but things should normalize after that.

There’s a greater likelihood that the content creators are the ones moving. Most of the reddit power users likely used third party apps. Most of the reddit power users are also the ones who wrote most of the comments worth reading.

So if on june 1 most of the reddit power users flee, reddit’s enshitification will have reached a terminal stage. Eventually, reddit will stop having things worth reading, and the lurkers will all move over.

I think we’re in for a long decline of reddit a la facebook. However unlike facebook, there isn’t a market of old people/foreign markets that can fill their user numbers.

That’s not how any of this works…

Communities (as you put, sublemmy) can’t be individually federated, only instances can be. And needing another account is a sign that you are looking at a post on the wrong instance, not a sign that an instance is not federated. In fact, finding out an instance is not federated can be pretty difficult unless you check the list of instances that are defederated on another instance.

That’s not a universal link, so you ended up on a different instance. A much simpler and easy explanation than what you came up with.

I was a mod on an advice sub on reddit, this is a terrible idea.

It was enough work as a mod to sift through things that actually needed to be reported. For advice, downvotes are needed to express when something is genuinely bad advice. It can’t be up to mods to sift through every single comment, that’d be impossible.

Just explaining how this affects the users here, that’s it. I just said why I personally think this is a mistake.

surely I can do that without both of them needing to give me permission via federation?

So there are whitelist only instances (which honestly is what beehaw should be doing), so if you hosted your own instance, you would need to be whitelisted in order to interact with beehaw communities/users. Otherwise, federation is pretty much a default

Like if I want to set up my own instance and pull posts from lemmy.world and beehaw.org, surely I can do that without both of them needing to give me permission via federation?

Ok, so this requires some understanding of the ActivityPub protocol, and my understand of this edge case is admittedly a bit fuzzy. You can still access that information, you could do it right now just by going to https://beehaw.org, and if you have some mechanism to pull that data, you could still get that data if you wanted to. But critically, that wouldn’t use ActivityPub.

With ActivityPub, your instance would send a request to the community on beehaw to follow the community. The beehaw instance would then send updates to your instance, where they would be stored as a copy. Beehaw keeps the “true” version, as the community is hosted on their instance, but you have your own copy. If beehaw defederates you (or is whitelist only and never federates you), then you can’t send that request (rather, you can send the request, but beehaw won’t listen). So beehaw will not send updates via ActivityPub.

sorry, I had to do a lot of editing in order to get it to post this morning.

Including instances that are also defederated.

Basically, beehaw has decided we can no longer access the “true” version of communities on beehaw. So the versions hosted here on lemmy.world are still visible to lemmy.world users, but that doesn’t update the “true” version, and also doesn’t update other versions hosted on other defederated instances.

It will be interesting to check beehaw communities hosted on defederated instances in a few days. Because the version on lemmy.world will be very different from the version on sh.itjust.works which will be different still from the “true” version.

You obviously got called out for disregarding the rules of other instances

I obviously didn’t. I like how you just assuming I’m some internet asshole. All I did was write out an explanation for the users of this instance because there was a lot of confusion about what defederation means. Maybe stop being a jerk and making assumptions?

I never said beehaw wasn’t allowed to do what they’re doing, of course they are. You’re the one making that assumption. I said that this will result in more damage to beehaw than to lemmy.world, and it will do more damage still to lemmy as a whole.

Yeah I did. That’s why I think they don’t fully understand what defederation entails. It doesn’t accomplish the goals they set out in their decision post, and does have a whole bunch of knock on effects (for their own users) that they don’t address at all.

That’s not at all what’s happening though.

Anyone can create an instance. So using your example, it’s kind of like reddit banning anyone posting from 4chan, but literally anyone could create their own “chan” to post to reddit. If they only whitelisted instances then that would at least make some sense.

It shouldn’t be beehaw’s job to moderate another instance that just lets everyone in.

But that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.

I think the admins of Beehaw think they’ve effectively banned lemmy.world users from their instance, which is largely what they did. And if they chose to do that, then that’s their decision. But they didn’t choose to do that, they did something far more drastic.

Defederation prevents beehaw users from interacting with lemmy.world users ANYWHERE on lemmy. Effectively, beehaw admins are deciding what their users can see elsewhere on lemmy, which in my view is wrong. Effectively, in order to access most of lemmy, beehaw users will need a second account on another instance. And if you’re going to have a second account, why have the first?

The problem is that defederation is not an act of moderators. This is an admin level action being used in service of a moderator level problem. This is not how defederation is meant to be used, and given how the admins of that instance describe their reasoning, I don’t think they fully understand the implications of their decision.

1. There are other, less heavy handed ways of accomplishing the same thing

2. This action doesn’t actually do what they want it to do, since anyone can create a new instance and post,

3. This action does more to make the experience of their users worse

So yes, admins choosing to defederate another instance despite not understanding what that actually does and what the consequences of that action are is, as I said, dumb.

If that’s the point, then there’s nothing wrong with what they did.

But like someone else commented, why are they hosting a lemmy instance? What they want is a curated forum…

There’s a lot of instances that could defederate from. 2 is not a huge number so far.

They defederated from 300 some instances. And it’s kinda ridiculous to use the number of instances instead of the number of users. They defederated from 2 of the top 4 instances in terms of number of users.

It’s definitely a temporary, broad axe to cutting an apple type solution to their troll problem

Two things:

1. It doesn’t actually address their troll problem, since anyone can create a new instance and post to their communities.

2. It has the knock on affect of their users not being able to interact with a huge chunk of the wider fediverse

That second point is the main criticism I have for them. I don’t think they fully understood the consequences of their actions. They’re using an extreme admin-level action for community moderation. That’s now how this was intended to be used.

Why would anyone stay on an instance that can’t interact with a huge chunk of the fediverse? Only the most passionate beehaw-ers will stay there. Most will likely leave to more accessible pastures.

They’re trying to intentionally cultivate a culture over there rather than to moderate over an evolving one, and at the moment its too much work for them with the high volume of users.

Sure, but the way they went about doing it was the wrong way to do it.

They’ve effectively locked their users into ONLY accessing their walled garden.

I think what they wanted to do was block lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works users from posting in their communities, which would be possible with a pretty simple bot. Instead, they’re largely preventing their own users from accessing other communities, which based on their post was not their intention. And because of those effects, it’s likely going to result in their users leaving for instances with more access.

walled garden

More like a prision

They want their instance to be a tight-knit safespace, and it is pretty hard to accomplish when there are only several admins dealing with an insane wave of newcomers

They could do that by blocking all users from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. What they’ve done is prevent their users from interacting with the broader fediverse, which is not at all what they intended to do based on their post.

There’s a positive here:

Everyone can just leave beehaw. I already saw a few comments from users that left beehaw after the admins there made poor decisions. Unlike reddit where if the admins make horrible decisions you can’t really leave, here the admins are bound similarly to how moderators were on reddit.

If the mods fuck up too much, people just create their own sub. Seattle had like 4 different subs due to moderator bullshit. Beehaw will probably not survive, and that’s ok. But lemmy as a whole will be perfectly fine!

We really shouldn’t. That wouldn’t actually solve any issues. It just means that the versions of posts we’re looking at on other instances aren’t “true”.

Beehaw is defederating incorrectly. The best thing to do is to abandon them (considering the size of lemmy.world, that’s what’s likely to happen). It should not be common practice to retaliate with more defederation.

No, this is a bad idea. If an instance defederates, they no longer get the “true” version of posts in other instances.

This idea of defederation is an extreme step. It really is like a nuke, and it really is supposed to be used in extreme circumstances (for example, a nazi instance should be defederated asap). The issue is that this extreme action is being used incorrectly.

They’re using extreme actions when a bot could just as easily accomplish the same task without needing to nearly break lemmy. It shows that the admins of that instance really don’t understand what defederation is or what it actually does.

They chose to defederate from large instances with open registration. They believe it’s allowing users to troll them.

IMO, this is kinda dumb. As any instance with open registration would be able to do what they want to prevent. Also, anyone can create their own instance and do this, they don’t even need a server. It’s just a bad idea.

I came up with a list of examples to explain this, but I can’t see to add them to the post. I’m having a really hard time posting today. So here they are in a comment. I think this helps show exactly what’s going on.

Examples

If this still doesn’t make sense, then try the following examples. I hope being able to see defederation in action makes this a little more clear.

Beehaw Communities

We’re going to use gaming@beehaw.org as an example of what happens to beehaw communities

Here are three links:

• https://beehaw.org/c/gaming/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
• https://lemmy.world/c/gaming@beehaw.org/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1
• https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming@beehaw.org/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1

The first link is the beehaw gaming community as hosted on beehaw. All of these are sorted by new, because it makes it very obvious when defederation went into effect. You can see that there are several new posts.

The second link is the beehaw gaming community as hosted on lemmy.world. You can see that all the posts before defederation (5 hours ago at time of writing) are the same as the beehaw one. But now, none of new posts are visible. We no longer get updates from the “true” version on beehaw. There are some new posts there, but all are posted by lemmy.world users. And the posts from lemmy.world users are not visible on beehaw.

The final link is to the beehaw gaming community as hosted on lemmy.ml. This is identical to the beehaw.org community, as the “true” version is on beehaw.org, the one that gets updated on other communities is the “true” version.

Lemmy.world communities

We’ll use the lemmyworld base community as an example:

• https://beehaw.org/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1

• https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1

• https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1

The first post is the version of this community as hosted on beehaw.org. You can see from 5 hours ago, there are no more posts. That’s because they no longer receive the “true” version of this community. Someone on there could still post, but then it would only be visible to other people on beehaw.org.

The second shows it as hosted on lemmy.world. We can see all the posts. The last link shows it as hosted on lemmy.ml, and we can see it’s the same as the lemmy.world version. The “true” version is on lemmy.world, so lemmy.ml keeps up with the updated version.

Third instance communities

Finally, we have the example of communities that are on instances that have not been defederated by beehaw.org.

• https://beehaw.org/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1

• https://lemmy.world/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1

• https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy/data_type/Post/sort/New/page/1

We can see all three of these versions look pretty similar. That’s because for the most part they are. We are identical with lemmy.ml, as lemmy.ml hosts the “true” version, and we get all updates from the “true” version. Beehaw.org will not get posts/comments from us, so beehaw actually doesn’t have the most “true” version of this community.

Comment example

I found this one really entertaining:

• https://beehaw.org/post/568532?scrollToComments=true

• https://lemmy.world/post/148178?scrollToComments=true

• https://lemmy.ml/post/1267202

This is the same post hosted on three different instances. Since the community is on lemmy.ml, the “true” version of this post is the lemmy.ml one.

It was posted by a beehaw.org user AFTER defederation, but it’s still visible to lemmy.world users, since the community it was posted to is lemmy.ml, not beehaw.org. We can comment on it, and those comments are sent to the “true” version on lemmy.ml (and then shared to the wider fediverse). However, comments from lemmy.world are NOT sent to the version of this post on beehaw.org.

When I found this example, there were only two comments on this post, both from lemmy.world users. So the poster did not get an initial response because of defederation.