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Is defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works still necessary? (beehaw.org)

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

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This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.

Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.

Two months on, I'm wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I'm just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?

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[-] Lionir@beehaw.org 68 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

From where I'm standing, I can't really much has changed unfortunately.. which really sucks..

Lemmy.world has grown substantially meanwhile the moderation tools have not improved at all. All I can say about the moderation tools is that we now know that the tools suck more than they used to.

Here's a list of moderation problems that we have discovered since then:

If a Berson is reported on another instance, we never get the report.
If a mod is banned from the community they mod, they can still take mod actions
If you get site-banned from Beehaw while you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from that instance and kbin can see your posts
People from other instances can't know who if someone is an admin on the instance they're interacting with
People from other instances can't see when we use the shield function to signal we're talking "officially / as a mod"
The modlog is not chronological
The modlog breaks if you ban someone for more than 4 digit days.
A banned user's description is still visible so if they link to a scat image in their description, it is still visible to moderators.

Despite these newly known problems, there have been exactly no improvement whatsoever to the moderation tools. It is honestly unsettling and terrifying.

[-] Janvier@literature.cafe 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I just finished writing a small book in a thread about federation on literature.cafe yesterday, the thrust of which is that moderation, not federation is the threadiverse's killer feature, and when in doubt smaller instances shouldn't federate with larger ones. This list makes a perfect post-script to my point. Do you mind if I crib it? I'm a big fan of what you're doing here. I'd also love your feedback on my observations if you have time.

[-] TerryTPlatypus@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago

No, you are definitely right. There is a time and place for federation, it's like a town deciding to incorporate with a larger region. If the town is too early in its infancy, the overall culture and debate will be drowned out by larger servers. But the risk of also not federating the town means that there is a chance of the community dying off. I'm thinking there should at least be a snaller period of considering the effects of opening up your server to the network, and consulting other instance admins about the idea.

[-] Five@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Support. No one wants to hear about the negative stuff about their platform of choice, but it's important to talk about it so it can improve.

[-] admin@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

JFC there are a lot of typos in your comment! No worries since most of it is discernible. I'm in agreement with all of these points regardless.

[-] Lionir@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago

I think I corrected them - feel free to tell me more specifically if you still see some.

[-] Antik@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Berson

😁

[-] liv@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Berson = Beehaw person.

[-] admin@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

And the plural is Beeple.

[-] Antik@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

TIL

[-] GammaGames@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

I hope the moderation tools improve! There are a few niche l.w communities I was looking for a few weeks ago

[-] Antik@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago

If a mod is banned from the community they mod, they can still take mod actions

Why not remove them as mod? I don't understand why you would keep anyone in the mod team that has been banned from the community?

If you get site-banned from Beehaw while you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from that instance and kbin can see your posts

Yes that is a problem with Lemmy in general. But why this only seen as a problem for people from Lemmy World and sh.itjust.works?

The modlog is not chronological

We fix this by having enough admins to go through these reports as soon as possible.

The modlog breaks if you ban someone for more than 4 digit days.

Why ban for 9999 days if you can leave it empty and perma-ban?

Anyway, I agreed that there are a lot of issues that haven't improved, but at least I heard that users will be able to block instances themselves soon so fingers crossed. But Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works very early on and in the meantime they are federated with instances that are as big as Lemmy.World was back then.

[-] Lionir@beehaw.org 18 points 1 year ago

Why not remove them as mod? I don’t understand why you would keep anyone in the mod team that has been banned from the community?

Oversight - that simple.

Yes that is a problem with Lemmy in general. But why this only seen as a problem for people from Lemmy World and sh.itjust.works?

That is not actually a problem with Lemmy in general - community bans do block posting unlike site bans. As for why, well, it was done at that point in time because Lemmy.World and Sh.it just.works took a lot of moderation time - for one reason or another, bad actors liked to go there. I have no reason to believe this has changed now that .World is now many times bigger than it was.

Why ban for 9999 days if you can leave it empty and perma-ban?

Oversight or malice. You can break the modlog of everyone you're federated with because of this - that is dangerous.

But Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works very early on and in the meantime they are federated with instances that are as big as Lemmy.World was back then.

Size doesn't necessarily mean problems though. I think it's probably a culture problem as the root cause but I don't think .World wants to tackle that problem so all I can do is wait for better tools.

[-] Antik@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I really don't get the "oversight" part of keeping someone who is banned from a community on the moderator team there. Can you give me an example how this would make sense?

The modlog breaking XXXX amount of days bug was reported to the devs by me btw. And it was fixed on 12/08: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2058

It just feels like you are looking for excuses to keep defederated while there is no actual problem that can not be handled by working together as admins. We've always said we are open to discuss actions but you've always said when the "when modtools are available". Now it's a culture problem - how are Lemmy World users different from lemm.ee, midwest.social, programming.dev or other instances? And what do you propose should be done to tackle these issues?

[-] Lionir@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

I really don’t get the “oversight” part of keeping someone who is banned from a community on the moderator team there. Can you give me an example how this would make sense?

Oversight as in, "I would never think this would not work so I commited a mistake".

We’ve always said we are open to discuss actions but you’ve always said when the “when modtools are available”.

And I stand by that.

And what do you propose should be done to tackle these issues?

I generally think that Lemmy.world's focus on growth while being the biggest instance results in a bad site culture but I still think this problem can be tamed on our side with better mod tools.

[-] BitOneZero@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Despite these newly known problems, there have been exactly no improvement whatsoever to the moderation tools. It is honestly unsettling and terrifying.

It's bewildering how the development team has ignored the problems with data not federating properly and the performance of the app.

[-] potterman28wxcv@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Is it a problem of contributions (nobody made a PR adding those missing features so they don't make it), technical challenge (those features would be hard to implement due to how Lemmy and federations work) or policy (whoever is maintaining of Lemmy does not want these features to happen)?

[-] Lionir@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

Some of these are likely not hard to fix but some of these are a bit more complicated like fixing the report system.

So it'd say it's largely the former two though I'd like to mention that these issues appear to not be treated as critical problems by the main Lemmy developers so I believe this is also a policy problem.