5 ms·

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 p

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 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.

lolinder 3y ago
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 https://beehaw.org/post/107014
- ShroudedNight 3y ago
  > It wouldn't surprise me if they continue to defederate any instance with open registration. We're back to dodging Eris, are we?
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    > 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 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.
    - rjh29 3y ago
      I learned why efnet is called efnet from your comment. Very interesting, thanks!
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  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.
guywithahat 3y ago
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
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  My only takeaway is that the "fediverse" is merely another layer/expression of centralization.
  - notRobot 3y ago
    Decentralisation isn't perfect, and has its problems. That doesn't mean it's the same as centralisation.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      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).
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > 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.
kibwen 3y ago
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.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  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.
- unclekev 3y ago
  > 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.
  - solveit 3y ago
    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.
    - lost_tourist 3y ago
      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.
  - 3y ago
jakecopp 3y ago
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 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!
- viraptor 3y ago
  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.
  - BasedAnon 3y ago
    >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.
- Vvector 3y ago
  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 https://join-lemmy.org/instances
  - shaky-carrousel 3y ago
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
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.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  > 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.
  - thaneross 3y ago
    If Mastodon is any indicator, the Fediverse is already well optimized to create echo chambers.
jrflowers 3y ago
What does irony mean?
dotnet00 3y ago
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.
raincole 3y ago
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.
lost_tourist 3y ago
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.
bbotond 3y ago
Join the programming.dev instance instead. It’s really nice and starting to become an active community.
smsm42 3y ago
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.

lolinder 3y ago

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 https://beehaw.org/post/107014

ShroudedNight 3y ago
> It wouldn't surprise me if they continue to defederate any instance with open registration. We're back to dodging Eris, are we?
- codetrotter 3y ago
  > 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 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.
  - rjh29 3y ago
    I learned why efnet is called efnet from your comment. Very interesting, thanks!
SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
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.

guywithahat 3y ago

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

Dalewyn 3y ago
My only takeaway is that the "fediverse" is merely another layer/expression of centralization.
- notRobot 3y ago
  Decentralisation isn't perfect, and has its problems. That doesn't mean it's the same as centralisation.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    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).
p-e-w 3y ago
> 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.

kibwen 3y ago

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.

resolutebat 3y ago
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.
unclekev 3y ago
> 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.
- solveit 3y ago
  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.
  - lost_tourist 3y ago
    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.
- 3y ago

jakecopp 3y ago

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 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!

viraptor 3y ago
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.
- BasedAnon 3y ago
  >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.
Vvector 3y ago
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 https://join-lemmy.org/instances
- shaky-carrousel 3y ago

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

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.

codetrotter 3y ago
> 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.
- thaneross 3y ago
  If Mastodon is any indicator, the Fediverse is already well optimized to create echo chambers.

jrflowers 3y ago

What does irony mean?

dotnet00 3y ago

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.

raincole 3y ago

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.

lost_tourist 3y ago

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.

bbotond 3y ago

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

smsm42 3y ago

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.