A few days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their Chat community about the challenges of content moderation and the possibility of leaving Lemmy. That post was eventually locked.
Then, about two days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their support community that they aren’t confident about the long-term use of Lemmy, due to so-called concerns about Lemmy.
If you currently use Beehaw and want to stay on the federated Lemmy network, consider migrating your account to another instance like lemm.ee.
Honestly, reading the second post I feel for them. Seems like the main issues are all technical.
The issue about a mod removing an image from the posting server and it not being removed on other servers is very concerning. That means that any instance needs to moderate the same content again on top of the moderation that was already done by the host instance.
That type of duplication of effort is strange and it also means that illegal images could be propagated throughout the instances when they could have been stopped at the front door.
I always felt the fediverse is designed in a very awkward way… the way all the content needs to be mirrored, not only does it make it hard to update / modify / delete content, but also it makes it so other instances have to host content from all the other instances they want their users to access…
Not only is that redundant and requiring a lot more resources from the instances, but it also means that if an instance you federate with is hosting content you don’t want (let’s say… ch*ld pr0n) then your instance might end up HOSTING (ie.activelly propagating) that content… if I hosted my own instance I wouldn’t want to federate at all out of fear of legal implications and I’d be constantly paranoid about possibly facilitating illegal stuff like that without even noticing…
Imho, a decentralized system in which content providers are separate from the user account providers would make more sense in my mind. Then the content providers can have full control over what they are hosting and also control over what user accounts (or whole account providers) are banned from posting / allowed to post. And it still gives users the freedom to navigate across different content providers seamlessly with the same account and interact with multiple content providers, sort of like with the fediverse, without having to login to each content provider.
Yeah. The Reddit migration, small at it was, brought an order of magnitude more people to the platform, and it has shown Lemmy is not ready for prime time. It is also showing that the devs may not be the best at leading this kind of development effort due to inexperience.
Relooking at the idea of the fedeverse may be needed, and the group at Beehaw seem knowledgeable enough on how a Reddit like system should work that they could probably do a better job designing one.
The fediverse model is just pointless because it offers a stupid amount of redundancy and replication of communities. Why should literally anybody be able to come and spin up an instance and flood my feed with a new bevy of 1 subscriber 1 viewer communities? They didn’t like the moderation strategy on the other server? Cool, let’s give them carte blanche to just make another new community with blackjack and hookers and the 10 people who also disagreed with policies of basic decency.
It’s just annoying. One day you’re like “oh I’ve finally purged my feed of the thing I don’t like” and then all of a sudden a new instance spins up and there’s 20 new communities for the exact same shit that they have on literally every other server.
At least reddit is one and done. I don’t have to filter out a football team five times because five different servers have five different communities for the one team.
You won’t see the posts to the small communities on the new instance unless one of your users manually finds them and subscribes to them.
I get why a decentralized model was created; we’ve seen issues pop up with Reddit due to a centralization of power. However, this current implementation of a decentralized system is showing major problems at a fraction of the scale Reddit showed and the devs seem incapable of enacting meaningful change to fix this.
It wasn’t set up to be decentralized power though. The structure was digital fiefdoms with admins and mods on an instance with power over their local communities… and yet difficult to censor content that was posted into it. But you can still get banned from a community or an instance or have an instance get defederated.
The structure doesn’t really solve any of the problems of centralization of power (as shown with Lemmy.world) - its to make it hard to shut down what someone wants to say on some instance’s community if the admin and mods are ok with it. And even if the instance you are on defederates and blocks them, they’re still there and people can sign up there and participate there.
This is Reddit with censorship resistance (no way to completely kick off /r/the_donald from Lemmy if they can stand up their own server) - not reddit with decentralized power.
It is decentralized in that there isn’t one group of admins, but a set of them across the platform who can run their instances as they see fit.
And you can effectively kick off an instance from Lemmy by mass defederation.
I don’t see that as a federation issue, it’s a moderation one. It’s on the admins to bring something new / niche to the table.
I always felt the fediverse is designed in a very awkward way… the way all the content needs to be mirrored, not only does it make it hard to update / modify / delete content, but also it makes it so other instances have to host content from all the other instances they want their users to access…
This was an implementation choice for Lemmy (and Mastodon) but isn’t required by the protocol. It’s a trade off of caching data locally to render vs network traffic. For other systems where its Activity Pub - think FourSquare check ins ( https://joinmobilizon.org/en/ ) or “a new video has been posted” or “a new blog entry has been posted” ( https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ ) - it works fine.
Layering a microblogging system on top of it where you want faster rendering time (and lower network traffic - unless you’re hosting a popular site) is awkward. Trying to layer a link aggregator with votes and comments on top of it with local caching of data… and you’re getting some of the problems that Lemmy is demonstrating.
Reddit on top of activity pub is much more awkward than “link sharing and commenting on top of activity pub” because it doesn’t have to be Reddit.
Part of the caching data everywhere is part of the original design intention of the developers ( https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/05-censorship-resistance.html ). And so while this functionality isn’t a mistake (from the standpoint of the developers), its implications weren’t fully considered when the total number of posts for years was 1/10th of what was posted in the past two months.
For other systems where its Activity Pub - think FourSquare check ins ( joinmobilizon.org/en/ ) or “a new video has been posted” or “a new blog entry has been posted” ( wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ ) - it works fine.
That’s interesting. Does Mobilizon actually not do any mirroring between instances? How does it work when a Mobilizon user accesses a group/community that isn’t in their home instance and posts some content there?
About the Wordpress plugin: my impression is that it only works as a broadcasting activitypub feed, but the blog authors registered in that Wordpress instance do not have any way to use that account to subscribe to any other ActivityPub feed, correct? if so, that piece of the puzzle would still be missing, and it’s there where we typically find mirroring.
As far as I understand it (and I could be wrong), there is no way in the ActivityPub protocol for a user from another instance to actually publish content (eg. a reply or a comment) directly into a different instance (that is, without hosting it in their own instance first), so at the moment the way it works in services like mastodon/lemmy is that the user posts content on their own instance referencing the content from the second instance that they are replying to, and then the second instance mirrors it and displays it as a reply of the original post.
This, as far as I understand it, is the origin for the need of mirroring, and not really any thirst for “censorship resistance” or “faster rendering time”. I feel the problem is still originating from limits in ActivityPub. Or am I wrong? Is there a way to do this in the current protocol without mirroring?
Layering a microblogging system on top of it where you want faster rendering time (and lower network traffic - unless you’re hosting a popular site) is awkward.
I don’t think the need for faster latency justifies the mirroring. You could still get a fast time by sending the requests directly to the original host, without proxying/mirroring them at all from the service offering the frontend. Just allow for cross-domain requests to call directly the API from the client, without needing server-to-server requests for that. Of course if the host is slow then the request will be slow, but if it’s fast the request will be fast. The responsibility for performance when providing content should fall on the content host. The instance where the user has an account could provide some token for identification as proof of the user belonging to it, and have third party content providers validate that proof and decide on their end whether the user is allowed to access/post content there directly (being subjected to the moderation of the content provider, who is the one hosting the content).
The more troublesome part of this approach would be having to rely on client-side aggregation of the content coming from different providers in order to build a feed. But I think this could still be viable. Or it could be handled by another different type of instance that acts as indexer but doesn’t really mirror the content, just references it. This also would only be necessary if the user really wants an aggregated feed, which might not always be the case, sometimes you just want to directly browse the feed of a particular community or your subscriptions from a particular instance.
I mean, I get that for some use cases mirroring would be a good thing, but that could be entirely a separate layer without requiring it as part of the communication. Making it mandatory places a huge responsibility in the instance host without it being necessarily something that every user needs or even wants. I don’t want to be dependant on what other instances my particular instance decides to mirror so I can access them. What’s the point of the fediverse if in order to access content from two instances I have to create separate accounts just because they don’t like each other’s content policy?
If that’s the case, I’ll probably be sticking around! I’m not fond of having the possibility of CSAM but unlike a lot of lawmakers I see the logical difference between photos and videos (disgusting abuse) versus artificial images (artwork with no basis in reality) and know there are developed and functional nations where the former is absolutely illegal but the latter is not (just FYI, best examples are Japan and Colombia, and I’ve been to the latter personally) and the instances of both filmed CSAM and IRL sexual assault have gone down in both since the relevant laws were passed.
I get the squick, I’m asexual and very protective of children, I just know that someone directed me to the evidence (multiple websites with reseach articles about the psychology of pedophilia including Wikipedia pages) and while filming real kids being forced into that is evil, I cannot ignore the psychological evidence that even regular, consenting adult porn is illegal in India and China yet rape and sexual assault in those countries are higher than the average per population in the US, Australia, Germany, etc. If a fictional portrayal keeps real people safe, we can’t afford to unquestioningly believe big media when news networks provide information. I’ve seen cops mention “it encourages the sickos” on live TV news but the evidence isn’t completely backing that up, so I decided the only moral solution is to allow people to exist in privacy instead of witch-hunting.
Aside from that, sickos aren’t the main worry for parents when it comes to kidnapping; Divorces where the one parent can’t handle losing visitation are common, and sad and horrifying as it is a lot of kidnappers are looking to sell their targets into slavery in another country, not make videos that could be traced back to the criminals.
By all means try to remove CSAM of real children, because how would you feel if you were the child who had been abused to make it? How would you feel if that child was someone you know? If someone is being directly hurt then they’re being directly hurt. My problem with almost the entire internet is that if someone is being indirectly hurt, that’s like an SJW saying an Irish immigrant is guilty of racism against African-Americans just for being white-skinned, or an Alt-Right Conservative politician saying a transvestite or homosexual is automatically a sexual offender.
I’ll leave it on this note. I tried to look up an episode of an old kid’s cartoon from the 90s called Bobby’s World on Start page. Safe Search was absolutely on. Apparently the made up word I misremembered as the episode title, “Kidzilla”, somehow triggers this: stopitnow.org
No search results, just loads up that site whenever a search contains that word. That is some serious 1984 thoughtcrime bullshit. If having uncomfortable content is the price I pay for having an uncensored internet, I’ll fight in a court to say “enough is enough, you (politicians) don’t have the right to e-police everyone 24/7/365 just to pretend you aren’t terrible people, and peer-to-peer services NEED to be designed as uncensorable platforms, fix this oversight because if I have to run 12 commands to delete one image then I’m only running it to protect REAL children, not a collection of pixels or words created entirely from scratch by some poor artist with a disturbing but not necessarily harmful kink”.
Now, if you DO put actual photos, video or audio of CSAM on my planned Lemmy server, I won’t just report that shit to the police, I’ll tell the cops “better find this bastard before I do because I’ll f-ing murder him for what he’s directly and purposefully supporting something that - despite my disagreement with the current boundaries of legality - is on the wrong side of even the line I feel should be drawn”.
Seriously, people, we’re talking about protecting free speech here becuase we’re trying to protect kids from harm, not to escape justice; Big Brother is a creep who watches your children with a predatory gaze too, after all.
I agree wholeheartedly. This is actually the exact reason I haven’t tried to stand up an instance. I don’t want to mirror the content.
Isn’t that what world figured out? They seemed to have stopped the crap that was happening here. I feel for them, they seem overwhelmed but at the same time, nowhere is going to be perfect. They seem to be coming from an overworked, fearful place and it’s not fun for them anymore. I’m mostly on world where we don’t see them anyway so it wouldn’t really effect me, but I do wish them well with whatever decision they make.
Yeah. I mean it’s a topic that will affect a lot of people, but the changes are likely months away. Beehaw doesn’t have a platform to switch to overnight anyway, it would need some work.
That said it’s good to get this conversation out in the open early as to hopefully spur Lemmy development to address issues we’re running into and help improve the Fediverse model overall.
What I don’t get is that they’d probably need to create their own platform. Their main issue is about mod tools, so they’d need to create their own mod tools. Why not just add those to Lemmy? It’s open source. If they’re capable of creating their own platform, they’re capable of adding what they need to Lemmy.
Getting mod tools added to Lemmy is low priority for the Lemmy devs. Rust, while being a very hyped language, has many fewer people who can work with it at the scale than other main stream languages.
The issue also extends to moderated content that has been federated out to other instances that don’t share the moderation ideals that Beehaw has. (The Lemmy software is an awkward fit for their ideals, and federation is something that doesn’t match their ideals at all - less of an issue when there were only a handful of instances that were mostly defederated - but with new ones coming online for the past 3 months and federation by default this made things awkward).
There are other open source alternatives that have better moderation tooling. For what it’s worth, here’s an old version of Reddit - https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit (the language is Python and JavaScript - see the bit about Rust above).
For Beehaw, spinning up an instance of old reddit and growing that to be their own community is probably an easier task than fixing federation and moderation in Lemmy to what suits their needs.
You pose a good question. Here are a couple reasons:
- Rust is hard language for people to develop with.
- There are problems extending beyond moderation that need addressing, such as database management, as admin alyaza put it:
The problems with databases are almost too numerous to talk about and even Lemmy’s most ardent supporters recognize this as the biggest issue with the software currently.
What I don’t get is that they’d probably need to create their own platform. Their main issue is about mod tools, so they’d need to create their own mod tools.
Not quite. When you are on a non federated community, with accounts that require approval, the ability to ban trouble makers solves most things, and doesn’t leave them with an easy way back in.
Moderation requirements on lemmy are very different though, because federation introduces communities and users from instances that have different rules.
No need to create their own platform, they can use phpBB!
The technology ever!1! And a good old MySQL with apache!
I thought you can turn off federation.
Since the beginning, I expected Beehaw to move to an unfederated software. They wanted a system where they could vouch for every user and comment, and even with a list of allowed instances, there was (and is) not enough control they can do to keep it to their standards.
What an odd bunch.
Personally I think federation is overrated, and that the server > community model Lemmy adopted is not ideal. I used to think federation was the solution to Reddit, and that being able to post on disparate forums with one account was the way to go. I still see benefits to it, but I don’t think it’s right for every community.
Ultimately all federation has done is create a bunch of empty spaces.
It’s cool in theory for everybody to be able to host and join but ultimately all that it’s done is create these void-like dead communities. More and more frequently I’ve been seeing people attempt to redirect from the dead zones into more active communities, but even “active” is pretty relative on the fediverse.
I feel like every time I click on some new community I don’t want to deal with (usually sports) it’s always on some new domain with 1 subscriber and 2 viewers. It’s not even exclusive to sports, it’s basically just all the communities I generally see outside of the major established servers.
I just don’t get the appeal for federation. I like it here because the community is small enough to not have succumbed to the major general toxicity that pervades every online platform eventually when it reaches massive sizes. I like the niche tech discussions - this is the same vibe reddit used to have before the digg migration. There are just a lot of dead, redundant spaces across the entire fediverse and it the decentralization makes it worse.
I feel a major problem was just people’s hurry to recreate a quantity of communities. I was seeing a number of sports teams communities being created, when a single community for the entire league would be a better call. Then multiply that by those same communities being created in multiple servers, and it gets out of hand.
These do seem solvable though, even just letting community admins “peer” with similar communities in other servers could solve this problem.
The point of federation is that you don’t have one central entity that controls the whole thing and can do whatever they want. Like Reddit.
The emptiness is due to the number of users instead of federation. There just aren’t enough people creating content to sustain smaller communities.
I don’t think more users would fill out more of the same communities. There needs to be some kind of central way of syncing topics together so you don’t literally have fifteen of the same community over fifteen different servers. It’s not necessary, and at best it fragments the conversation because nobody knows where to go unless they default to the larger instances.
This is the biggest issue. So many of the same communities spread across the different servers.
I’ve seen people suggest banding communities together. Seems like something to explore.
Aggregate meta communities. Not sure what sort of can of worms that is tho.
I’m not sure that’s a property of the fediverse. You’d have that same issue with similarly themed subreddits for example. And 99.99% of subreddits were also dead spaces.
I believe it’s just as simple as the quantity of users, and has nothing to do with federated or not.
If this happens, we will lose a good chunk of the lemmy fediverse
Does Lemmy support account migrating? I know Mastodon can do it, but wouldn’t know if Lemmy does.
Lemmy Migrate works great for at least syncing subscriptions, but I think I read somewhere that it doesn’t work if the instances don’t federate together. Lemmy unfortunately doesn’t support actual migration of history and whatnot.
I wonder if you can make multiple hops. Hop from beehaw to A, then A to B?
You just do it in 2 hops?
They have some valid complaints but bothowdy do they sound like they are whining quite a bit.
They always seem to be whining about something.
That’s what happens when you criticize something.
Did you read it? If you did, what tone did you feel it conveyed?
If you didn’t, why are you being such an ass when I’m trying to squarely state how I felt they conveyed their problems?
I read it and it sounded like general frustration while trying to be civilized. They laid out the reasons why the platform was failing them while noting things that were within and outside their control. For things outside their control, they listed the thought processes in how to overcome them. I thought they did a good job in communicating their issues.
But my response was to your reaction. You can’t write a critical piece like they wrote without coming off as whiny to a part of the user base.
That’s fair, and I appreciate you engaging with me.
The technical explanation of issues was definitely well done and presented the issues rather plainly. I don’t want to diminish the importance of the moderation issues. It just strikes me as a bit weird the replication compliants.
That’s kinda the entire point of federation, it could be better but until the lemmy devs figure out how to make all of the lemmy instances a kind of CDN on top of everything else files being put everywhere is the next best step.
Should moderation of those images be replicated just like the images themselves? Yes.
The commentary on forking lemmy felt unnecessary. Yes, once you fork it you own it. That’s how code works. But I’m also biased since I’m in IT.
So maybe it’s my profession or just me scrolling while at work dealing with developers who try to avoid doing work, planning work properly and don’t think through what they are asking but it came across as valid issues with a tinge of whine.
I don’t think that Lemmy provides everything that Beehaw wants in a platform, but I also don’t think Lemmy devs have planned out what a federated platform should look like.
But then I don’t see the Beehaw team trying to get around work. They have effectively been told by the dev team to build the resources they want to see on Lemmy, and so they are evaluating whether to put those dev hours into the existing platform or a new one.
That’s a kind of odd situation then.
Per beehaw, they are willing to pay a bounty to get things they want fixed/deved. I read that from one of the admin posts, can’t remember if it’s the first one linked in the post or second.
If lemmy has effectively said “go dev it” why hasn’t beehaw paid developers to handle the requests?
Maybe my radar is off but something seems a little weird between those two statements
If lemmy has effectively said “go dev it” why hasn’t beehaw paid developers to handle the requests?
Because Beehaw is evaluating whether doing so is a good idea or not, and a lot of that goes into whether Beehaw believes that Lemmy is a platform that can continue to fit its needs. So Beehaw is evaluating several options:
- Fund development within the Lemmy ecosystem.
- Fork Lemmy to get full control over development and fund the fork.
- Design and build a new platform from scratch.
- Do nothing.
Based on what was written, Beehaw admins seem to be leaning towards option 3 given the current quality of the existing code and lack of confidence in Lemmy devs.
And this kind of high level concept development is typical of organizations when choosing to spend money. It isn’t just a choice between spending money to fund development or not.
it came across as valid issues with a tinge of whine.
Maybe it’s because I’m not a native speaker, but I always understood “whine” as to mean: “complaining in an annoying way about something unimportant”. So I’m replying on that basis.
I get that the “replication compliants” touch on a fundamental design choice in the way how the federation is typically working through ActivityPub. But that doesn’t make their problem “unimportant”. The conclusion I’d take from that is that either there’s a need (for them, though perhaps for others too) to redesign Lemmy so it can fit that purpose or they made a wrong choice by using lemmy to build their platform.
I think at the moment they are debating which one it is.As for whether the way in which they complain is annoying… well, given that it’s a written text that can’t transmit non-verbal cues, I’d suggest not making too many assumptions or reading too much into it. Any complaint would sound annoying if you make the assumption that it comes from a position of entitlement, try to second guess or recontextualize it in a way that makes it no favors.
Just to establish common ground, we’re using different definitions.
“Speaking of complaining in a mildly annoying way” is a common definition we can agree on. I’ve never attached a level of importance to the definition and that may be due to me being a native English speaker.
Good Riddance. They wanted a safe space, they now have their safe space. Everyone’s happy.
What do you mean by this? I havent explored that instance
They seem to feel aggrieved by beehaw, which existed long before they discovered lemmy, and its sanitized moderation style. It’s just a safe space instance full of affable people. There’s really nothing else to it. I honestly have no clue why they’re upset about internet hippies.
