Originally published June 10; last updated June 20, with several new sections. See the Update history at the end for details. Thanks everybody for the great feedback on earlier versions!
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Screenshot from lemmy.world, June 2023 The front page of fedia.io is also all poop. I hate it when that happens.
Update, August 10: lemmy.world notes that there’s an obstacle to closing open registrations: the message on the signup page telling people about joinlemmy.world, where they can find other instances, is only shown on lemmy.ml. Meanwhile, lemmy.world has been under a DDOS attack:
“So who is attacking us? One thing that is clear is that those responsible of these attacks know the ins and outs of Lemmy. They know which database requests are the most taxing and they are always quick to find another as soon as we close one off. That’s one of the only things we know for sure about our attackers. Being the biggest instance and having defederated with a couple of instances has made us a target.”
Update, August 29: attackers spammed lemmy.world’s lemmyshitpost community with CSAM (child sexual abuse material), which then got federated out to other instances. In response, lemmy.world turned off open registration, but it didn’t help: attackers continued to post from other instances. So they wound up closing lemmyshitpost … although it would be easy enough for attackers to switch to another community, so we’ll see how effective that is.
It’s a difficult situation for other instances as well as lemmy.world. “Purging” the federated posts didn’t delete the images, there’s no way to disable image caching, and limitations of the moderation tools mean that admins have to view unblurred images to decide what to delete. Disabling image uploads leads to some unexpected error messages. There isn’t any equivalent of Mastodon’s “reject-media” option. The list goes on….
lemm.ee’s short-term mitigation plan includes disabling image uploads, deleting all images that have been downloaded from other sites, and applying a patch to prevent future downloads of images from other sites. db0 (lead developer of AI Horde) contributed a script that uses attempts to identify problematic images and delete them, although it has a lot of false positives (and it’s not clear how this interacts with mandatory reporting requirements in the US).
6. Invest in moderation tools
“Reddit admins have had 8 years to build a stronger infrastructure to support moderators but have not. “
– Sarah Gilbert, AskHistorians and uncertainty surrounding the future of API access
As Gilbert’s outstanding description of the situation discusses, Reddit’s underinvested in moderation tools for years. Alas, ever since 2017 , so has Mastodon. And so has every other fediverse software platform I can think of.
Now’s a great opportunity to change that.
In the short term, there could be a lot of leverage porting the moderation tools that have been developed for reddit – or finding ways to replicate their functionality in a federated environment. Moderator time is often the scarcest resource during a high-growth surge, and if moderators can’t keep up with the load there will be more spam, disinformation, racism, harassment, and people having bad experiences. Tools can amplify their efforts, and potentially let people who don’t have as much moderation experience help more effectively. And done right, these tools evolve to work on other fediverse software, where there’s certainly room for improvement.
But why stop there?
In this study, I perform a collaborative ethnography with moderators of r/AskHistorians, a community that uses an alternative moderation model, highlighting the importance of accounting for power in moderation.
Drawing from Black feminist theory, I call this “intersectional moderation.”… To ensure the successful implementation of intersectional moderation, I argue that designers should support decision-making processes and policy makers should account for the impact of the sociotechnical systems in which moderators work.– Towards Intersectional Moderation: An Alternative Model of
Moderation Built on Care and Power, Sarah Gilbert, J . ACM, Vol. 37, No. 4, Article 111. Publication date: August 2023.New tools designed to center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes – designed from the beginning to prioritize accessibility, consent, safety, privacy and other community needs that current fediverse software doesn’t handle well – could be truly transformational. Sure, easier said than done, but this is a good opportunity to make progress.
7. Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software
Mastodon instances run the gamut from single-person instances, relatively-small communities, and big general purpose sites. Over time, techniques have been refined for the different approaches – Darius Kazemi’s How to run a small social network site for your friends, for example, is an invaluable resource. But unsurprisingly, the software itself is a better match for some approaches than others; mainline Mastodon, for example, has consistently de-emphasized functionality that’s very useful for smaller community-focused instances (in contrast to forks like Hometown and Glitch)
KBin and Lemmy are similarly flexible enough that that they’re getting deployed in a lot of different ways. For example:
- startrek.website hosts three related communities: Star Trek for news and discussion (and a bit of slash fic), Risa for memes and shitposts, and Daystrom Institute for serious in-depth discussions with no memes or whinging.
- programming.dev and slrpnk.net are also interest-focused, but have dozens of communities
- feddit.it, feddit.nl, midwest.social, aussie.zone, and others have a geographical focus
- beehaw.org is a general-interest site with a lot of communities on differnet topics that’s “aspiring to be(e) a safe, friendly and diverse place,” with screened signups and active moderation
- lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works are also general-interest but have open registrations and less-active moderation
Some of these approaches are be a better match than others for where the software is today; most obviously, until the moderation tools and scaling improves, larger instances will be a lot more challenging. Of course, with enough creativity and effort, it’s often possible to work around the software’s limitations and get it to work in less-obvious ways, possibly by making tradeoffs (for example giving up on “good moderation” in the short term in order to keep registrations open).
With relatively-new and fast moving software, there’s no substitute for experimentation – and sharing what does and doesn’t work.
8. Values matter
Policies against racism, sexism, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, and Nazis are extremely appealing positioning these days.
– Lessons (so far) from Mastodon, 2017
It’s still true! Mastodon’s April 2017 influx was catalyzed by Sarah Jeong’s Mastodon is like Twitter without Nazis and the November 2022 wave was triggered by transphobic Apartheid Clyde’s acquisition of Twitter. And when Gab switched to Mastodon’s code in 2019, Mastodon BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) Eugen Rochko stated his opposition to Gab’s philosophy, which he accurately described as using “he pretense of free speech absolutism as an excuse to platform racist and otherwise dehumanizing content” … and virtually every Mastodon instance blocked Gab. This decisions remains widely popular; in a recent poll I did, over 90% of respondents thought that Gab should be blocked.
Of course, the policies aren’t enough. As Dr. Johnathan Flowers discusses in The Whiteness of Mastodon, “Mastodon has a history of being inhospitable to marginalized users.” Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy discusses several examples of racism and white supremacy on Mastodon in 2017. As a result, Mastodon’s got a problematic – although thoroughly deserved – reputation for anti-Blackness.
Lemmy also has a reputation.
I’ve been aware of Lemmy for a long time, but I’ve always been somewhat wary of it because it’s developed by tankies, and its flagship server (lemmy.ml) has a history of tolerating/encouraging tankie politics…. There’s just no way I could feel comfortable in a community that supports the right-wing nationalist Putin’s war on Ukraine, or outright denies the harsh repression meted out against Muslims in China. I’m far from the only one leery of Lemmy for this reason – the FediTips Mastodon account doesn’t recommend it , either.
– Jessica Smith, On Reddit and Its Federated Alternatives
You don’t have to scroll too far down the list of sites on joinlemmy.org to find more than one hosting anti-Muslim content. That’s not good. And posts from these sites show up on lemmy.ml, so there’s anti-Muslim content on the flagship instance. That’s also not good.
It’s possible that it’s a combination of understaffed or undertrained moderators and a few anti-Muslim instances, and once everybody improves their moderation and defederates the bad actors the problem will go away. Time will tell. And whether or not that happens, Lemmy’s developers are reportedly tankies, which is a problem for a lot of people. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there’s a fork.
More positively, though, defederation from bigoted sites is one of the fediverse’s good features, and forks can have a very positive effect. And with Twitter’s transformation into an openly right-wing, racist, anti-LGBTQ+ pro-authoritarian, disinfo media network, whatever segment of the fediverse offers an alternative is going to continue to be very appealing!
This is a great opportunity – and it won’t be the last great opportunity
There’s a lot more that can be said … but this is long enough already, so I’ll leave the rest to discussions in the fediverse and perhaps future posts. But since I spent so much of this post focusing on past screwups and likely problems, I’m going to wrap up on a positive note.
This is quite likely to be the biggest wave to the fediverse yet. It’ll be interesting to see how things go, especially during the June 12 Reddit blackout, but if even a small fraction of the people who want to check things out wind up staying around, the network could grow significantly. Not only that, the surge of interest is likely to be a shot in the arm for other fediverse software as well as KBin and Lemmy.
“For many of us, the details of the API changes are not the most important point anymore. This decision, and the subsequent interaction with users by admins to justify it, have eroded much of the confidence and trust in the management of reddit that they have been working so hard to regain.”
– BuckRowdy, Reddit held a call today with some developers regarding the API changes
And no matter what happens, this is far from the last opportunity. Reddit may well make enough concessions in the short term to keep people around for a while … but the writing’s on the wall, so as soon as alternatives fediverse are good enough for enough people, we’ll start to see significant movement, and the Reddark will turn into a Rexxit.
People try out the Fediverse, only to drift back to the corporate platform. Then six months later, a year, two years, something new comes up. The platform finds a new way to alienate users, and some subset of them will go hunting through their email to figure out which Fediverse server their forgotten account is on, and what login name they used. (Trust me: keep that info somewhere you can find it.)
– L. Rhodes in Here’s how it’s going to go down on Beehaw.org
Meanwhile Twitter’s doubling down on the “toxic hellscape” strategy, with Apartheid Clyde now talking about disalbing blocking. What could possibly go wrong? If he does that, there’s going to be another major exodus; even if he doesn’t, anybody who doesn’t want to spend their time in a racist, transphobic, hard-right-wing, disinfo-filled environment will continue to look for alternatives.. And while Facebook/Instagram/Meta’s new ActivityPub-compatible Twitter competitor will bring surveillance capitalism and an embrace-extend-dominate mindset to the fediverse, it could potentailly also bring connections with Oprah, the Dalai Lama, and 2 billion Instagram users. So that’s a huge opportunity as well.
As Ada says, it’s interesting times in the fediverse.
Ten days later …
Tens of thousands of people have signed up for KBin and Lemmy accounts since I first published this post, hundreds of new instances have been created, and “the threadiverse” is suddenly a hot topic of conversation. As expected, many of the newcomers initially found the experience somewhat confusing, especially the federation aspects… but most got the gist of it fairly quickly, and there are plenty of vibrant discussions on multiple topics. As Asif Youssuff’s Unofficial Subreddit Migration List and the sub.rehab list illustrate, more and more subreddits are exploring alternatives.
Of course, it hasn’t all gone smoothly. The moderation functionality of KBin or Lemmy is waaaaaaay weaker than Reddit – and for that matter, weaker than Mastodon’s functionality today. So with limited tools, it’s been a real challenge to keep trolling, spam, and porn under control. In that and many other ways, the software’s not yet ready for prime time.
But the opportunity’s not going away. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is tripling down, and generally throwing gasoline on the fire. Thousands of moderators are keeping their subreddis private despite the company’s following through on their threats to remove volunteer moderators (who Huffman described as “landed gentry“)3. Other subreddits are opening up but continuing the protest in creative ways. As Yousuff points out, Reddit’s reactions are a clear sign that the protests are working. It’s going to be very hard for Reddit to recover trust after the “brutal blackout“, so even if they somehow cobble together enough moderators to keep going and people reluctantly stay there for a while, everybody will keep looking for alternatives. In fact, just as I was sharing this update post to kbin, I saw that r/blind has set up their own Lemmy instance.
And just as with similar waves to the fediverse in the past, there’s also a surge of developers getting involved – contributing bug fixes and new functionality, userscripts to customize the experience, and starting to work on apps. As KBin developer Ernest says,
We have challenging times ahead. We need to cover critical functions in the code, develop better moderation tools, focus on performance, and create user-friendly documentation. By doing so, it will be much easier. And I intentionally use the word “we” because what is happening on Codeberg is absolute madness.
– KBin developer Ernest, in response to fedia.io admin Jerry Bell
Yeah really. As I write this, there are over 40 active “pull requests” (code contributions) in KBin’s source code repository on Codeberg; Lemmy has almost 20 pull requests on Github. And I’m sure both code bases will improve significantly. Mastodon’s influx in 2016-2017 led to a period of rapid community innovation and similar things are happening in the threadiverse (the suddenly-hot subset of the fediverse including KBin, Lemmy, and other federated threaded-discussion software). That’s good!
Looking at the dynamics of the last week, the lessons I highlighted here all remain very relevant. As I said in that post, though, there’s a lot more that can be said. So I added a new section above on Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software, and am including a few more thoughts on moderation below.
A few more thoughts on moderation
These complement the discussion in Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation, and perhaps I’ll merge them into that section later. But that section’s already quite long, and the format here is somewhat different, I’m putting it here for now 😎
Recruit moderation teams, and put policies and processes in place
There’s an entire section above talking about investing in moderation tools, starting with providing currently-lacking basics, and then over time breaking new ground. But tools by themselves don’t solve anything. Moderation is done by people in line with the policies set by instances and specific communities (or magazines). Once the load starts to get heavy, moderation teams also need to put processes in place to make sure that reports from users get responded to, bad actors get warned and then if necessary banned, appeals can be made when needed, and so on.
On Reddit, volunteer subreddit moderators perform the bulk of the moderation – Sarah Gilbert’s Towards Intersectional Moderation describes one large, tightly-moderated subreddit. When moderators go absent, don’t enforce sitewide policies against harassment or hate speech, or are themselves the source of the problems, with Reddit employees known as “admins” step in. The same two-level approach is likely to apply in the fediverse, although right now many magazines and communities are essentially unmoderated.
The good news is that there are a lot of people in the fediverse who have moderation experience – including some who have helped define policies and processes in subreddits, forums, Facebook groups, chat rooms, or other similar spaces. Anybody running an instance, or a large community or magazine, should be reaching out and looking for help right now. And policies, processes, and practices initially developed for one community can be refined into templates that are potentially more broadly useful.
Defederation can be a useful tool
People who are new to the fediverse often see it as an inherently bad thing when one instances blocks or defederates from another. After all, part of the vision of the fediverse is to have information flowing freely; instance blocking and defederation interfere with that. And when beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, it was certainly a hassle for users who have accounts on one of those instances wanted to participate in communities on the other one.
But defederation’s also an incredibly valuable tool for limiting the impact of trolls and bigots hosted on loosely-moderated sites. Most Mastodon sites defederate from hundreds of instances, and some have much longer lists. And that’s okay!
An important point is that defederation doesn’t have to be permanent. When mastodon.social got hit with a wave of spammers that infected the whole fediere, some instances temporarily defederated to limit the annoyance to their users (and load on their admins and moderators) until the problem got under control. As beehaw admins said in their annoncement:
this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community’s owner, i should add–we just have differing interests here and that’s fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we’ll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.
sh.itjust.work’s admin TheDude adds
After this happened, the beehaw admins and I had a good chat about their decision. While our stances on registration policies might diverge, we realized that our ultimate goals are aligned: we both strive to foster communities that thrive in an atmosphere of safety and respect, where users can passionately engage in discussions and feel a sense of belonging.
Although the probability of an immediate reversal are slim given the current circumstances, I believe we have managed to identify common ground. It’s evident that, even in separation, we can unite to contribute positively to the broader fediverse community.
Notes
1 For example:
- Sometimes people on different instances can’t interact because of software incompatibilities because one instance has blocked the other or turned on “authorized fetch”.
- Some Lemmy instances have downvotes, others don’t.
- Last week an upvote on Kbin boosted the post, this week it’s treated as a like (as it is in Lemmy); that’s an improvement, but also a change that adds to everybody’s cognitive load.
- Threads like PSA: How to link users & communities so it doesn’t break for other instances and how do I link to my community in comments? illustrate how confusing trying to refer to people and discussions on multiple instances can be (a huge problem on Mastodon as well).
The list goes on …
2 Configurable message lengths are valuable for accessibility because assistive technology does better with one long message than multiple short ones, and were I believe first implemented by glitch-soc; underlined lines help people with color vision problems distinguish between links and were first implemented by toot.cafe.
3 I’d love to hear what r/AskHistorians has to say about Steve’s description of developers as “landed gentry” but, like many of the 8000+ subreddits that “went dark” in a two-day blackout on June 12-13, they’re continuing their protest.
Update history
Ongoing: fixing typos, improving wording, and adding new links
July / August: updates about ongoing moderation and defederation issues.
June 28: link to an excerpt from lemmy.ninja’s excellent post on dealing with bots.
June 22: info about Lemmy’s millions of bot signups. Who could have predicted?
June 20: new sections Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software , Ten days later, and A few more thoughts on moderation.
June 11: updates in response to early feedback, including quotes from L. Rhodes and ozoned, links to more threads and resources.
June 10: published and shared to infosec.exchange and lemmy.ml. I tried to share it to KBin as well but it didn’t work – I think maybe because of some of the DDOS protections on kbin.social. I also tried to send it a friendica group as well but had a typo in the group name, oops.
June 9: draft shared to calckey.social,
