet culture shock. A lot of spaces on the internet do not encourage thoughtful posts and responses, and the culture of communication tends towards negative emotional affect and hostility. A lot of people seem to be entirely unaware of how hostile, reactive and negative they’re being, based on my admittedly anecdotal observations of new users joining spaces where the communication culture is radically different. They think it’s normal, because the spaces they frequent are also hostile, reactive and negative, and when their negativity is pointed out to them, it sparks defensiveness because they’ve not been aware of it until now, or consider it ‘normal’. The de-federation seems to have been interpreted by some as a rejection of their behaviour and has sparked that defensiveness as a result.
I’m sure it’s not news to you, but anytime you see someone trying to squash discussion or the like with terms like “snowflake”, they’re just projecting and letting you know that they’re fragile.
That’s 100% what it is. They just want to subject you to their inane opinions and bully and troll people. The admins made the right call I think.
I personally don’t want reddit #2.
Beehaw is all the rave and currently single handedly destroying [insert newest thing here] everywhere all at once, apparently.
It’s weird to me people are upset they can’t come crap it up with their vitriol when there are endless other places to do that. I realize it’s definitely not everyone doing that, but still…
“Lemme in so I can be needlessly hostile while enjoying your nice community but also ignoring everything it stands for / is about.”
No, go away. 🤨
Honestly it’s my… 2nd or 3rd? Day on Beehaw and I’d rather have a community where you need to pass a vibe check instead of a free for all like Reddit and Twitter.
Yup. There are a whole host of awful groups I do not want to interact with even tangentially through a second or tertiary community. I much prefer this setup.
Ditto
I’m liking beehaw as is
sweats in kbin
I don’t think you have anything to worry about; Kbin hasn’t really been a huge vector (afaik) for spam/harassment. It’s just those two instances in particular which were ballooning and creating a moderation challenge but all the admins are in conversation about pressing for better tools and refederating come that day
makes sense. kbin actually got quite a lot of users, 30k over these past few days. I think it’s half the amount lemmy got? though kbin users might be a bit more reserved and polite haha. we were also offline the first few days which I think also helped. trolls like lemmy better I guess.
@Otome-chan@kbin.social yeah I’ve noticed that too, the trolls don’t seem to be on kbin - kbin feels fresher and nicer in a way. Ernest has been doing a great job with this site
@kalanggam @polaroid I’m merely watching this from afar but based on what I’ve read I’d emphasize the part about wanting better moderation tools and beehaw wanting to refederate once tools are better.
No worries. When asked if they’d defed kbin they simply answered “I don’t even know you” lol
That means we’re not causing anyone problems, good job team!
To be clear there are problematic users on nearly every instance. I’ve had to moderate quite a few kbin users, but it’s not standing out from the pack as a particularly problematic place as of this moment.
Oh yeah I’m sure no instance will have a perfect track record, the moderation is appreciated
Probably because kbin federation has been open just for couple of days, due to the Cloudflare protection
I fully agree. Beehaw is just sabotaging the chances of the lemmyverse getting to a self-sustaining population.
Not sure if I agree; sustainably can be different things for different people. For some it might be that the platform has a large number of users, but for Beehaw it is to have a safe community without bigots and trolls. It’s not sustainable for targeted individuals if they are met with hate speech, racism, transphobia etc every time they visit social media.
The Beehaw about pages explain their philosophy in more detail: https://beehaw.org/post/439918
The beauty of the fediverse is, if someone on Beehaw doesn’t agree with their administrative decisions, they can just make an account on another instance.
Yeah, being part of an instance means you’re trusting them to moderate content (as with individual subreddits/communities/magazines). It’s a good thing. Maybe if down the line one instance gets so huge that it’s basically “the one” it could be a problem but if the fediverse keeps things relatively spread out it’s fine.
Not only that, but the ability to run your own instance to have full control over those decisions.
Defederation is a key feature of the fediverse. This is probably the politest defederation I’ve ever seen. I’m glad this is the first on Lemmy because if this kind of thing bothers people, they’ll be in for a rude awakening once we get some real defederation drama.
And you can’t have federated software without defederation, just wait till someone starts setting up massive numbers of throwaway spambot accounts
Oh, it’s not the first, by a long shot…. Beehaw.org/instances
I’m personally so happy the admins here actually want a good community. Ninety-nine percent of the blocked instances are cesspits.
It’s not the responsibility of one instance to get the threadiverse into a “self-sustaining population”
Specially when say community is:
• Comprised mostly of marginalized people.
• not completely open to registration, but requires your solicitation to register to be approved by an admin/mod
• choosing quality over quantity, and has no intention to grow so much or to become a Reddit replacement.
There are more than 300 instances on Lemmy alone (to that you have to add the kbin instances, of which I don’t know the number)
The problem here, and what really is stopping any kind of growth, is the lack of distribution. People are going to the same 5 communities and expecting them to be responsible for all the content creation (by hosting communities/magazines), when part of federation is the ability for every instance to have their own community for a topic.
Beehaw has the largest communities in the threadiverse. I think suggesting that it’s primarily made up of marginalized people is disingenuous. I absolutely agree with your overall take on the lack of distribution of communities being the problem. Particularly that they are all on beehaw.
I think you’re mixing up the people that take part on thread of communities hosted on Beehaw (who belong to hundreds of servers, both in and outside of Lemmy, not only to Beehaw) and the registered members of Beehaw as an instance. I’m talking about users registered at Beehaw.
Beehaw has the largest communities because people aren’t creating communities on their instances, instead recurring to Beehaw-based communities. But there’s a difference between participating in Beehaw-hosted communities and being part of Beehaw as a instance, a register user of Beehaw. This is not the responsibility of Beehaw, which is closed to new community creation. Federated social media is made by its users and here users have the opportunity, the possibility, and the ability to diversify Lemmy and the bigger fediverse by creating communities in other instances and participating in the communities that already exist in other instances.
Beehaw as a instance aims to be a nice and safe space, and as such attracts marginalised people to register into it. Yes, there are people that are registering in Beehaw without even reading what the instances is about, only because it’s a big instances. These are the people that are now “feeling betrayed” or “unable to understand” why Beehaw is defederating from instances that allow trolling. They chose a community that wasn’t the best for them, but I don’t put them as fault because, just like it happened with the twitter migration, people are being suggested the larger instances and aren’t being explained that being on a smaller instance also allows you to federate, sometimes way better than in larger ones that are often blocked/muted/defederated by small(er) instances for simply getting too large.
Does account migration work in this part of the fediverse? I know on Mastadon you can move instances pretty easily.
Not currently, but it’s been on the radar as a feature request. Not sure if anyone is actively working on it right now though.
The latest Dev update mentions it explicitly as a requested enhancement they just don’t have time for at the moment, so eventually but not for now (unless someone else steps in and does it)
At least you should be able to export/import your subscription list.
Imma be honest, Beehaw feels empty in comparison to the other instances and they’ve made some weird decisions (no downvotes?). Why am I even here when browsing world in my browser not even logged in seemed to be an infinitely better experience… I don’t get this place
I guess you haven’t seen what ANY community in Lemmy looked like before May 28th. Relative to today it was a barren wasteland in terms of content numbers, whereas in terms of community feel it was tight-knit and cozy. The busiest communities had like 5 or 6 posts a day, most with 0 to a handful of comments each. Whole instances like Beehaw and lemmy.ml might each have had around 20 posts or so a day on a good day.
Beehaw’s top priority has been to keep that cozy feeling of friendliness and community even as we have grown more than 10x in size. It’s not easy, and being a copy of Reddit or seeking mainstream levels of growth isn’t part of Beehaw’s current vision, as far as I’ve read into the admins’ treatises on Beehaw ethos.
It doesn’t feel empty to me, personally (just thought I’d be clear that this is only my opinion) but it is definitely somewhat slower than Reddit or some of the other Lemmy and Kbin instances that are out there. IMO, I think a lot of people coming to Beehaw who’re acculturated to Big Social or Big Social-ish experiences are inevitably disappointed with the amount of content because it’s not a massive stream of content being funneled into your feed anymore.
But I’ve been on the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.) for about four years now and gotten used to the slower flow, that going to Reddit or some other Lemmy instances or Twitter now feels like I’m drowning or being inundated/overwhelmed with content which flows faster than I can give a due-diligence response to. Either I could say nothing, just vote, write a one-off low-effort response, get in a heated debate, or try to take the time to write something more thoughtful (and then by the time I was done with that, the moment would already have past or I’d get some smart-ass reply that would end the engagement for me). Plus there are some concessions involved in getting all that content delivered to you.
Some people like that but it’s just not really for me anymore, it doesn’t feel healthy. I like being able to slow down and actually talk to people, and I like that I can trust I’ll see them again later. I like that I can post something and no matter whether it’s popular or not, someone will engage, even if it takes time.
On the other part, I don’t really understand how no downvotes is a “weird” decision; it’s definitely not uncommon considering some of the subreddits I participated in on Reddit did the same thing. But in any event, Beehaw does have some posts/comments around explaining the reason for certain choices.
I guess it’s not that dead. Biggest issue is I had is my feed set to Local instead of All by default, after switching that things look more like how I’d expect, not unlike my mastodon account. I I’ve set up an account elsewhere regardless, no idea how much I’ll switch back to this one since none of the content I want to see has actually originated from beehaw anyways…
And that’s okay, we can all enjoy the Fediverse on our preferred instances and platforms. Whether that be lemmy.world, lemmy.ca, beehaw, etc. or another platform like Kbin or Mastodon. That’s the beauty of this federated design.
Beehaw is for the people who want a safe, friendly place, no one’s twisting your arm to be here. People here still have different views and people still argue. It just isn’t vitriolic.
