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Comment by unclekev | Hacker News Reader

Just went to the 'Programming' lemmy/beehaw and the first thing I see is a post about how they have had to defederate from some instances because of a lack of proper mod tools, trolls and bad actors.

The irony.

> https://beehaw.org/post/567170

> 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;

> 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.

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One of the biggest issues with the fediverse imo is moderation. People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it. You end up in these situations where there are completely separate versions of the fediverse and the largest instances will often not be able to talk to each other.

At least before Elon bought Twitter I know the most active (depending on how you count metrics) site was poa.st, and this was on a mastodon.social blacklist, which was one of the other major sites, and every site had their own list. I know people would sometimes have 4 or 5 accounts so that they could talk to everyone they wanted or as insurance in case the current admin got bored and closed the site.

I of course support the idea of a federated reddit, but there are a lot of problems that exist in the community

My only takeaway is that the "fediverse" is merely another layer/expression of centralization.

Decentralisation isn't perfect, and has its problems. That doesn't mean it's the same as centralisation.

Decentralization is a loosely connected network of peers not reliant on one or the other. The loss or gain of a peer or peers is of no significant consequence to the peers at large.

Centralization is a network of peers all connected to one hub, reliant on the hub to provide spokes to other peers at large.

The "fediverse" as far as I can tell is a collection of many separate networks that refuse to speak with other networks (for ideological reasons at that, rather than technical), each network acting as a hub and providing spokes to their peers.

It's centralization ("Lemmy", et al.) within a centralization ("fediverse") within a decentralization (internet).

> People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it.

This is why the Fediverse cannot work. More precisely, it can work, but only in the same way as the thing it tries to replace.

It's always the same story: The largest communities impose their rules on everyone else, under threat of exclusion from those communities. This creates power structures that are almost indistinguishable from the ones found on commercial networks. In one case, it's business interests that drive culture, in the other, it's the egos and personal ideologies of the most powerful community members.

I honestly don't know which one is worse.

Why would you not expect egos and personal ideologies to affect both admins and mods somewhere like Reddit, they're people just like Fediverse volunteers? Aren't they both the same on that side, meaning the only difference is that one of them also has commercial interests in the mix?

The absolutely do. I'm sure there are feuding subreddits about the same topic. But reddit as a platform allows them both (because it's their business interest), so with one account you can see both.

When people disagree about the direction of a community, someone has to not get their way.

There's no avoiding this in any group.

Which is exactly why the Fediverse doesn't solve anything. It's the most powerful trampling over everyone else – just like on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. The Fediverse is yet another middleman brokering communication between individuals, with all the associated problems.

However, the worst that can happen to you is that you stop interacting. This is as opposed to Reddit, where you can get removed from the platform as a whole, so it's still an improvement.

Lemmy and general Fediverse centers the workflow of spinning up your own community even against the will of the entire rest of the ecosystem. This is in complete opposition to Twitter, Reddit etc.

Usually ego is worse. Money is inclusive - anybody can have money. If the decisions are made purely on money (this never happens in reality, but speaking theoretically) then any community of considerable size can find a home - it's money, so somebody would want to take it. When egos and ideologies come in, then splintering and exclusion runs rampant.

That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation. It's IRC/Forums etc but at a larger scale where you can more easily connect to similar channels and forums. You either accept that communities have the right to self-police whom they can talk to or not, or accept that you want a central authority to do that for you.

IRC and forums have nothing to do with federation. Maybe IRC if you look at the channel level, but there's still network-wide rules you need to follow or get banned, just like forums have one or more admins with a final say. The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections.

There have been so many attempts at it for the past 20 years or so, but people just don't want to accept that it cannot ever work. This is not the 90s where most people online were academics and you could get away with everyone building their own Killfile over time.

> The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections.

Indeed. And each "kingdom" has the exact same problem with power centralization that the Fediverse supposedly solves. And the more popular an instance becomes, the bigger this problem gets. And the more popular an instance becomes, the more people will join it. And boom, we're back to zero.

Neither of you seem to get it. You're talking about 'power centralization' in a completely different and orthogonal way from how the federation works, which makes me think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of centralization or federation.

If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole. Because there is no single authority dictating where you can and cannot post, unlike Reddit. It's similar to being specifically banned from a subreddit.

Reddit is a kingdom whose king delegates power to various fiefdoms, but ultimately still controls the land. You are at their whims, as evident by the fact that they're removing mods that disagree with their API policy. Federated instances are multiple kingdoms that share borders which they keep open for the sake of trade. But those borders can close depending on how their neighbors interact.

It's like I said, a return to forums or IRC style governing except the authority is the forum or channel itself, and they can link to other forums/channels as they want in a seamless fashion. In order for systems like these to work communities need a way to defederate and control who they connect to, because inevitably bad instances will rise whose sole purpose is spam, harassment etc.

> If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole.

The most popular instances are the platform. Yes, you can run your own instance, with only yourself as a user. Unless others choose to federate with you, that's the equivalent of calling your blog a social network. And if the biggest instances impose their own rules on others under threat of severing federation, the freedom to run your instance as you wish exists only in theory.

Whenever you get a bunch of people together you have to have rules or you get the inevitable mentally ill person who starts to troll or try to spread racism. Think 8chan or 4chan on steroids. It just has to be done. Hopefully the rules are permissive enough to allow reasoned debate on topics between diverse opinions. However I don't need to know your political leanings in all caps while discussing the latest news so pitch that guy off. If I'm being rude or ranting pitch me off.

> That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation

People keep on comparing Mastodon to email.

But, have you ever tried to send someone an email and had the email rejected with an error from your email provider saying "You can't talk to that domain because it insufficiently polices hate speech" or even "You can't talk to that domain because it lets its users talk to domains that insufficiently police hate speech"? Yet my impression of Mastodon is it is just like that.

Which makes Mastodon in practice a very different type of federation from email.

Big e-mail providers are actually worse, they usually go like "so, a neighbour of yours sent something that somehow triggered our anti-spam system ages ago, so fuck your messages and fuck you, 221 Bye!"

At least on Mastodon you get the chance to talk to someone and try to solve the conflict.

Big e-mail providers are primarily concerned with spam–which is defined by the volume and unsolicited nature of the messages, rather than the opinions they express. Sometimes their attempts at stopping it impose collateral damage, and their response to that collateral damage can be arbitrary and capricious–but that's a different issue from what we are talking about with Mastodon coordinated de-federation, which is much more intentional than collateral.

The terms of service of those big providers say that they can ban people for "hate speech", but in practice they rarely do that, and on the rather rare occasions they do, it is usually a particularly egregious case of it.

By contrast, the big Mastodon instances seem to be very keen on banning "hate speech" – and defining that term in a much broader way than most other platforms do. See https://joinmastodon.org/covenant point 1

> But, have you ever tried to send someone an email and had the email rejected with an error from your email provider saying "You can't talk to that domain because it insufficiently polices hate speech" or even "You can't talk to that domain because it lets its users talk to domains that insufficiently police hate speech"? Yet my impression of Mastodon is it is just like that.

That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.

On this Lemmy thing I guess the solution is to just maintain multiple accounts - each on a server connected to a particular cluster of servers.

> That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.

I've been avoiding Reddit recently, but when I used to use it – I never agreed with that kind of behaviour, and any subreddit which does it is one I don't want to be part of.

However, that said, that's community-level not instance-level, and so I'm not sure what that has to do with federation.

> That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.

Almost no one runs a personal instance. Most people have accounts on multi user instances. This is unlike reddit, where accounts are global and independent of subreddits. On reddit, mods from subreddit B can preemptively ban you after they learn that subreddit A doesn't like you. But they can't ban entire subreddit, say C, so that every user that's subscribing to C can no longer interact with anyone subscribed to B. This is the scenario that plagues Mastodon - not individual blocks, but defederating whole instances.

But then federated services operate on the level of a single subreddit, not that of reddit. That's fine, but they will never replace social networks (which unfortunately means we'll have to live with big corps running those).

How do people feel about having some of the open-source LLMs offloading some of the moderation burdens? I understand it sounds rather dystopian, but I also feel if the model is developed transparently, it may offer a solution to the moderation problem.

> People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it.

I imagine some will, but hopefully that won't be the norm. Beehaw isn't doing it.

There's probably been similar stuff on twitter though - blacklists where you get added for following someone else on the blacklist

Beehaw was around a long time before Lemmy took the spotlight, and they explicitly have tried to have a high-moderation community with a distinct character. It wouldn't surprise me if they continue to defederate any instance with open registration.

There are other programming communities on other servers that will likely become the actual replacement for r/programming.

EDIT: The "What is Beehaw?" post in their sidebar[0] is a really enlightening introduction to the community, and also quite interesting for developing an understanding of the fediverse as a whole. This isn't going to be a drop-in replacement for Reddit because the admins will all have very different visions of the kinds of communities they want to create. I didn't end up deciding to join Beehaw, but reading their post made me very hopeful for the future of the fediverse as a whole.

[0] https://beehaw.org/post/107014

> It wouldn't surprise me if they continue to defederate any instance with open registration.

We're back to dodging Eris, are we?

> We're back to dodging Eris, are we?

For those that don’t know:

> Initially, most IRC servers formed a single IRC network, to which new servers could join without restriction, but this was soon abused by people who set up servers to sabotage other users, channels, or servers. Restriction grew and, in August 1990, eris.Berkeley.EDU was the last server indiscriminately allowing other servers to join it, Eris being the Greek goddess of strife and discord.

> A group of operators, with the support of Jarkko Oikarinen, introduced a new "Q-line" into their server configurations, to "quarantine" themselves away from eris by disconnecting from any subset of the IRC network as soon as they saw eris there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet

This is how the Eris-Free network, or EFnet as it is known, was formed.

Further:

> EFnet […] is a major Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with more than 35,000 users. It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network.

I learned why efnet is called efnet from your comment. Very interesting, thanks!

I like this miniature manifesto (Beehaw). Sadly I don’t think the mod policies outlined in it are something scalable for the masses, but if you’re trying to build a cool, tight knit community it feels like it will work really well.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Moderation in the fediverse (inc. Mastodon & Lemmy) means defederating from "problematic" instances, where problematic is defined in the rules of the server doing the federating server (which appears to be documented at https://beehaw.org/instances)

This means moderation happens at a community & instance level rather than global moderation.

Please correct me if I'm missing something - I'm quite new to Mastodon & the fediverse like I'm sure many are!

That's correct. Defereration is a moderation tool. There are instances which explicitly cater to bad behaviour and they will be dropped by many others. It's fine. (Yes yes, it's not perfect and random problems do happen)

It's actually problematic when instances get too large to fail (like the two biggest mastodon ones), because when their mods cannot cope anymore, you can't realistically ban the whole insurance - too many users would be affected.

But that's still better than a single global namespace where you have to deal with single accounts every time.

>It's actually problematic when instances get too large to fail (like the two biggest mastodon ones), because when their mods cannot cope anymore

Or like Twitter, and every other large social media network. So much straight up criminal stuff flies under the radar simply because it's impossible for a handful of people to police that many people.

But we were told "You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server/instance" (1). If lemmyworld is a "problematic" instance, why is it one of the recommended sites to join? Seems like the messaging is confusing for new users.

(1) https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Yeah, I created an account in lemmyworld simply because it was the first one in the list, and this move from beehaw pisses me infinitely. So now I do have to trash all the work I did subscribing because they threw a tantrum?

Well, they can have their server to themselves, I'm not going to subscribe to another server only to see it also blocked. They have proven to be the unreliable ones.

I hope the rest of the network retaliates and defederate beehaw. That's the right thing to do. If they want to be alone, grant their wishes and make them alone.

Defederation wars is not the solution. There needs to be finer grained tools. But I don't have any good answers.

This has been my primary concern about federated reddit. With mastodon etc, the defederation stuff is tolerable because you aren't as likely to have any reason to care about the instance defederating from you anyway.

For instance, the free-speech instances weren't going to be interested in dealing with the typical Twitter refugee anyway, and both would be content in their own corner.

But with federated forums this changes, as now you're expecting users from other instances to form a community with your users, so you're heavily incentivised to only work with instances who place the same emphasis on the rules, and unless each "clique" is fine with duplicating all the common forum topics for their own users, the result is that a very small group of people gets to take everyone's content hostage to impose their own will on the community.

So we're back to the same Reddit issue of a few people controlling the majority of the content.

There's nothing ironic about this, the whole point of a federated system is that instances have the power to decide who's a part of their network.

The irony is that one of the main drivers for the Reddit blackouts is/was the lack of moderator tools in the official client.

However, if there's demand open source contributors will sort out the tooling soon enough, while the closed-source official Reddit app is unlikely to improve anything soon.

> have the power to decide who's a part of their network.

Former Reddit mods are going to love this feature.

Now when they are power-tripping or they don't agree with another instances users views on a topic, instead of just banning the users, they can ban entire instances/communities from participating in one fell swoop.

Reddit mods already have bots that do this for them. Subscribing to/commenting in the wrong subreddit will get you banned from a whole host of subreddits.

That's the reason I got banned. I posted in one anti-covid sub a study that refuted one of their pseudo science ones and got banned from 8 or 10 popular subs, most which I didn't even join, and warned if I ever dared post there I would get banned from reddit. And yet there is no reddit feature where you can see where you are "banned" from. It's ridiculous. I didn't even care but a lot of stuff hits r/all and you can easily go into those groups and comment on something. Banning should mean you can't enter or post in a sub, but it doesn't. That's how glaring "reddit features" are and how awful some mods are as human beings.

As opposed to Reddit, where admins have to forcibly intervene when subreddits frequently brigade each other. For all its foibles, the fediverse approach is solving actual problems with Reddit.

I think many people implicitly desire that the federation graph is complete, or practically nearly-complete with some pariah servers cut off. To put it differently, they want to be "user@host" in a system with a global namespace, not "user" in the "host" namespace with patchy access to others.

This.

I don't want 10 user accounts in 10 places to access the stuff I want to access.

The problem is that a complete graph doesn't really make sense because people are different and find different things acceptable.

I don't want Nazi shit on my reddit replacement. I'm assuming a lot of people here wouldn't want theirs to be full of commie shit. Then there's the religious nuts etc etc.

Think of it less as censorship and more as community self-segregation. I wouldn't go to a Nazi bar or Sunday school in real life, why would I want to be in the online equivalent?

Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts, if you never happen to exchange emails with them? Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites?

Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it?

> Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts

Email providers very explicitly do care. You can be banned from gmail for especially egregious things for example. If an email account was serving me nazi propaganda I would inform the platform, and if it was coming from a specific email provider they would likely be blacklisted. Keep in mind this already happens when it comes to spam; the difference is that nazis are not blasting random emails with nazi stuff so it becomes much harder to track.

> Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites?

Generally speaking, yes. We went over this before with Cloudflare and sites that were full of people harassing and harming other users. Responsibility eventually falls on someone and that someone was the host provider.

> Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it?

Because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federated instances and content works, which is why I recommend you actually interact with those services before trying to make arguments. A user isn't subscribing to sub XYZ, they're a user of an instance which has subs XYZ and which federates to instance ABC. This is important because the instance is serving you that info, so if I like XY but hate AB, the instance can serve me content, users etc which are a part of AB. In fact, this is why Reddit does exactly what you seem to think they don't do. Many subreddits have bots, automod etc that will ban people that are from certain subreddits due to the content of their posts or how likely they are to troll. Defederation is a more explicit form of that.

> Email providers very explicitly do care.

That wasn't what I was asking though – I was asking whether a user should care. Why should I care who else uses my email provider, if I never interact with them?

> You can be banned from gmail for especially egregious things for example.

Gmail will only ban you for "especially egregious things". The Mastodon Server Covenant clause 1 calls for banning people for things which Gmail would not consider "especially egregious". A big difference.

> Generally speaking, yes. We went over this before with Cloudflare

I don't consider who a CDN's other customers might be when deciding which CDN to use. I'm sure many CDNs provide services to websites advocating viewpoints which I view as foolish, even reprehensible–but I don't see what relevance that has to my own decision as to which CDN I should use for my own site.

> Many subreddits have bots, automod etc that will ban people that are from certain subreddits

I think that kind of behaviour is toxic, and I would never knowingly participate in any subreddit that did that. But, in any event, that's a community-level issue, not an instance-level one, and as such I'm not sure what it has to do with the topic of federation.

> But, in any event, that's a community-level issue, not an instance-level one, and as such I'm not sure what it has to do with the topic of federation.

Instance == Community. The rest of your post I've already addressed and I'm not going to go over again. You calling out the Mastodon Server Covenant does not particularly make sense because it's not an authority, it's a listing of servers. Again you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federation works given that you keep using incorrect comparisons.

> Instance == Community

A whole instance is not necessarily a single community.

People keep on defending Mastodon by comparing it to email – an email provider is not necessarily a community.

If we are talking about a federated Reddit-clone (Mastodon is more a federated Twitter-clone) – the communities are the subreddits (or whatever the clone chooses to call them) not the instances.

An instance is a community, period. This is like trying to argue that subforums on a forum is not a single community. They may be smaller blocks within a larger community, but they still form a larger community as a whole and adhere to a generalized ruleset.

You're the one that keeps comparing it to email, so I recommend you stop. Simple as that. Ctrl-F this thread and every response that has to do with email starts with you. I've explicitly compared it to IRC and forums.

Your last point is incorrect. Beehaw is a reddit alternative. They defederated from other instances because other instances had free registeration, which was resulting in users from that instance trolling and doing low quality posts in their community (according to them). They can do this because the instance is the community.

> You're the one that keeps comparing it to email, so I recommend you stop.

In previous discussions here about Mastodon, people have been defending it by comparing it to email.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35579181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35583666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35582762

This is not the previous discussion, nor am I one of the previous users from a previous discussion made over two months ago. I do not care what other people have argued about and am not making their argument.

I don't, but I don't want to see it either or allow them to see my stuff since I'm extremely anti-nazi and anti-fascist and don't them to come trolling me. Nor do I want them using my resources to try and bring young impressionable people into their fold.

On a service like Reddit a user can simply visit or join subreddits they are interested in, and ignore subreddits they are not interested, or which they find offensive.

The way the Fediverse works, as it is explained to newcomers, is that you can follow any topic on any server regardless of which server you are one. The expectation is that the graph is complete. When the graph is not complete, suddenly you can't follow your favorite topic because some users talking about a different topic did something that the admin on the other server isn't happy with. The whole server gets disconnected. Whichever server you choose to join, you always have the risk of getting defederated for things you have nothing to do with. Yes, you can change to a different server, but changing servers is not nearly as frictionless as it's sometimes made out to be.

In Usenet, to name another decentralized service, this is completely different. Servers can decide to carry or not carry a newsgroup, but they don't cut off a complete server for what happens in one of the newsgroups. (That's not to say that Usenet doesn't have problems of its own.)

> they don't cut off a complete server for what happens in one of the newsgroups

Back in the dark ages when I was running a Usenet site, we would definitely drop servers if they were more hassle (spamming, providing blocked material, etc.) than we wanted to deal with.

>Think of it less as censorship and more as community self-segregation. I wouldn't go to a Nazi bar or Sunday school in real life, why would I want to be in the online equivalent?

A closer analogy here is that your city councilman doesn't want to go to a Nazi bar or Sunday school in real life, and so he orders all the roads to the churches and the bars demolished, and also the roads to all the houses of the people who go to the churches or Nazi bars.

"After all," he says, "they can still build their own network of roads if they want. We're just not going to allow anyone in our community to use our network of roads to get there."

Let me answer with a somewhat famous reddit post (ironic, huh?): https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw...

If you don't kick Nazis out of your bar, they will infiltrate it, run everyone who isn't a Nazi out and then you're running a Nazi bar yourself.

The point is that "federating" with a remote instance means accepting posts from users on that instance that you have no control over. If "host" is a rogue instance that's sending spam all over the place, it makes sense that other parts of the network will defederate from it. It's still a global namespace, users are just limited in where they can post if they are on an untrusted instance.

And there you have it. Reddit has solved both performance / scalability and moderation, and thinking it can be solved by going distributed / federated is naive. Every Reddit alternative has failed / is not as successful is because of this.

> not as successful

How do you measure success? Number of users? Number of posts and comments?

It is possible to have a small community with few people and less activity, that maintains a higher quality of content than a bigger community with more people.

The main danger of being small might be the threat of becoming an echo chamber because you are not exposed to as much variety in ideas. But even big communities sometimes do a “pretty good job at” (i.e. succumb to) becoming an echo chamber.

If Mastodon is any indicator, the Fediverse is already well optimized to create echo chambers.

That's what has turned me off on the whole fediverse thing. Too much time spent on figuring out who's not going to talk to whom and who is going to be banned from where. I am old enough to remember the old time internet forums. It wasn't always pretty. It wasn't always clean. There were trolls. There were flamewars. But people spent most of the effort to connect and build, not on banning each other and walling off. For me personally, a collection of 100 safe spaces, cross-banning each other, is not something I want to deal with, and defeats the whole purpose.

Maybe it's my own problem, but I believe a lot of people have the same problem:

My biggest issue about this is that I'm too lazy to learn how it works. I don't understand what "federation" and "defederating" mean in this context. For Reddit I have terms like:

subreddit - a board, like in a forum

mod - a mod, just like in a forum again

karma - useless internet point

and that's about all I need to know. I just don't have the incentive to learn what federation, defederating, instances, etc are, but they seem to somehow can affect what content I can see or whether I'll get banned. This demotivates me even further.

Of course if it becomes a mainstream platform or all my friends are using it then I'll learn these concepts. But not before that.

That's because beehaw is essentially a giant safe zone and they don't suffer trolls. They got too many trolls from outside so they decided to cut bait.

Join the programming.dev instance instead. It’s really nice and starting to become an active community.

What does irony mean?

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