Now that we’re no longer linked to lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works we can’t subscribe to their communities any more.
How affected were your subscriptions? How many of your subs stopped working?
My subs were mostly beehaw and lemmy.world so I’m looking for new stuff. :)
Do you have some tips for interesteing communities on other instances?
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Honestly feel like this is more reason to join a smaller instance which can interact with all of these communities. It takes some of the load off of the bigger instances, you can have a closer relationship to the mods/admins of your instance, and have protection against drama that goes down between the bigger instance
We really just need a way to migrate accounts (with post histories, etc.) from one instance to another. I know it’s been a hotly requested topic; hopefully it gets added at some point.
I wonder how that would work if an instance gets abruptly shut down. Maybe each time you make an account you get a ‘recovery key’ that you can link to your new account on a new instance, thereby taking ownership of your old posts (or at least the ones that got federated out of your old instance).
That’s actually true.
It’s going to take a while to have all the dust settle and for everything to stabilize I suppose
ha, if it turns out anything like mastodon, it’ll be the medium to small instances that have the biggest amount of defederation drama. This whole thing is the most amicable defederation I’ve ever seen.
Small instances have otherwise been good for mastodon though
It’s temporary, so I’m not very fussed. It’s all just part of being in a Fediverse. I deliberately did not create an alt/back-up account, despite most people doing so. (Too likely to spend even more time online!) There are plenty of other community subscriptions to keep me busy even with the current defed.
Just about everything on mander.xyz is interesting. That’s a science and nature instance you could look into.
That is a rather healthy outlook tbh!
I think I’m going to sub to some kbin magazines, that’ll add some extra stuff, they’re pretty big after all. :)
I ended up subscribing to magazines from kbin today, too. Still a lot to discover. lemmy.dbzer0.com has a lot of interesting stuff as well.
I must have missed a memo. Why did beehaw defederate with
lemmy.world/sh.itjust.works?I really want to like Lemmy, but if we can randomly lose access to content like that, it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Details. Basically, there are four people running Beehaw and trying to moderate. Beehaw is not a Reddit replacement, nor is it a troll/free speech friendly place, by design. The intent is for Beehaw to be an open, but curated, instance. That’s why there is a sign up process.
Those two instances are both large and open sign up enabled, Lemmy today has extremely weak moderation tools compared to Reddit, there’s been a massive influx of traffic and Reddit users, and those two Instances are the place where many trolls are landing.
It’s temporary, but today the tools and infrastructure are not in place to maintain both open fed with these Instances and preserve the Beehaw identity.
(@supernovae@readit.buzz replying to myself because replying to your comment was bugged, couldn’t post)…
I hear what you are saying. However, the Fediverse intentionally puts a lot of control into the hands of whoever is running the Instance. I, for one, do believe that the Beehaw Admins want Beehaw to be federated with as many Instances as possible. It’s very clear from their Rules and About posts though, that controlling and curating the atmosphere within this Instance is the #1 priority, and access to content for their own members is a high but secondary priority. They also did not want or ask to be such a huge destination for accounts in the Fediverse. One of the reasons I believe there are so many communities here is because Beehaw is an option for folks who want a safe and controlled platform with a broad range of topics, with discussion that fits a certain community culture that Beehaw espouses. Whether those communities are the largest or most active is not a motivating factor in their creation.
Beehaw admins seem to be placing the health of their own communities and members above the “greater good” of the Fediverse, which is precisely the kind of decision the Fediverse empowers them to make. They even said that, if necessary, they would move to a whitelist model for Federation. So no, the system will not “continue to be overwhelmed,” because the Admins have been very clear that they will take steps as drastic as necessary to maintain the community and culture they are attempting to build. That’s an entirely legitimate use for Fediverse Instances, even if it rubs many people (myself included) the wrong way.
For what it’s worth, I have another account on lemmy.dbzer0 and another much smaller Instance which have much more focused communities and open Federation, which embodies a more typical or expected Fediverse user experience. I plan to stick around Lemmy/KBin for the next year or so and watch all this play out. It’s still very early days and these things will work themselves out.
Great summary!
Thanks for the update and for the link to the reasoning – I had completely missed it.
Based on the initial post (only mentioning defederation without linking to the Details), it sounded like the three servers had a falling-out of some sort, but this sounds reasonable. I can appreciate the difficulty of trying to maintain a welcoming environment.
From a user perspective, I think I’m mostly frustrated with the lack of visibility with these changes, specifically trying to keep track of what I do and don’t have access to. I don’t think that’s the responsibility of beehaw to implement, but I might continue to look for solutions
While it’s not the easiest to sort through, the Instances list at the bottom of the page shows every instance we’re federated with and those that are blocked. This will always show what you do and don’t have access to through your Beehaw account (or through your account on another instance should you sign up elsewhere). Direct link if it’s easier: https://beehaw.org/instances
You’re awesome, thank you.
I saw the “instances” link at the bottom, but I assumed it was just a variation on the join-lemmy.org site (which I see is another one of the links down there). Please forgive me, still learning the platform :-)
I’m pretty sure most of us are still learning the platform, and the defederation is certainly adding to the list of things to figure out as a user. I’d rather people ask than just silently wonder. :)
It’s unfortunate that Beehaw started so many communities with such generic names with so few admins. The “beauty” of federation/lemmey/kbin aka “Reddit style” is that communities are supposed to be self-organizing and have their own representation/moderation.
I think the bigger problem is Beehaw decided to launch so many generic names copying Reddit’s busiest and most generic reddits without thinking through the moderationand traffic overhead.
it should be instances have their champion topics and they’re federated or if they have the manpower/technology and funding they can go for the big generic names.
I get why things were defederated - but blaming open registrations is a cop-out (a big lie… you can’t know people by their registration info). It was bad "systems thinking’ that led to an overwhelmed system that will continue to be overwhelmed.
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I’d love if there was a “meta subreddit” option here in the fediverse so I could group together every instance of say !cats and the eventual hundreds of variants on black cats, or orange cats, or illegally smol cats, into a single easy to view link. This way it would be easy to just and new groups of similar discussion into a single continuous channel. Perhaps this may be a thing once more of the apps start to take off and mature, but until then it’s definitely a thing I’m missing here.
I agree with this. However, I want granular control over the combination. If I want 3 out of the 4 matching magazines combined, that should be possible.
Just avoid echo chambers like Beehaw, exploding-heads and Lemmygrad and you’ll be fine.
Run your own instance and it becomes irrelevant.
Honestly, I wish this wasn’t necessary. This is the worst thing about federation, in my opinion - inter-instance politics results in one instance admin defederating from another and all of the users of that instance, who may have no knowledge of nor care about the reason for the defederation, have all of their subscriptions disrupted. It’d be nice if it didn’t remove already-subscribed communities, and instead just prevented them from showing up to other users under the Communities list / in the ‘All’ list.
It’ll be okay once the mod tools are improved.
I worry the fracturing will screw us before then. the next few weeks are the most important. This was the WORST time for this to happen
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Yes, new instances usually automatically federate with everything. From what I’ve heard, there are “default” blocklists being maintained as far as what you might choose to block by default (so you don’t have to go through the growing pains yourself if you don’t want) or they could decide to whitelist instances which would then affect federation. And, as seen here, they can also defederate from any instance at any time if they feel the need.
If you’re running your own instance, of course, you’re the one calling the shots so you make those decisions and can federate with everything if that’s what you want.
I went over to kbin (I already had an account there) and replicated my subscription list as best I could. Splitting my time between here and there. I wish I didn’t have to have two separate accounts, though! I didn’t want to be fragmented.
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Same here. Example: I have a question I want to post on AskLemmy. I started to post it from Beehaw, and realized that I’d be cutting off responses from a huge swath of the Fediverse if I did. So I’ll be posting it from kbin, instead.
I had an account on beehaw and kbin, but as of the announcement yesterday I’ve gotten rid of my beehaw account.
It’s worth noting that Kbin is federating now; they’ve got over 100 pages of communities to scroll through.
Yeah, I’ve been exploring kbin a bit as well… I do miss having a dedicated app though.
Plus I like it here so it would be nice to keep this as my home base!
In case I was unclear, you can keep this as your home base, now - you can subscribe to kbin communities from Lemmy as of (I believe) yesterday afternoon.
True but actually using kbin instead gives access to both beehaw and lemmy.world for instance.
It’s pretty cool to have so many options. We can have one account that sees more instances, or several separate accounts that see all those instances, or create our own instance: population 1 that sees all.
It’s like discovering the internet for the first time all over again. :D
That’s how I went. Time will tell if it eats storage etc, but so far I’m loving the control I have over who to federate with.
Yeah, from Kbin really interesting to view this drama from the outside. We can see posts from both sides right now.
I hope we’re able to avoid drama ourselves in the long run. I don’t mind at all seeing it from a distance, but it would suck to be a direct part of it.
Is there an easy way to search through all the kbin communities at once?
You can go to Kbin, click Magazines, and browse - when you find one you want to sub to, just rightclick -> copy link, and search for it on your instance.
Thanks! That’s what I was doing, just wondering if there was some elegant solution I was mising.
I just started a small instance called wizanons.dev if anyone is interested in joining. We’re focused on magic and mysticism, especially psychonautics.
Also super friendly and we’ve yet to ban any instances since we’re still small and haven’t needed to. We run the “magic” community, which is mostly general for anything magical - fantasy or otherwise anyone wants to post about.
Wonderful! This is something I was looking for :)
I was subscribed to a lot of pretty niche communities on lemmy.world, so safe to say I’m disappointed in that regard. I’m happy the mods here are trying to make this place safer, but I think it would help to be able to make your own communities at some point.
I’m currently browsing for communities to replace those small ones that I lost hold of.
Would’ve been nice I’d there’d been some way to block users from those domains to access our stuff but still let us subscribe to theirs somehow.
That’s a good idea. Allow communities to choose if they are globally or locally subscribable.
I’m new here, so i hadn’t much time to engage there. One thing i was happy to find was a ADHD community on lemmy.world, it’s a bit of a bummer that i can’t access it from here. I think it’s the largest one. Found another one on kbin though and ADHD memes is really cool.
You can engage with it from here when a new thread comes by but you can’t create new threads from here.
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I don’t think I subbed to anything on those two instances, so I’m not affected at all. I only recently switched to subscribed on the front page too as default so if I missed anything from them, I haven’t noticed. Beehaw have grown large and active enough to make up most of my front page at this point.
I think out of all the federated subs I have, the active an interesting ones to me are coming out of programming.dev. I also sub to a few fediverse related ones, one of which actually posted about Beehaw’s decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.work. There were some takes that miss the point. There were also those who defended Beehaw’s decision too. It was interesting to see the interactions unfold.
Can you tell me how you switched your default to “Subscribed”? I can’t find the option.
Sure!
Go into your Settings, then scroll down until you see this section:
I’ve highlighted the option that you need to change to see your Subscribed communities’ posts. It’s the “Type” setting and you can switch it from “Local” to “Subscribed” there.
Hope that helps!
Don’t know why I couldn’t see it before lol. Thank you!
Honestly, it’s understandable. Personally, I find it poorly labelled and it’s wedged in between other options of nearly the same size.
Tangent:
I’m here through kbin, reading your post from beehaw. Reading “Now that we’re no longer linked …” made me go “We? I can see content from lemmy.world, sh.it, and beehaw just fine.”
Not trying to throw shade, just pointing out that even though the post absolutely recognizes the new landscape provided by the fediverse, it’s easy to stay in “old world” siloed modes of thinking.
I do not think anyone at Beehaw can see or interact with us in this thread on Kbin, so we may simply be talking into a void together.
Edit: disregard, apparently Beehaw can view and interact with us. If you’re reading this from Beehaw, I want you to know that I love you.
I believe that’s the case, yes. So Kbin/Lemmy.world, etc. still receive the content posted on beehaw, however beehaw doesn’t receive the content posted on Kbin/Lemmy.world. I guess this also makes it so that if anyone were to comment on this thread from another instance, we wouldn’t see their comments (unless they’re from beehaw or another instance that beehaw has federation enabled with)
edit: It seems that I was wrong, as clarified by @vaguerant below. Federation between kbin and beehaw is still active.
kbin has not been defederated from Beehaw, so interactions between those servers are continuing as normal. There’s lots of posts about how “we” are defederated from Beehaw on the kbin front page, but those aren’t coming from kbin itself, they’re just showing up on the kbin front page because they’re popular content in the threadiverse.
We (all of us, not a specific instance) should probably get into the habit of referring to our instances by name instead of just saying “us”, “we”, etc. because it causes exactly this kind of confusion when we don’t.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. There’s been so many threads on the defederation, I have gotten confused.
Kbin.social wasn’t defederated actually, only those two Lemmy instances
So I tdoesnt effect us (on kbin)
that’s comforting, in a way
I went to Beehaw to see if this thread of messages was over there, and this thread is indeed visible there (I clicked on “more” then “copy URL to fediverse” to go see)!
Yeah, it’s an odd situation! Takes some time getting used to
Yeah, it’s an odd situation, not something one’s used to really. :)
I have the feeling things are going to get bigger here on fedi196.gay very soon and its quite possible we’ll be taking the meme niche of the fediverse
I think the only community I was subbed to that would have been impacted was the Nine Inch Nails community. It was only just getting started so I’m not too concerned with it.
I had just subbed to some on both servers, but hadn’t interacted in any yet. So it hasn’t affected me too badly. I just need to go find different versions of those communities, since most of the witchy ones I could find were over there.
I wish I could fully move to kbin and avoid the federation drama but there’s currently no way to move my post and comment history to a new account. I’m kind of stuck.
If you really want to move, better sooner than later?
