In light of recent events in the Fediverse

It's lousy being blocked by an entire section of the site and now labelled a bigot because some trolls made their accounts on the same instance as me.

Agreed, it sucks. But their admins are talking to our admins, and so far ours seem like they have their heads screwed on pretty well, so I'm sure it'll only be for a short time.

Oust the shitheads, promote the stand-up sh.it.heads, I say.
- To be honest I had no idea that people from this instance were doing it until one troll post bragging about getting us banned from Beehaw and explained how he did it, along with a comic book supervillian diatribe about how the Fediverse isn't safe and long live Reddit.
- Thank you for bringing to light the phrase sh.it.head, I am quite pleased with it
Yeah, I'm sure it doesn't feel great, but I didn't get the sense that they were trying to personally attack everyone on the relevant servers, but more of a "we're only four people, did not expect our instance to become a "default" community, and are completely underwater from a moderation perspective. We need to pull a rip cord to get this under control"
- Wait did sh.itjust.works do anything? I thought the story was that beehaw.org cut them and lemmy.world off, but only for people browsing on beehaw.
For context, what has happened?
- I think they were using the open sign ups to join and then harass people, a lot of which were in other instances, in particular beehaw.org. Now beehaw has defederated from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world.
I mean the easy solution is to have your instance enable registration screening. That's what it's for. It takes less than a minute to answer most instances' registration yet (based on experience) that simple barrier is enough to stop most trolls.

Until a Lemmy instance gets large enough to actually hire full time admins to catch and remove abusive content ASAP, I don't see instances reasonably being able to go without registration screening because the trolls will seize on that opportunity every time.

Admins of larger instances see it all the time:

New instance pops up, yay! And most instances automatically federate with new instances!

It doesn't have registration screening, this is quickly discovered by trolls and adbots and the instance gets filled with rule breaking content.

Large instances start blocking it because by federating with an instance that is being used in this way degrades the quality of your own instance and adds a ton of workload to your (unpaid) mods and admins.

The instance eventually enables registration screening, and other instances start unblocking it.

It's happened with plenty of instances before and will probably keep happening as long as spam and trolling exist.
Make an account in another instance, there are lots of them.
- When other instances have abstract requirements and a manual approval process that takes who-knows-how-long, though, that's not always such an easy ask. People want to be where other people are, and those busier instances are the ones that set harder requirements.
  
  When I left Reddit, I signed up on two instances: lemmy.ml and beehaw. I was eventually approved for lemmy.ml, but even now trying to access beehaw just hangs on the login page perpetually, presumably because I have not been approved and there's nothing else I can do on my end.
welcome to the fediverse! Before you get "locked in" to a particular instance, take a look at your other choices and pick one that you might fit better in. https://fediverse.observer

The issue with this is beehaw is large enough that them defederating from other instances is potentially a serious threat to those instances. Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation. Moves like this could be interpreted as an attempt to become the dominant instance, defeating the purpose of the fediverse.

I am not 100% sure where you are going with this, however I am going to say I agree that the move by beehaw is a blatent move to exert control on other instances, and it was never in question, in my mind atleast that it was their goal from my reading of their first post. I however disagree that they pose a threat to the other istances, they pose a threat if instances give in, like it apears sh.itjust.works may have done given their new post. Beehaw, sense the begining has been going arround acting like they have quite a bit like they are the arbitor, and everyone else should join them. I for one think the other instances of Lemmy should band together and let Beehaw wall themselves off. I do not think they would sucseed in this goal, and they would either give up on their imperialistic conquest or they would die a death of isolation.
- it is a threat if users jump ship to beehaw from the smaller instances beehaw has blocked. but when I wrote that comment I wasn't aware that lemmy.world is now three times the size of beehaw, at least according to this tally https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. that should counterbalance things.
Is there an Out of the Loop thread for this? I'm new here and not sure what's going on.
- Beehaw.org, one of the largest instances suddenly decided to also defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works....
  
  They are becoming an incredibly insular community which would normally be fine...but the frustrating bit is that many of us have been enjoying and participating in content from many instances and then suddenly it gets taken away from us.
  
  If they had defederated from the very beginning or if they were a much smaller community it wouldn't be as frustrating imo.
  
  I just want to be able to interact with people, not keep jumping through hoops to find which instances support other instances and making new accounts there.
Social networks are inherently monopolistic because people follow the crowd, and federation is meant to counteract that tendency toward userbase consolidation.

It's just that network effects are real. I want to be where all the smart, fun people are, not on a ded site or nazi island. I don't really care about who's on my instance, just who's on the network. Federation and decentralization were never huge selling points for me. And as Mastodon demonstrated, most people just want to log onto a big network and don't care or want to think about instances.
- I feel the same. I don't care about the instance, I just want to interact with the communities.
- I think your point is valid. Federation and decentralization are my main seeking points. i think it's exciting that one instance can cut off instances that aren't working for them. The power to cut off bad actors is huge.
  
  That said I don't understand why they are. They said something about moderation, but I funny know what that means. Creating a safe space for such a large community is tough. Idk.
- undefined> I want to be where all the smart, fun people are
  
  Hence why you're on lemmy.ml! :)

What happened?

https://sh.itjust.works/post/107627

Basically, Beehaw defederated from some newer instances. Partially because some people were being shitheads, but for other understandable reasons as well.

The moral of the story is, it's ok to be a sh.it.head, it's not ok to be a shithead. Not the same.
- these two instances’ open registration policy
  
  So the problem they have is that they don't make new users jump trough hoops?
- hey, I have been here awhile, and while I am not 100% sure the exact issue that triggered this, what I can tell you is generaly the beehaw admin team has shown themselves not to be the most trust worthy team when it comes to lemmy instances, so I would take their story with a grain of salt
just replying so I remember to check back in
- Pls use the save button instead :)

You'd be better off without them, they (the runners of the instance, not the userbase) are a bunch of absolutely cowardly little liars. They were more than happy to accept the massive boon this instance gave them and at the same time agitate and concern troll here to try to drive a wedge in the userbase. I find that shit deeply irritating, especially since they claim to be apolitical and merely blocking instances for "hate speech" which (aside from being a political concept) was seemingly the false pretext they have for also blocking hexbear.net, which is currently forked but is the only instance with substantial usership to mandate pronouns and has much more aggressive anti-racist moderation.

If you simper enough, I'm sure they'll be happy to have you back since they seem the type to feel they are never receiving enough sycophantic flattery, but that's a bad trade for you.

If someone claims to be "apolitical" it's a huge red flag, in itself.
- Exactly. Politics affect every little instance of your daily lives, from the taxes you pay, through the type of food you buy (local or imported?), to the sex of people you can get married to.
  
  Being apolitical is just being ignorant.
- Generally means they're either clueless or that they want to delete particular views.
  
  I do have concerns about this instance and free speech, but I haven't bothered to do enough research yet. I'd love to hear more about it either way.
  
  I also hate that I sometimes have to get off of a platform to talk about that platform. I was effectively copying things done for the League of Legends subreddit to here, and I didn't really feel comfortable talking about it in Reddit DMs.
Can you link to me where Beehaw claims it was apolitical? From the inclusion of LGBTQ+ and feminism, Politics being similar to the politics subreddit, it would seem to me beehaw generally leans left in terms of culture.
- Culturally it trends towards the Democratic Party style of talking a big game about progressivism and then being functionally conservative, but the admins are borderline Thatcherite in their rhetoric.
  
  https://beehaw.org/post/524300
  
  The very first sentence: "Beehaw is a community of individuals and therefore does not have any specific political affiliation."
  
  After acknowledging the first part I said, it continues:
  
  "What we stand for and the space that we’re trying to make is compatible with many forms of politics. Unfortunately some political groups build themselves around and choose to elevate or tolerate hate speech. These are the only political groups that we are incompatible with."
  
  "Some of the instances that we have chosen to defederate with have explicit political stances and ideologies. Their political stance and ideology had nothing to do with the choice to defederate. The choice to defederate was based on the amount of hate speech present on the instance and/or explicitly endorsing it. "
  
  Also, goddam is the post longwinded for a simple lie.

Permanently Deleted

Eh, it's not all bad. They want a certain tenor to their instance, and don't have the tools to effectively deal with folks who want to screw with that. Lemmy is in a period of exponential growth, and open registration policies seem to be the exception rather than the norm.

If it's an actual problem (I haven't seen anything particularly problematic yet, but I'm your average good natured sh.it.head), they're within their rights to use the few tools at their disposal to calm things down, work with the instances of concern, and retool their approach.

This is all a learning experience for everyone involved. I have no ill-will or butthurt over this move, just disappointment that we can't have nice things right away.
- @Cracks_InTheWalls sigh. So basically the jerks that were banned from reddit are trying to ruin things here. and getting themslves banned and a few instance to not talk to eachother till their gone. Oof.
  
  @Puffymumpkins
Why do they need to grow a pair? They did what they felt was needed and used the tools at their disposal. Tell the people that caused the issues to act mature and as if they have functioning brains. Not sure how people are at fault for wanting to use the internet in peace and enjoy doing so.
- it's anti-competitive, which goes against the "no one group is in charge" spirit of the fediverse. Beehaw is a large instance with a lot of sway.

But how to pronounce "sh.it"?!

(Weird, don't know why it automatically became a link.)

AFAIK that's just standard link terminology. Any . followed by two characters is automatically interpreted as a link. It's been that way on Twitter for quite a while, and I remember at least one conservative politician falling afoul of that at some point in the past, though I'd have to search a bit to find it.
- It's not any two letters, but there are hundreds of TLDs. Many of the two letter ones are delegated to nations. .it is the TLD for Italy.
Try to use a backslash:

sh\.it

becomes

sh.it

Is this a beehaw reference

Is this some sort of beehaw reference I am too lemmygrad to understand?

but I use sh.itjust.works XD

Assuming your comment and post history has not been altered, then you my friend are a sh.it.head, not a shithead, and Cracks approved to boot.

Embrace it, it is a good thing (it's actually an extremely neutral thing, but it's a better label than Lemming anyway).
I also use it, but more because the servers (that I'm aware of) are based on Canada and Lemmy.ca took way too long to accept me even after writing an essay to join.
- well that instance is run by like one dude out of his mom's basement and his server wasn't ready for the influx