As this #RedditBlackout accelerates the Fediverse experiment, I feel the urge… the need… to chime in with my 2-cents.
My summary of the current lay of the land: Beehaw saw a wave of pornography spam and decided to shut Lemmy.world off and Defederate from this server. I’m too new to this community to fully understand the wants/needs of each individual server, but I’ve been around the internet long enough to recognize that porn-spam is an age-old trolling technique and will occur again in the future. Especially as small, boutique, hobbyist servers pop up and online drama/rivalries increase, online harassment campaigns (like coordinated porn spam attacks) are simply an inevitability.
Lemmy.world wants open registrations. Beehaw does not: Beehaw wants users to be verified before posting. This is normal: many old /r/subreddits would simply shadowban all 1-year old accounts and earlier… giving the illusion that everything is well for 5+ or 10+ year old accounts, but cut out on the vast majority of spam accounts with short lives. This works for Reddit where you have a huge number of long-lived accounts, but its still not a perfect technique: you can pay poor people in 3rd world countries to create accounts, post on them for a year, and the these now verified accounts can be paid for by spammers to invade various subreddits.
I digress. My main point is that many subreddits, and now Lemmy-instances/communities, want a “trusted user”. Akin to the 1±year-old account on Reddit. Its not a perfect solution by any means, but accounts that have some “weight” to them, that have passed even a crude time-based selection process, are far easier to manage for small moderation teams.
We don’t have the benefit of time however, so how do we quickly build trust on the Fediverse? It seems impossible to solve this problem on lemmy.world and Beehaw.org alone. At least, not with our current toolset.
A 3rd Server appears: ImNotAnAsshole.net
But lets add the 3rd server, which I’ll hypothetically name “ImNotAnAsshole.net”, or INAA.net for short.
INAA.net would be an instance that focuses on building a userbase that follows a large set of different instances recruiting needs. This has the following benefits.
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Decentralization – Beehaw.org is famously only run by 4 administrators on their spare time. They cannot verify hundreds of thousands of new users who appear due to #RedditBlackout. INAA.net would allow another team to focus on the verification problem.
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Access to both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login – As long as INAA.net remains in the good graces of other servers (aka: assuming their user filtering model works), any user who registers on INAA.net will be able to access both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login.
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Custom Moderation tools – INAA.net could add additional features independently of the core github.com/LemmyNet programming team and experiment. It is their own instance afterall.
Because of #2, users would be encouraged to join INAA.net, especially if they want access to Beehaw.org. Lemmy.world can remain how it is, low-moderation / less curated users and communities (which is a more appropriate staging grounds for #RedditBlackout refugees). Beehaw.org works with the INAA.net team on the proper rules for INAA.net to federate with Beehaw.org and everyone’s happy.
Or is it? I am new to the Fediverse and have missed out on Mastodon.social drama. Hopefully older members of this community can chime in with where my logic has gone awry.
You’ve got it the other way around - Beehaw is defederating themselves from all the major instances, because they can’t enforce a safe space like they want to at any kind of scale on this Fediverse model. Lemmy.world is about twice the size of Beehaw in number of users.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
That user is from sh.itjust.works, which is a 2nd server that Beehaw also Defederated from.
Sh.itjust.works is just as active as ever though, he might be using the wrong filter for his feed. Or he was primarily subscribed to beehaw communities.
Yeah, just saw that. Either way, I completely understand Beehaw’s goal but don’t understand how they think it’s going to work in the long run.
In the long run they are hoping for more flexibility. I think it is incorrect that they are separating from “all the major instances” but they are separating from (two) servers with open account creation. I personally think an instance admin should be informed when their users are being banned from other instances, so they have the option to review behavior and consider if they would like to do the same. Sh.itjust.works at least has instance rules that should be compatible with most of what beehaw doesn’t like.
And my counter would be that they’re not buying themselves flexibility with their proposed approach.
And I still don’t see how anyone thinks that the manual account approval process solves anything. If I’m a bad actor, I can go out right now and create 50 accounts on every Lemmy server, come up with slightly different answers for the stupidly-simple “why do you want to join this instance” question, and have a veritable army of troll accounts approved and at my disposal within the week if I am so determined to be an asshole on Beehaw. In the end, the process is literally no different than an admin-driven manual Captcha that only achieves proving that you’re not a robot.
In my mind I view this like an IT security issue. If you are trying to prevent bad actors from entering your environment, you don’t just cut your connection to the internet… while leaving wide-open public access terminals in your front lobby for anyone to use as long as they verbally promise not to do bad things.
I don’t know what the answer for Beehaw will be, but I know they won’t accomplish it with their current plan of action.
I very much agree with giving source instances a chance to discipline/ban bad actors. Hopefully this will evolve in that direction. For now the Beehaw admins feel that the right mod tools are not yet available. They have a specific vision for what they want to build, and it is completely up to them how they go about that.
That doesn’t mean everyone external has to agree or like their decisions, but it’s their house, their rules.
You’re correct in the old world / Reddit way of doing things. But I’m not sure if that’s how it “should” be done here on Fediverse.
Even on Reddit, the mechanism of just shadowbanning young accounts is cruel. Especially as a “secret rule”, it basically cut off Reddit from the younger generation. Its why Reddit tilts to millenials, because we weren’t banned yet in 2008 when we made our accounts, while all accounts in 2019+ are basically shadowbanned by default. This obviously can’t work either for Reddit and is probably the reason they’re in decline.
The fact that we have new solutions available to us here, in the Fediverse, thanks to 3rd party servers and new server instances, is something to be celebrated.
I guess I should clarify - I don’t understand how Beehaw thinks their approach is going to work at scale, because any bad actors (trolls, bigots, racists, etc.) they’re trying to prevent can simply create new accounts on Beehaw and cause the same troubles directly on their server. Sure they’ll have marginally more control over those accounts, but nothing is stopping people unless they put “I AM A RAGING BIGOT” in their user application.
In the meantime they’ll only be preventing reasonable people who use other login servers from participating in Beehaw communities. In my mind, that’s only going to lead to more bad actors focusing on Beehaw and less general population from the Fediverse to drown them out.
The process is self-selecting, is it not?
I don’t think its much of a surprise that a ton of troll-behavior came from an instance called sh.itjust.works. People who find explitives funny and want to associate with that are a different cut from folks who just wanna hang out and casually talk.
I mean, you can’t really classify everyone from that server just because it has bad words as part of the domain name. It’s likely that it’s getting as many new users as it is simply because it doesn’t require an approval process, which is something that many new Lemmy users probably find offputting when trying to sign up for the other servers.
Also I’m not sure how any of that invalidates anything I’ve said. I can appreciate their goal, but I see it rapidly meeting with the reality that all they’re going to accomplish in the long run is to isolate themselves inside of an echo chamber that will be constantly harassed by the same people they sought to keep out, without the rest of the Fedi/Lemmy-verse to combat it by drowning out the assholes.
(edit) - In short, people who want to harass, will. And will come to your server to do it if they really want to. If you cut yourself off from the rest of everyone else, all you’re doing is cutting yourself off… from everyone else.
Ah yes. But people who will harass will be timelocked by a 1-week account creation + account proving period will cut down dramatically on Beehaw’s amount of work.
And I don’t think a hypothetical INAA.net instance that follows the 1-week account creation/proving period would be too much to ask for in the great scheme of the Fediverse.
How is this possibly enforced? IP bans are only marginally effective.
I guess I should clarify that I’m not arguing against anything you’ve said here about the ‘middleman’ server. I’m simply talking about the lack of foresight that I see in the Beehaw admins’ approach to safe space enforcement.
Not sure I agree that it’s “cruel” but it is definitely heavy-handed. It’s really just a way of enforcing the “lurk more” attitude of old forums at scale.
Telling 20 new accounts each day to read a few posts before making their own gets old fast. It also prevents harassment from day-old troll accounts. It’s not perfect but it is a better solution than doing nothing at all.
Accounts were never shadowbanned for year long periods. I remade my accounts multiple times and never had to wait more than a few weeks before being fully active, minus a few niche subs with oddly strict rules.