Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Is there any reason for them defederating?
Beehaw.org is a highly maintained instance with careful moderation and rules for their instance and communities.
The explosion of new users this month has overwhelmed their moderation team with having to keep up with now moderating new huge user bases from large instances like sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world. These instances in particular it seems had lots of bad actors causing issues in their communities.
There are plans for them to re-federate at some point with the advent of new modding tools and updates to Lemmy
That honestly does not sound like the worst way to curb the increase in traffic. It’s understandable for communities to “get their house in order”.
But it does put a damper on the growth of every instance. The second people hear one of the biggest instances has cut off from the other biggest instances, they go “this fediverse thing is just too complicated!” and go to one of the centralized replacements.
The issue is the the growth could literally kill the underlying servers. Imagine running an instance on a raspberry pi and all the sudden see a hundred thousand users start hitting your server.
If that was Beehaw’s issue, I’d be more sympathetic, but it isn’t. They are using it as an incredibly crude moderation tool, not because of some technical limitation.
They want an echo chamber
I thought it was because they lacked the ability to effectively moderate.
That’s correct.
Moderator tools on Lemmy are still super, super basic when compared to Reddit’s. There’s a fair bit of work to be done yet.
Which effectively creates an echo chamber, be it good or bad
If the echo chamber I’m a part of prevents nazi and fascist ideology from becoming normal than I’m all for it.
Excuse me if you misunderstood my initial comment but it doesn’t argue against your statement at all. Again, a good or a bad one, an echo chamber is an echo chamber
Oh, gardens can have diversity without being an echo chamber. As they said they don’t see another way to stop those people who like to shit in carefully created gardens.
Nobody likes shit in their garden.
The flowers do.
(I’ll just show myself out).
And this is exactly why they have to defederate. People like you exists.
I mean—maybe? That wouldn’t necessarily be malicious, but I think it’s fair and appropriate to apply a healthy amount of skepticism and suspicion to their purported goals and reasoning. Beehaw is a self-proclaimed “safe space”, and unfortunately that term has become a kind of dog whistle for militant identity politics.
Particularly in instances, like this one, when thinly veiled patronizing is wielded to preemptively paint a large group of strangers with a very broad brush in the purported aim of protecting marginalized persons from “malicious” outsiders, my cynicism radar tends to beep very loudly. It may well in fact be true that the current suite of mod tools makes beehaw’s managers powerless against an overwhelming tide of new traffic, but that wouldn’t automatically rule out competitive motives.
Federated or not, Lemmy represents an opportunity for wealth for whoever is best positioned if it ends up being a successor to Reddit, and what we’re going to see is a round of jockeying and vying for position in the coming (ongoing) chaos. I’ll admit that like many of us I’m very new to this platform, but the fact that defederation is possible at all leads me to believe that less scrupulous individuals in positions of ownership could with only small effort leverage it to enlarge their influence at the expense of competing servers.
Maybe I’m dead wrong on a technical level; maybe I’m full of shit–I’ll admit I basically don’t know what I’m talking about except in the broadest possible terms, so somebody please correct me if I’m wrong–but I wonder if this isn’t so much about creating an echo chamber as incentivizing people who identify with beehaw’s stated ideology to come under its umbrella (with supposed protections for hate speech), and defederation is just a way to force people to make the same kind of unhappy, unnecessary choices many of us just made with Reddit.
EDIT: I really can’t thank y’all enough for this. It feels like I’m right back on Reddit. From the accusations that I must be a secret conservative because I dared to question motives to the folks unable to actually engage in discourse without manufactured disdain, it’s like nothing has changed at all.
Maybe beehaw doesn’t have an axe to grind, but somebody sure does.
My god, this post was unnecessarily long. I think they just don’t weirdos posting dick pics and bombarding it with questionable content. Not everything is a culture war.
I’m voting for full of shit based on the dotted line you drew between any safe space and militantism.
Okay. To be clear, I wouldn’t automatically assume anybody who wants to be free from hate speech has bad intentions, but I also think it’s fair to be critical of any effort to stifle dissenting opinion–even uncomfortable opinion–with the justification that the censorship is to a third party’s benefit, and it’s immaterial whether the third party is children, a historically disadvantaged group, or any other class. That is, I don’t say all this to accuse beehaw of ulterior motives–but I also wouldn’t put it past anybody, and skepticism is appropriate (like always). More and more frequently, “safe space” really just means: We want an echo chamber, but it’s okay because we know best. That’s a red flag.
When it comes to racism, sexism, and transphobia, the “dissenting opinions” are things like “you do not exist” and “you are sub human” and “you do not deserve rights.”
You’re fooling yourself if you think that not tolerating hate == stifling dissenting opinion. How should one stand up for human rights? Moderately? Or militantly?
Sounds like you’ve bought the old conservative line of bullshit on all this. “Oh they don’t permit sexism? We should be highly skeptical of this!! What about freedom of speech??”
Le sigh
The problem with defederation is the same problem with the position you’re taking, that it conflates all opinion with whatever worst thing you can imagine, enabling you to insist that because some people are awful, everyone who doesn’t agree with the proposition is (or in beehaw’s case, everyone who doesn’t join their walled garden). This isn’t a case of “they don’t permit sexism.” They didn’t permit sexism when they were still federated. Defederation is an extra step–they want you to use their server or otherwise not participate in their communities at all, and the explanation for why is that the people on lemmy.world are sexist. Maybe they’re authentically overwhelmed, and it’s certainly their prerogative, but one would be wise to examine their stated basis more critically, because heavy handed owners of platform infrastructure are why Lemmy is in this position in the first place.
Now you’re just not reading. Look at this thread. It’s been clearly shown and stated publicly that they are simply overwhelmed by the explosive growth coming at them from instances like lemmy.world that have added millions of members overnight. They have a more intentionally managed community with high standards and hands on moderators and they cannot right now handle the sudden explosive volume. They are trying to scale up and their desire and intention is to refederate. Meanwhile you have spun up all kinds of tales in your head about how they want to control speech or ban it because of their militant identity politics. You’re making all of that up, when the actual explanations are right there in public for you to read. Try gathering more information and forming fewer judgments based on your internal biases.
I simply adore it when the right tries to use the vocabulary of the left and only outs itself!