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
The Beehaw instance has defederated from the Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works instances. Each instance is responsible for sending updates to other instances. Defederation means that no outgoing updates are sent and no incoming updates are honored.
So I’m still learning all of this too, but my understanding is this:
Your accounts on each instance get you access to whatever that instance is federated with. My mind goes to bundling, almost – e.g., if you have a Hulu subscription, you can access Showtime through it as well.
When the instances defederate, it’s like losing part of a bundle. Nothing stops you from making an account on that instance, though, while retaining your accounts on other instances.
So, in how it plays out: I have my account on reddthat.com. When I scroll through my feed, I get content from communities hosted on reddthat and from communities hosted on instances that are federated with reddthat.
But suppose I want to see content from communities on instances that aren’t federated. All I have to do is switch over to another account on an instance that is federated or to an account on that instance specifically. I still have both of my accounts and all I need to do is switch.
The talk about shadowbanning just means that if you’re trying to access content from an account not in federation, you won’t be able to comment or anything like that.
Again, I’m still learning all of this stuff, so this may not be right and I welcome any and all corrections of anything I’ve said that isn’t accurate.
If you don’t want to color with your opinion, use a different word than shadowban. They didn’t do this with malice as the connotations of that word would imply.
Defederation is always malicious. Imagine your email getting silently lost, because gmail defederated from aol.
The network has started to implode sooner than I expected. This was an interesting week and a half…
I’m guessing you have no idea that the mods of world and shitjustwork talked with the mods at behaw, and they all agreed it was the right thing to do at the time. You obviously don’t know the situation, or understand that the fediverse is not supposed to work like a centralized platform.
What fediverse? We’re finding ourselves on an island. Seeing other islands far away, while not being sure if they can hear us or not.
I’m trying to stay positive, but I’m seeing people making the same predictable mistakes over again. To start the fediverse going, we need to do ONE thing. Federate. I knew a bunch of people would appear, and do exactly the oposite, ruining the whole thing for everyone, but I had no idea it would happen even before we got any serious traction.
There are tons of great, mature software projects aimed at smaller, closely moderated communities. PHPBB, SMF, Discourse, various *chan clones… yet, they chose a new, experimental software, who’s only strong feature was the ability to connect communities together. Just to turn it off.
In the last 5 years I’ve tried Twister, Secure Scuttlebut, Mastodon, Matrix, Nostr, even the protocols not using the internet as a physical layer at all, like disaster.radio, Meshtastic, rnode.
I just want a place to gather news and read some shitposts, without the constant bug hunting and drama.
What are you talking about? The apps all allow multi login. So why is this an issue?
Okay, guess I just won’t use it then if they defed from my primary instance. Glad they did this now and not later when they became bigger and more important.
If they’re that into making a safe space then fine. Hopefully some other people will also make more free spaces and both of them can exist and everyone can be happy.
I realize that is a highly optimistic outlook to put it mildly. I must remain hopeful to avoid losing my mind, if I haven’t already -.-
shrugs It sounds like they’d happily refederate once the right mod tools are available.
And this is why the fediverse will never work out - if I gamble wrong and set up shop on an instance that gets in a pissing match with other ones, I either have to make an account elsewhere (and then have to do it again later the next time two instances defederate each other) or live with only seeing some of my subscribed content.
There are already conversations about Nomadic Identities and what that would look like. Until that is done, I agree with you that there are going to be some issues, such as this. The fact that this is on their radar is very promising.
set up shop on an instance
Don’t do that. You probably should have multiple accounts on different instances. If you really need a continuous, single identity, post links to all your usernames in each.
This is why the move from Reddit was so difficult for Redditors: because we put all our eggs into Reddit Inc’s basket. All our content is under Reddit’s control. This analysis can be applied to any centralized social media service. If your instance shits the bed or bans itself from everyone else, you can move somewhere else. You can start your own in the worst case. It’s annoying, but at least there is a real path to move on.
We shouldn’t be putting our eggs in any one basket. We shouldn’t have been doing it before the Fediverse, and we shouldn’t be doing it here either. Your social media access should not be dependent on the goodwill of one person or entity. Eventually, that entity will corrupt.
Also, I’m on vlemmy.net. Right now, they haven’t defederated from anyone, and I believe we’re still not banned from Beehaw or anyone else. If you really want the whole Fediverse (and you probably don’t), make an account on vlemmy or one of the top three instances on this page.
Why don’t you have a second account?
Lazy. Don’t care if my shit gets fucked. But if you do care if your shit gets fucked, then you shouldn’t rely on centralized social media.
I’m genuinely curious of a real answer on this as I have the same concerns having registered on InfoSec.pub. Apparently signing up there means I am locked to that community? What happens to my account if they shutter? It’s not like I can login using Lemmy.ca as my community.
As cool as this is, it’s not fully thought through IMHO. There’s a reason centralization tends to occur naturally. We are already seeing that with people in droves showing up on lemmy.world. for that matter who owns the instances? I’m lazy I’ll get around to digging more eventually but right now this is a curiousity.
What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)
If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works
But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.
All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)
You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.
You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in
I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.
Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just
Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further
This argument is absurd. What happens, right now, if Reddit shuts down? Where can you take your account to access what’s on Reddit?
The fact is federations CAN be set up this way. Lemmy is new and the people providing the service are working to get things functional as fast as possible. Federating authentication is possible. Can you do it right this second? Nope.
Can you do it with Reddit right this second?
“I’m not gonna do this because it doesn’t work the way I think it should.” News flash, Reddit doesn’t work that way either, while you’re not doing it on Reddit…. Lemmy CAN work that way, Reddit… yah good luck.
I get it, mediocrity now is better than improvements later…
I think the logic is more that reddit is not going to close up shop anytime soon. Whereas Dave running a server from his basement genuinely might just shut down any moment. Just because both instances are possible, doesn’t mean they’re equally likely.
Apparently signing up there means I am locked to that community?
There is a feature request to allow accounts to be transferred to other instances. So that’s in the works.
We are already seeing that with people in droves showing up on lemmy.world. for that matter who owns the instances?
Someone that’s not spez.
There’s no such thing as a perfect system that shitty people can’t fuck up in some way. All that can be done is to mitigate the damage on shitty person can do. So yeah, if the instance you’re on gets taken over by assholes, it’s going to be a problem. But it will be less of a problem if you’re on a centralized system that gets taken over by an asshole.
Case in point: beehaw is an instance that hosts a lot of LGBTQ communities. The influx of new users comes with an influx of new assholes. The kind of assholes that say shitty things to people in the LGBTQ+ community. On a centralized system they’d either have to accept those slurs or move to some other centralized system. But on lemmy, they have the option of temporarily disconnecting from the instances that have had an influx of assholes.
It’s a growing pains kind of thing really.Most of the new users aren’t assholes, and some of the new users will step up and become mods and the assholes will be removed. But until then, some smaller instances are going to batten down the hatches until the storm passes.
Lemmy offers options like this that a centralized system doesn’t have. Does having additional options make a system worse?
