Heya, with recent news of beehaw.org defederating from a few instances, I noticed that we also recently defederated from sh.itjust.works. I’m not in-tune with whether they deserve it or not, but I have noticed that it does have some impacts on our users.
I happened to see this post from a fellow furry, expressing frustration with picking the ‘wrong’ server. They can also no longer see pawb.social posts/communities.
I also recently posted my little heart script over there because they had a general scripts community, and I’ve only just noticed that the edits/updates I’ve been doing on that post are not actually going anywhere - it’s similar to being shadowbanned. The pawb.social version of that post gets updated as normal, but we never sync that version to their server (and subsequently no other server ever gets the updated version). This makes sense now that I know we’re defederated, but nowhere in the UI does it indicate that I’m just shouting into the void. As a side effect, I’m no longer able to keep tabs on that scripting community for tool updates.
- Pawb version: https://pawb.social/post/43513
- sh.itjust.works version: https://sh.itjust.works/post/89693
I suspect that this is a big problem right now because people are migrating and joining servers at random, and they don’t know that the server they’re joining has bad admins. Communities are rapidly getting created, growing, then getting shadowbanned by half the lemmyverse.
I’m not petitioning for anything to change at pawb.social at the moment, and I’m sure that there were good reasons to defederate sh.itjust.works, but it does make me a bit wary that eventually I too might feel like I picked the ‘wrong’ server if a defederation culture becomes common in the lemmyverse. It’s not something I thought I had to think about when making an account. I really doubt anyone reputable will ever defederate us, so it’s really just a matter of who we choose to defederate.
Thoughts?
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We have a clear set of policies that set out what we will and will not tolerate. While sh.itjust.works is a much larger instance, we’ve seen a large number of users who’ve shown racist, xenophobic, and homophobic tendancies towards our users and other users within threads.
The current problem seems to stem from reports not actively being federated to the offending instance for their admins and community moderators to deal with. The alternative to that is they’re simply going ignored.
Either way, we unfortunately only have two tools at our disposal:
- Ban the individual accounts so the posts don’t federate here
- Block the instance
There’s simply no way right now to silence or otherwise “quarantine” instances that are experiencing an influx of 4chan and man-child trolls.
Edit: Also, to be clear, we try to use defederation as a last resort, and only in circumstances where the situation either requires vast amounts of attention (lack of moderators) or where the instance is “freeze peach” (no moderation), either of which is detrimental to the community.
This thread and the admin actions you had to take makes me wonder- is there a way to defederate a specific community within an instance to keep it ‘private’ to that instance? Like, why does the rest of the fediverse need to weigh in on feedback and suggestions or the admin log or ect inside another instance?
No, I don’t believe there’s a way right now to make a specific community “local-only” though this has been a thought I’ve had.
I do like the transparency and having outside opinions is useful in the decision making process, but I don’t appreciate derogatory remarks like some in this thread from remote communities.
Yeah, I agree. Hopefully that’s something that can be added. Imagine we decided to hold a banner contest for a fancy new look, right? At the moment, nothing is stopping folks from remote communities we’re tangentially linked to from brigading the vote to be a BoatyMcBoatface situation. Since each instance is it’s own community that connects to a wider community, there really should be the ability to keep some things local.
Please see this post for updates.
At the moment, I’m fully in support of retaining the defed from shitjustworks, simply because they have an open registration policy and as such, are completely filled to the brim with trolls and other bad actors using their space to harass other people. Right now what’s happening is folks are able to make an account on shitjustworks and lemmy.world, go troll other instances to their heart’s content, get banned, and then spin up a new account in seconds to do it again.
Lemmy’s mod tools aren’t very robust at the moment, so defederating from a place that isn’t ensuring they have a handle on their own community is the best tool instances have to protect their own community. If either of those places get themselves together properly, I assume there should be no problem refederating with them.
It does seem a bit problematic to just deferdate any instance with an open registration policy, because such instances are naturally going to grow faster than ones with more user vetting, and as such taking a blanket position to not federate with them seems like it would be effectively cutting oneself off from most of the network, in the long run. At the same time though, I get why they might pose a trolling risk, because Lemmy doesn’t have the same means to deal with ban evasion and because any given instance is going to be run by small team that has limited time. Feels like a situation with no good options at the moment.
Yeah, admins and mods just need more robust tools to identify and remove ban evaders, escalate issues with troublemakers to their home instance admin, as well as create litmus tests for community participation (i.e. your account must be X days old if from a federated instance to post here) to make it less attractive to relentlessly spam and troll.
Hello, I’m the guy that made that post. I was wanting to just make a short post explaining things, but it turned into an essay it seems. So, uh, enjoy.
Honestly, that edit was mostly just an emotional response. It’s… Just so much drama, tbh. I just want the whole “Lemmyverse” to prosper or whatever, but it feels like everything is fracturing and falling apart. I feel like I shouldn’t have to make multiple separate accounts on different servers (although that was the norm in the old forum days, and it might end up being a culture thing here).
Feels like there’s going to be two separate “cliques” almost; those lucky enough to get into an invite/approval server, and those that couldn’t/didn’t. And each of those “cliques” will form their own communities and not really talk to each other. There’d be [email protected] and [email protected] or whatever, and they’d just never talk.
Compounding this is that defederation is implemented really badly. Like, super badly. I don’t think anyone actually understands how it works and what implications it has for users. There’s no interface for when things you post get blackholed. I only found out about it when I posted a comment, went to the original instance and thought it weird that the comment wasn’t there.
If defederation like this continues, especially without standardized blocklists, we’d get into a situation where people would send messages and then them not be received by the other end. Communities would fracture into local “forks” which are only visible to a single instance. Even worse, it would not even be clear that this is happening, or how it works.
I do think @Crashdoom should have posted an announcement about defederating sh.itjust.works. Especially since it is one of the “OG” instances that were spun up at the start of the migration. Ideally with the motivations behind it and why lemmy.world (which has similar issues) was not defederated.
However, I want to make it clear that I don’t disagree with their decision. I can see open signups being a problem, and… Honestly the fact that a thread that the troll made is still there (even though the user is banned) doesn’t reflect well with how the admin’s polices mesh well with other instances. I sympathize that this situation… Honestly sucks for everyone involved. There are a lot of arseholes online. Thanks to all the mods that largely keep them away from us.
The admin of sh.itjust.works made a thread about the defederation here as well, they seem pretty chill about wanting to work things out: https://sh.itjust.works/post/129725
Legitimately, I think all of this will cause people to leave Lemmy en-masse because it “doesn’t work”. Combined with the janky UI, federation being confusing in general, the political issues with lemmy.ml and lemmygrad dot ml (which I’ve not seen any evidence that they’re owned by the same person, but eh), it doesn’t look good for Lemmy. I was optimistic that maybe it might have had the momentum to be a serious competitor to Reddit but honestly… I don’t think it’s production ready yet. Maybe next time Reddit does something unpopular, if it still exists, but I think this migration is ultimately doomed to fall to this drama.
I get that Pawbs and Beehaw don’t want to be a “new Reddit”, and instead focus on high quality, heavily moderated communities (like /r/AskHistorians. Never used it, but from what I’ve heard it seems to be the vibe they are going for?), but I was hoping there’d be a world in which they could co-exist with the heavily focused communities which are being mass created on lemmy.world and friends.
Regarding “limited” access… I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m not really sure how it would work? Mastodon is a mostly one-on-one situation. You follow and interact with one person at a time, whereas with Lemmy you interact with a number of people at once. There’s a number of technical issues that need answering here which I may go into in a follow up post, since I’ve rambled on enough already.
I intend to use my beehaw account to continue interacting with pawbs; you can’t get away from me that easily!
Edit: Does editing a post cause it to be resent?
I must say, I do have to agree that care must be taken with defederating. While I certainly understand doing so from instances which are highly toxic, or those that are actively engaging in spamming. Banning very large instances, like SIJW, could start to cause a lot of issues as more communities move over from Reddit. Here’s a list I found on Reddit of some communities that have established themselves (I don’t know of it’s in an official manner or not, but not sure it 100% matters in this case) on Lemmy apparently. Many are on lemmy.ml, but others are on different instances too, such as lemmy.world. That’s definitely going to be a problem soon if we defederated from omw of those.
I support defederating from actively troublesome instances, but only in a reactive way. Proactively defederating could lead to more issues than it solves. Unless we actively had issues from SIJW, I don’t see a reason to defederate from them? (It would help of we could just block certain communities from instances, instead of having to defederate entirely)
Hello, it’s me, the poster of that comment. I made a long comment detailing some of my thoughts and concerns, but for some reason it got lost somewhere and never made it to pawb.social.
EDIT: Okay, so apparently editing the post got it to resend and it showed up. Interesting.
Yeah, the problem feels worse than Mastodon, and I think it may come down to there being no limit feature. You can’t just hide thIngs from the instance without cutting off communities.
Lemmy’s mod tools need to improve and have more granular options for dealing with instances, communities and spam (same with mastodon tbh!).
I kinda like what Pixelfed is doing there, they got tired of the spam bots coming from mastodon.social and decided to build their own spam classifier, similar to how it’s done with email.
