this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023

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161

Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Cipher@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.

I've been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to "lemmy" as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.

For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw's communities are "owned" by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances' content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw "owns" the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.

This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.

Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren't going to read technical documentation?

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[–] BurningnnTree@lemmy.one 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

People don't dislike defederation because they misunderstand it. They dislike it because it's a bad user experience. It sucks to effectively get banned from a bunch of major communities through no fault of your own. It's a flawed system. I don't know what a good solution would be, but it's definitely an issue.

I guess one solution is to encourage users to join servers that are as small as possible, to reduce the chance of getting blocked. But that approach comes with its own set of downsides too.

[–] popshabang@kbin.social 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm torn on defederation. In theory I like it; a user can join an instance that moderates to the level that they agree with. Beehaw is a pretty good example of this because a lot of users like having a slightly more restrictive community in order to maintain a certain vibe.

But there is a more pragmatic side of me that thinks that the average user isn't super informed about this stuff, and are naturally going to gravitate to the larger instances. No doubt there were more trolls coming from lemmy.world, but there are far more regular users that have no idea what's going on.

I think Beehaw's decision is understandable though, especially given the lack of moderation tools. They've already mentioned that they are willing to (re?)federate in the future when trolls/bots are easier to deal with.

[–] greenskye@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Brand new to lemmy, but this is my take as well. The first account I created was on lemmy.world and then I had to create another to come here. Imagine if Verizon 'defederated' from T-Mobile because of a few bad actors.

The problems are real, but the solutions Lemmy currently seems to offer are going to stifle it's growth before it can truly go big. I can deal with it, but as it currently stands I could never get my friends to join and even if they did, a defederation event happening would kill the concept dead for my more casual friends.

[–] syntaxerror@lm.madiator.cloud 6 points 1 year ago

Imagine if Verizon ‘defederated’ from T-Mobile because of a few bad actors.

happens with email servers all the time

[–] seedling@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

That's basically how federated software has to work. Without defederation, running federated software becomes unusable. Either you get overrun by spammers or you become legally liable for illegal content from other servers if you don't do anything about it (the beehaw admins mentioned someone posting child porn as being one reason for defederation). Lemmy is clearly in its early days but this kind of thing will become way more common, as it is on more mature fediverse platforms.

Email providers are a good example of federated software. They have to make sure nobody is sending spam or malware or they will get federated, and they can be very aggressive about that.

Ultimately if you don't want defederation to ever happen, you want a centralized system run by a single organization. Those are your options.

Or you can have the government step in and have a very highly regulated system like for telephony, where almost nobody gets to run an instance, which seems unlikely in this case.

[–] MrMonkey@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

It's just like when email blew up. Email is a federated system as well. These are basically the same arguments I was hearing in the late 80s, early 90s about email. It's too confusing, nobody will ever use it.

Most servers did zero authentication for incoming emails. When spammers suddenly struck huge ip blocks were banned including innocent bystanders. Any "home" machine was often port blocked from running a mail server.

They developed tools and techniques to mitigate problems and now nobody cares where your email is.

The tools for this area known and the devs are working on it. Early adopters experience some friction.

[–] Fubarberry@lemmy.fmhy.ml 9 points 1 year ago

Yeah, and the user experience matters a lot right now. The reddit blackout is the best chance for rapid Lemmy/fediverse growth, so giving the best user experience right now is critical. Users who are new to the fediverse are already confused by the multiple instances, adding in extra conditions like "don't join these communities because you can't interact with this community" adds an extra level of complexity and makes the fediverse seem fractured and flawed as a first impression.

Beehaw's decision to defiderate may have been the best short-term decision for them, but I feel like it's a terrible decision for the rest of the fediverse and will hurt growth.

[–] ZappySnap@lemmy.one 9 points 1 year ago

Yep. I have accounts on three instances, but I had been using my Lemmy.World one the most, and then suddenly my beehaw communities are gone. It’s not a huge deal given that these accounts are so young, but it was still annoying. These sorts of things will prevent Lemmy from growing as an overall community.

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[–] trachemys@iusearchlinux.fyi 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Defederating lemmy.world is a temporary measure as better mod tools are made. It isn’t worth handwringing over. Defederation should not be the norm for dealing with a few trolls, or objectionable communities.

[–] Cipher@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This isn't handwringing, though I can understand why it might come off that way. This is simply mulling over how things "actually work" in the fediverse as opposed to how people believe it works. I believe that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is and how it works. This is an educational issue that we have an opportunity to begin sorting out

In addition, my scenario of instance users subscribing to illegal content will still be valid even with moderation tools. The only way to stop that currently is defederation with instances hosting illegal content.

[–] trachemys@iusearchlinux.fyi 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Federation/Fediverse should mean a user of any instance should be able to use any community. Gated communities shouldn’t be the expected norm. So, I would agree with the lemmy.world people who are upset at being broadly blocked from a Fediverse community. But it doesn’t matter because beehaw says it is temporary.

[–] rknuu@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is true, except for one element:

Fediverse should mean a user of any instance should be able to use any community the instance elects to federate with. Lemmy is open by design, but instances can just as easily switch that feature off and go to a allowlist method.

A commonly missed element with federation is that you federate with who you trust since you essentially mirror their content. It's less apparent with the lemmy migration, but mastodon used to caution its users to "join an instance that aligns with your preferences" for this reason.

Federation is really a philosophy about mutual trust, just like how email providers can block messages by user, instance, or domain.

Trust me, there's likely more gating present than you're aware of. Maybe not at lemmy.world (which as of this post is only blocking one site for reasons I won't mention), but this can get dark pretty quick if you leave things completely open.

[–] klangcola@reddthat.com 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A major instance (in terms of comunities) like Beehaw changing from denylist to Allowlist would be devastating for users on small and single-user instances, so I hope it never comes to that. Unless there's some process to get hundreds of tiny unknow instances in the Allowlist

I think some people see Lemmy as a way to host their own self-supported community on their own server, with users identifying strongly with the values of the instance, and with cohesion among the users of the instance.

While other people (me included) see instances more as something to just host the account, so we can participate in Commities across "the network", where "the network" is basically all the Lemmy instances except the de-federated extremists, or other walled gardens. User-cohesion is more on the Community-level and less on the Instance-level.

Do we want a small network of instances that have proven themselves trustworthy? Or do we want a large network of instances that have yet to prove themselves untrustworthy? Different people will have different answers

You do bring up a good point about needing to trust your federated instances because you're essentially mirroring their content

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[–] Hotchpotch@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

By that line of reasoning all alt-right, homophobe, harassing, doxxing, trolling etc. instances should be allowed to access every other instance to spread their hate. Is that really what you want? I don't.

[–] trachemys@iusearchlinux.fyi 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why do you think entire instances will be devoted to that? You will have to block every instance that has open registration, since any open instance cannot guarantee one of the people you mentioned will not come in. I guess the issue I have is that I see moderation as something between users and communities. Not that the overall instance should be doing the moderation.

[–] Hotchpotch@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Some are run or overrun by those kind of people. Have a look at how many instances are already defederated: https://beehaw.org/instances

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[–] Cipher@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think that assertion is based in reality. A server has to be hosted somewhere, and admins will generally choose to uphold those local regulations for the sake of their instance's own longevity. Federation has never meant that you communicate with literally every other instance. This isn't Tor where nodes pass along communications that don't directly involve themselves.

[–] trachemys@iusearchlinux.fyi 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Two separate issues are prompting “defederation”. Blocking users from posting to your local community and blocking remote communities from being mirrored on your server. Those should be handled differently. Beehaw didn’t want trolls posting mean things and blocked every user on a server. Your concern about illegal content would be more a complaint about specific communities that feature that content.

Either way you shouldn’t blame an entire server for a few users or communities you don’t want. Expecting everyone on a instance to be like minded isn’t going to work.

[–] Cipher@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The only way to not address things on a per-server basis is for moderation tools to be expanded in scope. Maybe that will be how things work one day, but it is not how things can work right now.

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[–] polaroid@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

It's a stopgap measure until better moderating tools are developed. I can't blame them for it.

[–] prlang@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My understanding is that people from Lenny.world can still “use” behaw by subscribing to communities and commenting on posts, but people on Behaw just can’t see them. Is that not how it works?

I have to say I chose behaw because I wanted a more heavily modded experience here. I really don’t mind them shadow banning whole communities if a disproportionate number of trolls are coming over from them. People have got the right to speak, not the right to be heard. The internet’s full of kids just wanting to be obnoxious, and I’ve got to say I’m more then happy that other humans are helping me to filter that junk out

[–] Cipher@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

When a Lemmy.World user posts to a Beehaw community right now, it updates the cached community that Lemmy.World stores. Beehaw has defederated with them, so the "source of truth" never updates. The source of truth is what updates other federated instances. As a result, someone on startrek.website, for example, will not see posts made by lemmy.world users to beehaw communities. The only people who can see what lemmy.world users post to beehaw right now are other lemmy.world users.

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[–] rknuu@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately, defederating means the cord has been cut. This means we still have what was previously been posted, but all future content is bidirectionally blocked.

[–] Wander@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Just because this software can be used that way, doesn't mean you're required to use it that way.

If I want to start a lemmy server and not let lemmy.world in, there's nothing wrong with that.

Lemmy.world isn't owed anything, they're not owed to view content in my community, they're not owed that I show their content to my users. And if my users are unhappy with that, that's fine, it's their choice to stay in my enclosed community or not.

Just because we're running the same software and the same communication protocols doesn't change that.

[–] Rakn@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

Nah. I don’t think it’s an education issue. E.g. I do understand how it works, but see defederation as the nuclear option. As a user in a federated system I don’t care where the communities are hosted that I frequent. As long as it works. That’s the entire point of federation. Otherwise we could just remove federation all together and have everyone create a separate account per instance.

I get where the beehaw admins are coming from and it’s understandable. But it’s not good and chips away at what Lemmy is and could be.

This is one instance now where this happened and I’m not on either of these instances, so I’m unaffected. But if I see more of these defederations (no matter where), the Signal it sends me is that for my needs I likely still have to bet on Reddit and at max this will become an occasional visit.

We are still far away from this point. Just saying. And a normal user can’t be expected to understand it or relate to it. It’s bad UX if they have to. Arguing for them to be educated about it is nice in theory, but misses in reality of how things just are.

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[–] leigh@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s unfortunate that a handful of replies here are demonstrating exactly why the Beehaw community leaders felt they had to make this choice. 😞

If Lemmy instances are like web forums, federation basically gives us a “Sign in with your [home instance] account” option. (That’s not technically accurate at all, I’m only talking about the user experience.) It reduces user friction and helps people participate more widely. They just stopped allowing that from certain instances because they think adding a bit of friction back in will be healthier for the Beehaw communities. If you’re on one of the defederated instances, you aren’t banned. Yeah, it’s inconvenient for you, but you just need a different sign-in (at least for the time being).

[–] greenskye@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From an end user perspective, I want a singular UI to browse all my various Lemmy identities in a cohesive manner. Not logged in on multiple tabs, trying to keep my subscription lists synced or otherwise organized. This is where a good app front end could smooth a lot of user friction out of the process.

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[–] socsa@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

This is a bad take because you used the most extreme example of why defederation is a practical necessity to justify a significantly less serious issue. I personally would want the bar to be much higher for this kind of thing.

I also don't "misunderstand" anything here. I just strongly disagree with the decision. What's next, beehaw gets upset that other instances allow downvoting?

[–] Dee_Imaginarium@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hi, Beehaw user here. You can downvote me all you want and they'll never appear on my instance so that won't be an issue. I could be sitting at -50 on your instance and it'll always appear as 1 on mine.

Honestly though, I'm a big fan of the defederation decision (at least for now). It's only a temporary measure until Lemmy gets more powerful mod tools and then they'll refederate when they can more easily moderate the trolls and bad actors. This is one of the features of the fediverse, got an instance that's producing a large amount of trolls? Not anymore! Insta-community clean. The only people I've ran across that don't like it are normally the people that end up getting banned tbh.

Edit: For reference to the vote scores, on Beehaw this is currently sitting at 25 upvotes for me. If anybody is viewing from an instance with downvotes, that's how it appears for Beehaw users.

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I do not think that anyone "likes" de-federation. In the end though people coming in from other nodes are guests in our forums. We do not have to put up with bad behavior. Moreover instances that allow their users to engage in this bad behavior take some responsibility too. They are your users after all. So if your instance gets banned look to your instances users, and also the admins and their policies that allow those users on that node. Do not under estimate the troll problem. Moderation is required and if it cannot be done effectively then other actions have to be taken like de-federation.

Then again, your coming from lemmy.ml and are not de-federated so why do you care. It is also a bit rich when lemmy.ml has not accepting subscriptions from behaw since I joined. Maybe you should complain about that too.

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[–] queue@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nice slippery slope fallacy. Try arguing in bad faith somewhere else.

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[–] administrator@lemmy.pro 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For example, lemmy.world are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities.

Are they, though? I’ve read a lot about it, and everyone over there seems to more or less understand it, kind of just shrug about it now, and have moved on. Lemmy world sees it’s bigger than beehaw now, has tons of its own content, still has access everywhere else and will be fine.

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[–] AnonymousLlama@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

People also need to be mindful that the concept of the fediverse isn't a simple one, not to the majority of people who use Reddit / other sites. We want to try and streamline the process of searching for, signing up to and contributing to content, at least if we want these platforms to continue to grow.

We don't need the 400+ million that Reddit has but having more interested users will help generate more content / engagement

[–] SKLC@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To me the whole situation is a "they bit off more than they could chew" kind of thing so you pull the nuclear option.. Honestly I'm avoiding subscribing to any beehaw communities because I won't be able to see any posts made from one of the most populous instances, hence diminishing their value. As a general user I would avoid signing up for beehaw as well for the same reasons.

[–] rs5th@lemmy.scottlabs.io 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

bit off more than they could chew

By starting a Lemmy instance a year and a half before Rexxit? I never saw them claim to want to be the next Reddit. The Fediverse had an influx of users and Lemmy doesn’t currently have the mod or admin tools to deal with that situation gracefully. My understanding is that most of the bad actors were external to Beehaw.

They didn’t bite off anything, shit was being shoved into their mouth so they closed it.

Personally, I’m using my very own Lemmy instance so that I can choose who I federate with (including Beehaw). I totally understand why some folks might want to have their home instance elsewhere, and it’s cool that federation gives us that ability.

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[–] mattreb@feddit.it 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If communities belonged to "lemmy" you would have Reddit. If anything would be forcefully federated it would be a mess. IMHO it's the right balance. I get your concerns about being confusing but given the state of development of the platform most of it will be solved by a better UI and better instance data synchronization policies, etc...

[–] Cipher@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

I agree. These mechanisms are in place to stop the fediverse from becoming fedChan

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[–] cfx_4188@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Signing up for social networking so you can start yanking tech support and reading man pages right away? Is this some elaborate masochistic exploration that we don't know about? What the vuck are you all talking about...

[–] Cipher@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

People need to understand what lemmy is. This is not monolithic social media like facebook or reddit. People need to understand that, or the mismatch between how they think it works and how it actually works is going to cause a lot of mental anguish that could be avoided.

As they say in software development, 8 hours of debugging can save you from one hour of reading the manual.

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[–] foxuin@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 year ago

It will take more time to establish norms. Other instances will certainly defederate and folks will become more accustomed to what that defederation means.

Instances are very vulnerable right now. There's not much ability to trust or predict how the owners of your instance will behave, because there isn't a long history of past behavior to look back on, so understandably some users will be frustrated by the lack of stability.

I do see one huge issue with how people are being instructed to join lemmy, which is that most resources tell people it doesn't matter which instance they join. That becomes fundamentally untrue with defederation.

[–] jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 6 points 1 year ago

I think if every instance was a one person instance then the mods would not have the hammer sollution to defederate thousends of people at once. Back in the days they would ban a IP range, it's simmilar.

But to not need to do that, there need to be better tools available for them, we're waiting for those now.

[–] erwan@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As we are seeing the same issues with Lemmy and Mastodon I'm starting to think there is something fundamentally wrong with ActivityPub.

Because instances pull content from others they have a responsibility in the content, so instances with different rules can't really work together.

If on the other hand we had a lighter integration between instances, like for example RSS to consume from multiple instances and only having federation for identity management (like OpenID or OAuth) I feel like we could avoid a lot of drama.

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[–] Cstrrider1@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

know very little about the programming but it feels like there would be some sort of SSO multi-instance user account syncing solution.

Make an account on one instance, say Lemmy.World, and from that account request access to the other instances that you would like to join. Your account would get cloned and synced to the other instances that you get accepted to and posts/comments in that instance would be stored on that instance account as a secondary instance.

Posts could be cloned to all federated clone accounts or you could designate a secondary backup acount in case the primary server goes down. Maybe there could be a limit of instances you join like 3-5 cloned accounts to reduce duplication of data and maybe only clone messages, not media or something unless specifically requested. It would also allow for folks to continue posting and browsing even if their primary instance is overloaded or down which would improve the end user experience.

Again I only have an approximate idea how this works so this may all be dumb...

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[–] maynarkh@feddit.nl 4 points 1 year ago (12 children)

A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to “lemmy” as opposed to the instances that host them.

The thing that I think didn't sit right with a lot of people is that Beehaw's admins apparently said (I haven't seen it first hand) that they see a future in refederating with Beehaw's communities being kept private, only accessible to Beehaw users, while Beehaw users would get access to the wider Fediverse.

To be honest, I feel that it's Beehaw's prerogative to grant or revoke access to anyone on other instances, but also I wouldn't be surprised that in turn other instances would not federate with an instance that would not give access to other instances' users for its communities.

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