Lemmy Instances are already blocking each other
beehaw.org
beehaw.org
ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
The actual reason is that the defederated servers have open enrollment and have grown large enough that the small fraction of their traffic that is abusive and requires moderator attention is dominating beehaw moderators attention.
This isnt a moral judgement - they just don't have the plungers or the juice required to deal with the sewage, so are defederating to protect their own time and attention until those instances get a chance to settle down.
It feels a little surprising for it to happen this quickly, that's all.
So if you have instance A which is federated with instance B, and if instance A sees instance C as hostile, it obviously defederates from instance C, but it would become problematic if instance A would also defederate from instance B simply because instance B is federated with instance C.
(...) 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“Lemmy instances are already blocking each other“ is a kind of weirdly editorialized headline here. It kind of implies that there was some sort of promise that fediverse servers weren’t going to block other servers, and that promise had been broken or something.
“Beehaw de-federates from two other servers following influx of trolls” would be more accurate.
This is a key dynamic. People are used to social media sites being kept livable thanks to a team of paid professionals and fancy ML tooling, often supported by volunteer labor. But here the volunteers are in charge and many of them have other things to do than deal with people's bullshit just to keep the user growth graph going up and to the right.
Lemmy has a great chance achieving what mastodon couldn't, because its the community that matters, not specific users, but with instance blocking each other, any hope of creating a community to rival reddit is going to be thrown out the window.
I haven’t been following lemmy, can you elaborate on this? Isn’t the idea of blocking instances part of the point?
Like if I made “GoatseLemmy: Where Every Post Is Goatse” I wouldn’t expect content on it to be available for everyone without any input from admins that pay to run other servers.
The point of federation is to have the technical ability to post and follow across compatible servers.
The point is not to require every instance to accept posts and followers from every compatible server. If anything, that's the opposite of the point.
Thats a problem because beehaw seems to be the largest with many established subreddit communities, which limits the usability of smaller servers.
Genuinely, I think you will be relieved to read the announcement in TFA whenever it succeeds in loading for you; they just can't handle the moderating burden that the traffic from those servers brings, and given the almost completely unrestricted ability to create accounts in those instances it shouldn't be surprising. Beehaw would like more granular control but that isnt available (yet?), and they'd refederate once everything cooled down.
As if being a federated network wasn't enough of a hurdle for new users, now we have instances blocking each other already.
If you cant make decisions about the sort of traffic your server receives and choose to defederate for pragmatic reasons then your service is not decentralized in fact.
Put another way - if your ideal service is identical to reddit, and each instance is connected to all, then your service is just as centralized. It just has an unusually fussy and bespoke database design.
Having the right to divorce your spouse is important. But nobody wants to date someone whose been married 4 times.
But more seriously - I don't see how you can remain marri.. federated, when one or more instances operates as a much more popular open relay.
I don't have the words for this, so please interpret charitably and correct candidly, but there is an expectation that each instance performs its own vetting and policing, so everyone can work together as individual fiefs without a central authority, and each piece can be as big or as small as it needs to be to sidestep that 'small unreachable team with enormous surface area' thing that we're doing so much of everywhere else? Yes?
If I have that right then this seems like a perfectly appropriate time to block with a similar emotional tenor as closing a water main to deal with a leak.
Why would you expect that? Don't Mastodon instances also routinely block each other?
but in Reddits case, you follow an interest instead of a specific person, meaning if enough people are active in the tech community on Lemmy it can replace reddit much faster than mastodon can replace twitter, as it doesn't matter which users migrated.
Also, blocking nodes in a distributed social network is neither new nor unhealthy. Usenet has killfiles. IRC has k-lines. Far from being injurious in themselves, they're essential tools to prevent some rando from setting up a bogus instance and using it to spray garbage all over everything. I already had to block one obvious ex-Redditor who had done exactly that on Mastodon, shitting all over a thread that had been going well until then. I was utterly unsurprised to see that they got defederated shortly afterward. That's what should happen when people can't stop misbehaving.
Do I wish that the fediverse had better moderation tools, both separate from defederation and for coordinating defederation decisions? Of course I do. AIUI coordination is done now - when it's done at all - with an ad hoc system based on tags, of all things, and that's a bit absurd. I have some ideas about how a better system might look or be implemented, but I certainly don't fault anyone for using the tools they have during a period of such rapid growth.
At least wait for people to settle in first!
Just as there is no simultaneous conversation about, say, walnuts in offline life, so there are multiple communities that discuss walnuts on boards with all the predicates and social constructs those communities have, from focuses towards, say, farming to environment to cooking, objective focuses, or social focuses in belief, location, language, of community. And no one's prevented from starting their own walnut focused board or even community.
That Lemmys are choosing to not try to be super catch-alls from the start I see as healthy for communities.
For search/discoverability, multiple boards each dedicated to walnuts may not aid discovery, especially in tails where signal is strong, perhaps oldskool directories/newskool directory of search/filtering could start to come in useful.
I've been working on an alternative that is, ultimately, a standalone and lightweight ActivityPub server that handles only one account at a time. The idea would be to serve an account as - in essence - it's own container. If a person just wants to run an instance for themselves off an old laptop in their livingroom (which is how I run my Mastodon instance), they can do that themselves if they have the skills - which I would strive to be minimal.
But, if they needed to rely on someone like beehaw, they could sintead join a "collective" - a central site on one domain that handles all incoming and outgoing messaging, DDOS protection, CDN caching, and even blocklist handling (e.g. reading a user's blocklist and blocking at the outermost layer) then passes what gets through to the individual service running on the backend. A collective could apply a site-wide blocklist, but the users would be able to opt back in because, at the end of the day, they are the ones who are actually federating with these other instances - the collective is, in essence, a firewall or "management layer", akin to an APIM for APIs.
Obviously, I'm not done building this, but I'm going to try and accelerate my work once I get some paid work off my desk. Why wouldn't something like this work? If an account wants to stay connected to a problematic server for whatever their reasons, how would that impact the rest of the collective if federation is handled at the user level?
Or, perhaps a better question, what's wrong with handling federation at the user level? Should I not be able to follow any account or block any account I want? Why must this fall on the backs of the admins?
Fair enough. It might be that a community back end and commercial front end are the uptime solution. In the back, people with principles. In the front, someone who actually cares about the people on the other side of the screen.
Which is unfortunate because I think some neat projects flounder for lack of good onboarding.
Managing multiple identities is challenging. It’s solved-problem challenging, but that implies a single client which sort of defeats the purpose of de-centralising the back end.
It sounds like a minor hurdle to our demographic but most people are super lazy and bad at juggling online authentications. I would never recommend Mastodon to any non-tech person for that reason (beyond the other UI issues) unless there was a specific niche community they were interested in.
But you also have the option of using an instance that didn't ban the community you're interested in, which you don't with reddit.
"You don't need an account on social media unless you want to interact with people on the internet"
This whole defederation thing is going to guarantee a win for centralized services.
The only major difference with Reddit is that the latter has an additional, all-powerful layer of royalty that holds control over these lesser lords. Whereas Lemmy has them all fighting each other.
Either way, the peasantry just has to put up with whatever nonsense battling the ruling class involve themselves in.
Anyone whose spent awhile in a hobbyist forum or IRC network has likely experienced that they're just as, if not more prone to moderator drama than even Reddit. Wait until an admin rage-deletes a whole instance over an argument with someone or one community brigades/DOS's another and then you'll get to see the dark side of the "good ol'" community-run forum days.
This decision makes perfect sense. Beehaw requires applying to sign up with a sort of cover letter. If their community is more restrictive, they should only federate with similar-minded nodes.
Whatever happened to self-moderating? I have higher standards for my speech and on-line conduct than any TOS. Many others do too. Plus, I know how to use software that allows "kill-files" and won't use any that doesn't give me the ability to "moderate" others if I want by just filtering it.
Vetting? It's a global network. If you want vetting spin up a Linux on Linode or something and invite only,ssh only, and create a forum.
You see a similar effect in spam. It would be a vast waste of your time to roll your own spam engine. Killfiles aren't sufficient; they spawn new accounts instantly. Spam used to dominate email, until big email hosts developed ways to shunt it off. And that requires constant management as the spammers find ways around those filters.
I'm glad for dang's moderation here on HN. I wouldn't come here if I had to roll my own killfile. It doesn't just keep the worst offenders away. It also keeps the conversations on topic, rather than degenerating into flame wars.
Moderation is of course imperfect, just as spam filters are. But without it, I find any open communications medium unusable. The loudest and most obnoxious voices dominate, effectively creating a different kind of censorship that keeps out the things I actually want.
Should have waited another 12 hours to get it confirmed that it's never going to pan out
I'm wondering, if the current Reddit civil war between spez and the mods would be best handled by a similar arrangement. Create two federated, in a loose definition of the word, Reddits...one run by Reddit and mods spez approves, and one run by the same way its run now. Users could choose which version to use. Posts and comments come from the same source, but mod actions are unique to each version.
Not that Reddit would ever do that.
Beehaw is the second largest instance by number of users - and LemmyWorld is the third.
Them defederating from each other effectively shards the network into two halves, making the whole thing useless.
Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
Why's that? The typical user problem isn't "see all the content", it's "see some good content". As long as the two halves have critical mass, it could well be fine. For example, the fact that Reddit and Twitter were separate networks didn't prevent both of them from growing pretty well.
With Lemmy that's not the case. It's about sharing information and discussing it. So federation is less crucial, but it does add one powerful benefit: the network itself can have network effects and grow to critical mass, leveraging the same benefit Reddit had over disparate forums and the like. It's not a necessity from a user perspective, but it makes it feel like all the information is in one place and so users prefer it anyway.
I actually think a large problem with lemmy is that it's already too centralised. Each instance is trying to be a reddit. Which is all very nice, but it also means each instance is effectively in competition. I think each instance should be trying to be a subreddit.
The way it'd work in my head is that you'd have two types of instance. Front-end instances that are effectively curators/aggregators & identity providers. They effectively get to present you your front page and r/all. And this is entirely "if you don't like their curation choices, pick another". So here you'd get to pick if your instance is tech-focussed, foss-focussed, as-big-as-possible, family-friendly, politically charged, etc.
And honestly, the only thing stopping that instance from being an app that's not much more than an rss feed-reader, is that I've saddled them with being identity providers too. Which is not the world's biggest hurdle.
The second type of instance would be one subreddit. So moderators are instance administrators, you're trying to build one community in one place, etc. You're just trying to build one community in your one niche/topic, - and you're not trying to compete with other instances who are also trying to be everything to everyone.
I think this would present a lot of benefits. Front-end instances would naturally discover subreddits through the subscriptions their members make. For users, discovery would be through cross-posts, and curation amongst the subreddits their home instance already knows, etc. They can choose their own funding model, ad model, membership model, etc. And if they make choices that are wildly unpopular with their members, they can move to an instance with different ideas/ownership/spez without losing their communities in the process.
For subreddits, administrators can control their costs by, eg, choosing only to host text posts instead of images & media. Brand-owners can own their own communities/identities - ubuntu can run r/ubuntu on their own infrastructure with their own moderators, etc. And we should see a lot less pissing patches like the linked post, because subreddits aren't directly leaning on each other. Hell, there'd be nothing stopping youtube exposing their channels as pseudo-instances.
What I'd really love to see is a return to a world where one person can host their niche community on a $5 VPS - and still get all the benefits of being a subreddit. And at the same time, foss communities & company support forums can join right in without it being a huge risk to themselves, etc.
Asking for centralization is asking for another model where we put all our eggs in one basket, and then wonder why that basket has to kowtow to VC to pay for it all. What worries me is that right now, we're very focussed on breaking free from that, and no-one's exploring what we could actually gain from the alternatives.
And while this risks sounding incredibly hand-wavy - it's really just the forums we all grew up on, sharing a common API.
Especially in the tech world, it would make sense for r/php to be hosted and run by the offical php.net guys, r/laravel by the laravel.com crew, r/vuejs by ... (you get it).
However it'd be hard for the subreddit hosters to manage which user-facing instances are allowed to post. If shitposters could just fire up new personal instances every time they were banned, then subreddit hosters would just be playing whack-a-mole and get fed up with it.
They'd almost have to require that users post from instances with good reputations - and now we've just reinvented e-mail's problem of forcing users into using one of the big providers in order to be able to send/post anything.
Too bad we can't have nice things
… but also kinda creepy.