On Politics and Forking
Beehaw is a community of individuals and therefore does not have any specific political affiliation. At this point in time, we do not know what the political leanings of most of our users are. I would suspect that many of them would identify as progressive because we are explicitly a safe space for minorities. 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. If any of it was unclear in any of the other posts, I will restate it all here. Beehaw does not tolerate hate speech. Beehaw is an explicitly safe space. We center and promote kindness because that is what we see and love in the world.
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. Since hate speech is not controlled on the instances that these users come from, we cannot expect them to change their behavior when participating on our instance. While users may exist on some of these platforms who do not spread hate speech, the choice to defederate is made to reduce the burden on our moderators and admins. Occasionally these instances or users from these instances will point their fingers at Beehaw and make claims about our political leanings or whether certain kinds of politics are banned. To be explicitly clear, the only kind of politics that are banned here are those which enable hate speech such as fascism.
Politics on the internet
Many, if not most discussions of politics on the internet are poisoned by virtue signaling. When they are not poisoned by virtue signaling, discussions are often just ways to vent emotions. I believe the reason for this is the platforms themselves and the incentives to engage online. On the internet I can adjust my level of anonymity. An adjustable level of anonymity allows me to change how I speak to others while simultaneously mitigating or removing any consequences to myself. This of course varies based on the platform and what I'm attempting to accomplish, but in the context of speaking with others on the internet, I can be relatively consequence free to say whatever I want on most major platforms. Particularly negative or hateful behavior might cause me to be banned off of a platform, but through the use of technology or other means, I can simply create another account (or migrate to another platform) and continue the same speech. In malicious terms, I do not have to worry about managing someone else's emotions or my connection to them.
In real life, on the other hand, it is not as easy to pass myself off as someone else. I must be much more aware of how I speak to others because consequences can be much more dire. When discussing politics with others, I may alienate them or myself and so I may choose to be more open to listen rather than soapboxing. The people I'm interacting with may be a regular part of my life and may be people I have come to respect. Understanding how they think might be vitally important to maintaining or improving our connection.
I am presenting the internet and real life as two ends of a spectrum but it is more complicated than that. There are people who are very visible and tied to their identities on the internet just as there are people in real life who use false identities created to mask their true identity. Interactions vary in level of connection, platform, and who happens to know who we are in other spaces on the internet. There are plenty of people who talk on the internet about politics with the explicit goal of changing the minds of others. Some of these individuals are not using this as an outlet to manage their own emotions. These generalizations are presented in this way because I need to talk about these patterns in the context of the platform Lemmy. I'm asking everyone on this platform to be wary of anyone who focuses on politics but is unable to explain the issues themselves. They are probably trying to deceive you, are virtue signaling, or projecting their own insecurities and you should be skeptical of their approach.
I would encourage all of you to think about incentives when presented with political drama online. It is easy to get engaged because politics has a direct and often scary effect on our lives. In this community, it is not difficult to find individuals who are regularly marginalized by politicians. Especially for these minorities, it is completely valid to get emotionally invested in politics and I would personally encourage doing so on some level, but we need to think carefully about the other parties present in a conversation and whether they are willing to listen or incentivized to do so. For the people who are hiding behind anonymity and posting to vent their emotional frustrations with the system they are likely not invested in the community we are growing here and it may be appropriate and healthy to ignore or disengage with these folks.
Forking
It is in this political context that forking from the main Lemmy development has been presented. People are quick to point to potential upsides of forking, but the upsides are an after thought presented as a means to bolster or justify forking. These justifications are for what is ultimately a moral issue. The question at hand is whether it is moral to use a platform developed by someone who has committed acts which one deems immoral. To anyone posing this question, I would ask them to consider what other technology they use every day and to trace the roots back to each invention along the path to today's day and age. The world has a colonialist history, rife with violence and immoral behavior. Unless you retreat the woods and recreate technologies yourself from scratch, it's impossible to live in a modern society without benefiting from technology built on countless dead bodies in history.
We do not have the technical expertise to create a new tool from scratch - all we can do is leverage tools that already exist to create communities like this. At the time we created this instance, the service we decided on was Lemmy. We did so with awareness of discussions around the politics of the main instance and developers. I think we've done a decent job outlining what we intend to do with this instance and explicitly made strong stances against hate speech and other behavior we do not agree with, including where we disagree with them. When taken in the context of computing in general, these political leanings are also not unique in their social and political harm as compared to some of the tech giants out there. The same is true in comparison to some of the famous tech inventors and innovators; in comparison to the history of computer technology; in comparison to the exploitation and problematic mining of rare earth minerals used in technology; in comparison to the damages we cause to the earth to create the energy used to power our servers. We can follow this path of thinking back all that we want to, and ultimately it's just not a particularly fruitful discussion to zero in on whether the political leaning of the main developers and instance are in perfect alignment with what we want to accomplish. We are not explicitly endorsing their viewpoint by using their software and we are not tied to using this software forever.
I cannot stress enough how much bandwidth has been taken up by these discussions in recent days. It been brought up as frequently as every few hours across Discord, Matrix, inbox replies, comment replies, new threads, and other forms of communication. We're currently dealing with a lot of other issues like keeping the server running, expanding to add more communities, moderating the communities amidst a huge influx of users posting and reply content from other instances, managing expenses, optimizing our server, planning for the future, and so much more. We cannot entertain philosophical discussions on all of the wonderful things we 'could do' when we're struggling to keep up with what we're already currently doing. We have not yet received a serious proposal for a fork which details operational needs when it comes to the maintenance, support, and resources needed to accomplish and maintain it. Simply put we do not believe a fork is necessary at this time.
How you can help
As a final note, if there are things you'd like to see in this community we very much appreciate your input. However, this community has grown so large that I am already finding myself unable to reply to everyone and address everyone's concerns and I'm sure other admins feel similarly. Please consider whether your questions are better directed elsewhere - consider using the search functionality to see if others have answered the question; consider joining the matrix or discord to field questions to community members, or create a thread asking for help from your fellow users before reaching out to an administrator or a moderator.
If you feel strongly about contributing to Beehaw specifically or helping out with tuning or running the hardware, please join the Matrix or Discord and get involved in the relevant channels or discussions. If you want to contribute to Lemmy development, we would encourage you to dip your toes in, get involved, and get more familiar with the platform. Follow the Github and report bugs when you encounter them, or see what you can contribue to existing open issues. If you see technical issues arise with development, bring it to our attention so that we can act as mediators because we have collective power.
If you feel strongly about a longer term or larger project like creating a team to create documentation or helping us to legally become a nonprofit entity I also want to assure you that we love the enthusiasm, but unless you are coming to us with a formal pitch please spend your efforts self-organizing around this so that you can come to us with that pitch. Assume we know nothing about the field of expertise needed to accomplish any of these larger tasks and assume that we are extremely busy and unable to field or solicit advice without an executive summary and at least a draft plan of what the steps might look like, who would be responsible for those steps, anticipated concerns and plans for addressing them, and a timeline and estimation of resources needed.
My whole experience of moving to lemmy has felt like when people from another state move to a new one and complain about how awful it is and force it to change into where they left. If people are so absplutely offended by the politics of its originators, go create your own social media and stop harassing the poor mods, especially if the mods of this particular instance are trying to make your experience more palatable.
I settled on lemmy.world, but yeah 90% of the lemmy related discussion I see is "Why doesn't this work like Reddit and when can I expect it to work like Reddit?"
I've tried to do my part in explaining this isn't meant to be Reddit, but I'm already seeing an increase in hostility directed at devs for the lack of central authority (which is the thing they're fleeing in the first place but fuck me for pointing that out lol.)
Hey server buddy!
I think it's a mindset - with a company at the head, if you don't like the product, you should complain.
They need to understand this isn't a product - it's a project. It's not mature yet, and it's trying to solve a very difficult problem - how do you make social media healthier and more resistant to exploitation. The design they've settled on is complex and ambitious, and I'm pretty impressed it's been able to scale up this well
All that being said, the main complaint I've noticed (and I think is valid and it often gets dismissed) - to sign up users are given a choice (which server to join), and to make an informed choice there's a minimum of a few pages of required reading
It definitely matters, and the way you're presented this choice is pretty overwhelming
I'm working on a Lemmy client, and my thought is this - break up the options. Give users a choice of 3-5 options with a "next" button and a search option.
Another is the difficulty of finding and subscribing to communities - I've noticed a huge improvement with some recent changes, but there's always more that can be done
Anything else you've noticed? Particularly if it's something to keep in mind as I write the app
I just migrated from Reddit, and liked what I read about BeeHaw. Signup was a bit confusing, but eventually just sent an email to the team, wrote a bit about myself (education, family, interested, political leanings, probably massively oversharing 😅), and got an invite a few minutes later.
So far I really like the tone in here, and especially the quality of the comments. Feels like Reddit at its best, nice and helpful people.
I was on Reddit for 15 years (plus a few years lurking), and it's been my largest casual time-sink throughout. Leaving sucks. In the end, I couldn't accept losing my Android client — 10 year anniversary with Relay a few days ago — the thought of having to use the official app made me gag, as probably 95% of my Reddit time is on mobile. So I left for BeeHaw/Lemmy, and now I have to work with something that's (from a UX standpoint) probably even worse 😅
It's the principle, though; they're fucking over their users so incredibly hard, and I don't want to be a part of that anymore. Even if that means having to use a platform that isn't mature yet. Fuck it, I've been here before, and I can cope with having to start over again. I hope Lemmy can get to a point where there's a great experience to be had on mobile (I'm currently on/in Jerboa, btw). Maybe you're the one to fix it? 😍
So — a few things that I'm struggling with that might be worth considering for your app:
The ability to hide read/upvoted posts! This is my main pain point, by a very wide margin. As a Relay user, I'm used to a fresh screen with fresh new posts every time I open the app. Not so in Jerboa. Open app, and there is (potentially) a very long scroll ahead of me too get past posts I've already read and upvoted. I can look for upvotes, but I don't upvotes everything, so not a perfect indicator. The only functional one seems to be a slightly greyed-out post title (dark theme). My current understanding (very limited, granted) is that this is a Lemmy thing in general, not just Jerboa. Something about lacking the ability to react to a post being previously viewed æ upvoted? Either way, I'd love a setting that would let me hide all posts that I've upvoted, or hide all posts that I've read (clicked). Also the ability to manually hide a post from the main list view (get rid of something without having to upvoted or click on/into). In combination with a Refresh-button, maybe?
Better options for sorting posts (newest / popular / etc.). Probably also a Lemmy thing.Sorry, this seems to be there already, I'd just missed it somehow.Not having to manually scroll this text box up constantly because what I'm typing is disappearing behind the keyboard. Seriously, Jerboa? 😑
The ability to hide the downvote button, probably on a per-instance basis, as some allow downvotes, and some don't.
The ability to turn off excerpts on the front page.
Sorry, have to go to a meeting, will try to come back to this later and add more suggestions 😊
Good luck with the app! Can't wait to see it 😃 It's for Android, right? 😬
Careful, your æøå is spilling out :p
And I'm coming from a surprisingly similar place, replace relay with boost and and I'd have thought you were stalking me
I would even go further and allow a "don't care" option which randomly assigns new users to an instance with auto accept. Even make this the default.
Those who want can have the option to get into the details and make an individual decision.
Sounds like we need a site like https://choosealicense.com/ but for popular lemmy instances.
That's a very good point, I think that's better from a UX perspective and easier on me.
So while we're on the subject, any thoughts on how to pick this server? Ideally, I'd like to pick servers that are general interest, are underutilized, are on the smaller side, and are likely to stick around. I think I could find data for most of that sooner or later (I'll probably start by looking for server lists and having a hardcoded backup), and if I get enough traction I might look at using statistics and llama to profile them (the project I shelved to work on this could be repurposed to do the heavy lifting)
Any other criteria or consideration I should keep in mind? Practical or not, these days all sort of wacky things are becoming possible even for individuals
Sounds great! One simple thought: Leave it up to the individual instances to decide wether they want new users, wether they can handle the load. If they think not, they can close themselves for new registrations and you would automatically (?) choose others instead.
If you do want to make a more informed decision from your side, do you know these tools/sites?
All three show stats which might inform your decision. The last two include up time. The last one includes a number indicating how many other instances this instance has blocked / defederated (3rd column from the right, 'BI'). The last also has a section Recommended Instances, which seems to have had a similar thought process to ours.
I also liked this idea to have something like https://choosealicense.com/. A few basic questions to roughly guide the selection process. Relevant questions might be:
Generally, I think the registration process should be as quick and simple as possible by default. Most users cannot or want not make an informed decision. Those who can and want will find a small "advanced options" link. I also hope we rework https://join-lemmy.org/ one day, to move the server talk and technical details out of sight for the same reason.
Thank you for adding to the lemmyverse!
Yeah. As a project, it requires input from users, not just a company.
I just want a super easy clean simple interface which is what attracted me to reddit in the first place. I feel like anything more complicated than "simple" is a step in the wrong direction. I'll withhold judgment for a while until I've settled in but like many other new users I'm finding the learning curve challenging.
I don't know that the developers of lemmy intended this to be a space mirroring reddit, nor did they expect a mass exodus of users from reddit jumping on to lemmy.
Oh for sure, I totally get that. I don't hide my confusion, but I'm also understanding and sympathetic to the lemmy devs who have to deal with millions of new users almost overnight.
I would recommend Jerboa for Lemmy if you're on android/Google play. I've got it in list view with the font size customized to my liking and I think that it's a very streamlined and simple feel, reminding me of the early Alien Blue days on IOS.
As a transplant from reddit myself, I am loving my experience with Lemmy thru this app. Still taking some getting used to tho.
That's my entire point though - You're asking for a Reddit clone, and Lemmy isn't meant to be a Reddit clone. If you don't like it, that's fine, but people need to stop demanding the devs shift gears and make it a Reddit clone.
I disagree that I'm asking for a reddit clone. I'm saying sites like reddit and google were very successful in large part due to their extremely clean minimalist user friendly design. In an era where everything now "just works" it seems like a regression to increase complications.
But that "just works" comes at a price, namely the price that has sent you here in the first place, a central organizational authority. It "just works" because everything feeds through and is owned by Reddit/Google/whoever. Technology isn't magic, friend. You can have easy peasy use at the cost of zero control, or ultimate control at the cost of ease of use.
Lemmy is designed to lean towards the control side which means more moving parts. There are Reddit clones out there that offer that same "ease of access" singular control point if you just want to jump from ruler to ruler, if you want to stay on Lemmy then you need to understand that yes you need to understand how to navigate and use the services because IT'S NOT REDDIT and people need to stop demanding that it work like Reddit.
It's particularly frustrating, because those options DO exist. Exiles could absolutely just go to one of them and get the exact same experience. However, Lemmy got some buzz and everyone wants to be the cool kids even if they have zero interest in learning, and now half the posts are "DEVS WTF MAKE IT REDDIT" Of course I'm annoyed. If you want Reddit, go back to Reddit or find a clone and stop demanding not Reddit become Reddit.
I recently moved here and through my minimal interaction so far, I love it. I'm all about positive treatment and inclusion. I have only made two posts (as a somewhat personal experiment to test the waters) which would not have had any attention on Reddit, and people actually talked and congratulated me, which was a very weird but welcome experience.
And I love that the downvote arrow is removed in order to promote discussion rather than just vote and move on.
A service can always improve and get better in some ways, but the stance of beehaw is perfect imo
I agree with your sentiments! I love the engagement outside of all of these discussions and absolute flood of "how do I do xyz" and "it would be better if...." on like every single community and every post lol.
I want access to lemmygrad so I created another account, but overall I do like how beehaw is structured and all things considered I'm surprised at how much people are being critical of it, especially with Alyaza and Gaywallets very patient and thoughtful responses.
More what I'm getting at, though, in terms of trying to change lemmy is changing the culture of it. Regardless of where they are on the spectrum, it seems like most people on lemmy have been some flavor of leftist, and I could be wrong, but holy cow there are a TON of people "both sides"ing and using the example of discussion around gender affirming Healthcare not being a good convo to have here as something infringing on their free speech as if those conversations aren't dogwhistles for transphobia. People can happily move to other centrist instances, or ones like exploding-heads if they want to engage in that crap. Again, I'm a newb here and I could be off and maybe this has always been a thing, but I was on mastodon years ago which is similar and I wasn't too far off
I think in terms of technical development, of course there's always room for improvement but I also feel that some things are the way they are for a reason, and endless expansion might not be what the developers want, over a more cohesive, personal community. I go both ways on that.
Like I never even thought about that aspect and honestly I don't care as long as I'm not funding violence and hatred. And if that were the case I'd leave. It makes no sense to tell someone how to run their instance. It's theirs.
Hopefully this is not inappropriate, but regarding the "this platform was made by tankies"–argument:
Yeah lemmygrad will fade in popularity and lemmy.ml has already gotten so big it's shifted politically. It also seems like the creators are fine with other ideas on their instance too. Maybe it's just cause they know lemmy wouldnt get adopted otherwise but the only strict moderating against speech I see is against the obvious trolls and alt right fascists so far.
Then you have beehaw and the other instances outright blocking lemmygrad and things seem just peachy
I didn't realize lemmygrad was tolerating hate speech over there. That's fucked up.
I think it has more to do with them being Marxist Leninists which is really problematic to a lot of people. You should go check it out and see for yourself what the posts look like.
What specifically about being a Marxist Leninist is so bad that it warrants lumping them in with racists? I'm not an ML and I disagree with them on a number of things, but they're no Nazis. I looked around I didn't see anything particularly repugnant.
Honestly I'm pretty much in the same boat as you and I feel like the frenzy is overblown. Its especially right now with the huge influx of people from reddit, which by and large has users who are super lib/centrist. Some examples that people have given are their unwavering support of China, Russia, North Korea and denial about tianenman Square. I kinda side eye people who don't have nuanced takes about North Korea or any of those places for that matter. I am also hard pressed to think that people who specifically identify as ML's wouldnt do their research, but of course there are all kinds and dogma can happen anywhere. But yeah it's not like people are screaming "LETS GENOCIDE PEOPLE!!!". And they seem to have anti racist, anti transphobic stances, so Idk
Genuinely curious, what kind of nuanced take is there around North Korea to be had? My impression is it’s basically a slave state with a God King.
As a leftist the only positive take I have about most of these states is that A. The ideas were new and they didn’t know better, or B. The situation they came from was so bad they were justified to try something, but then they got power and grew authoritarian as people do. For instance I think Cuba had every reason to revolt. I also think Castro was a repressive dictator.
This is from an outsider (non US) perspective, so I am sorry in advance if this is offensive to ask but Google doesn't really help me here.
I looked up what a "tankie" is and that seems to be an insult to people who live in a communist state. Is communism considered a hate speech or otherwise hateful for people in the USA?
The common usage of tankie in left spaces is someone who parrots North Korean, Chinese, russian propaganda, someone who supports the use of violence and military action, and someone who will often downplay or deny the atrocities done by one side. For example denying the massacre at tienamen square or supporting Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. On lemmygrad there was actually a non ironic thread about celebrating Stalin's brithday.
A tankie is essentially the leftist counterpart to the right wing fascist. They just support a different flavor of centralized military dictatorship.
Tankie usually means someone who supports the authoritarianism of communist authoritarian nations. Occasionally it's also used to describe all communists
Communism is not considered hate speech, but it is commonly hated
Interestingly, I think this is similar to how "patriotism" is seen in Germany. Patriotism is commonly hated although probably not all patriots are die-hard Nazis. The dislike or even hate towards communism is very foreign to me but it is good to know, thanks for explaining.
Americans are highly propagadized to hate communism.
My wife is a political organizer, no matter what type of person she engages with people agree with Socialist/Communist policy. However if you start the conversation openly on what ideology that policy is based in people shut down or worse get angry/violent with you. It's absolutely wild.
I don't think anybody can say beehaw is in any way representative of lemmy.ml politics. As far as I can see, it's the farthest thing from lemmy.ml or any other politics on either spectrum. I actually think beehaw is a fine example of how independent different instances can be.
Absolutely - and I think there's huge benefit in beehaw being that example, especially as we see big migrations onto lemmy and the wider fediverse.
After finding out about these issues i considered leaving Lemmy. Then thought about how the Beehaw peeps handle things and honestly, i'd rather be on Beehaw than pretty much anywhere else on Lemmy, they're precisely the people you want moderating your new home.
Lemmy is an AGPL software. Forking would just put a ton more burden on yourself with no real benefit.
I'd only bother forking if the original devs stopped supporting it and/or there were features you wanted but they refused to implement. What those dev's political believes are matter very little at the end of the day and it's ok for people to have different opinions.
Yeah, I don't even understand what they strive to achieve with a fork.
Okay, it's forked now... do we add... features that the lemmy devs wouldn't... like...
...???
Tbh i do not know what argument OP is responding to exactly. Presumably someone wants to rename it Icepick and have a banner at the top of every page proclaiming "we remember our fallen comrades of the Kronstadt rebellion".
A lot of it has been over on the discord (and apparently the matrix server but I don't use matrix) and a few other places where lemmy is being discussed. Lots of well intentioned folks who really want to be part of the community or want an alternative to Reddit, but are uncomfortable with the software being associated with the people that it is associated with. I think people just want us to divest ourselves of that association but don't really understand that we're just a bunch of folks that wanted to start a cool, nice place to hang out (no shade at all to the ops folks who have been keeping things running through this wild ride the last few weeks, they're awesome) and we definitely don't have the expertise or desire to maintain the software it runs on.
I don’t think reddit had a particularly nice beginning either. Everyone was using reddit just the same. The sheer amount of users pushed a lot of the bad stuff into to corners of reddit. I don’t know the history of lemmy but i am sure the crush of new users will do the same here.
Lemmy grew tremendously within a few days so the tankies are drowned out or blocked, and Lemmygrad's share of pie has shrunk substantially.
That said initially the top two were lemmygrad and lemmy.ml and the creators do run both. On both instances you'd find pro russia and china imperialism and weird stuff like defending the invasion of ukrane and denying tienamen square incident as western propaganda. The other instances were boasting monthly numbers in the double and single digits.
Suffice to say when your biggest instances are coming off as weird mouth pieces for the Russian and Chinese government it can be a turn off. That said on lemmy.ml they seem to have been telling the truth about allowing free speech and with demographic shifts I think it's less of an issue than it was.
Liberalism in a nutshell
I think some people are uncomfortable with the donations links embedded in the Lemmy-ui code.
in the code... there's a link to donate
That you'd have to read the code to see..?
That's not worth a fork.
I'm going to take your response in good faith, but know that it appears from my end that it isn't.
The code has the UI include a link to donate to Lemmy that appears on literally every page of a Lemmy instance if the code isn't altered prior to installation.
I don't see that on my instance, so, I don't know.
I would also say that that isn't worthy of a fork, though.
Soft forks over branding aren't uncommon. Typically handled with automated tooling. But I understand not seeing that worth the effort.
It wouldn't surprise me if whoever is building Beehaw is actually using an automation to remove the donations link. There's typically a heart right near the create post link. It was there last week on Beehaw. It's not there now.
TL;DR:
Beehaw is a politically neutral community that does not tolerate hate speech. They defederate with instances that promote hate speech. Online political discussions are often toxic due to anonymity, while real-life discussions require more awareness. Beehaw advises being skeptical of individuals who focus on politics but lack understanding. They encourage considering incentives and disengaging from those who use anonymity to vent. Forking from the Lemmy platform is debated in a political context, but Beehaw does not see it as necessary at the moment. They prioritize server management and other tasks and haven't received a serious proposal for a fork.
It's so easy to spot AI generated text (unless it is made to obscure it).
(Not that I oppose its use here. I think tldrs are a suitable use for LLMs.)
Off topic but how can you easily spot AI generated text?
It has a particular style of writing that pops out after you read enough of them. The caveat is that it can be made to change it up enough that you can't tell. Just tends towards a certain style by default.
Thank goodness for that
As one of the many New Users/Lost Redditors: Thank you for working hard to "keep the lights" and in fostering such a welcoming community.
Is that why? I notice some people will make some wild political assertion, and when I offer a counterargument or ask for evidence, they just repeat themselves. Frustrating.
Or they repeat themselves because that's all they know what to say. Parroting because they read/heard something that, in their small world view, they agree with and don't take the time to research.
The other reply made an excellent point. But, I want to add, that sometimes the goal of a debate is just to frustrate you. That's it. What they're trying to say may be stupid, nonsensical, needlessly brash, or whatever. That's intentional. They do not want a sensible discussion, they simply want to piss you off. That's their win.
There's a great quote about this, that is (thankfully) often repeated. Let me find it...
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre
All I'll say is, this is one of the huge advantages of FOSS. If a website is run by bigots and people tolerant of abhorrent behavior, that's part of the website. But if FOSS was written by someone of that ilk, you can take the toys they made for you and play elsewhere -- they showed their hand as soon as they submitted their project under an open source license, and it's too late now.
What I do think is worth mentioning is that I wouldn't be averse to forking conceptually -- on a political basis, sure, but as lemmy grows rapidly I think it's tremendously worthwhile to pay attention to any forks that fix issues and growing pains with lemmy as a service. It seems particularly restrictive on the backend in some ways (could be wrong) and I think that using a more feature rich fork should such a thing appear would definitely be to beehaw's benefit. But that's a conversation for when that day comes, and not one that should be predicated on "lemmy=tankies=bad" but rather on "does this fork serve our userbase more", which is both a healthier question to ask and one more in line with the community being cultivated here. All this is hypothetical or course, but it's worth talking to these ends early on imo
If there was a more feature rich fork but the og is still really active, will you be able to communicate across forks?
As in could instances on different forks federate with each other? Sure. We already federate with mastodon instances and with kbin and other fediverse platforms. Having two versions of Lemmy is more an issue for maintenance, as well sharing new features and fixes between the forks.
As long as neither fork broke compatibility with the underlying protocol you'd still be able to communicate, for example we can Mastodon and that's a totally different platform other than the fact it also uses ActivityPub.
The platform is a tool, much as anything else is. The intent and message is what separate the use of tools. BeeHaw has an amazing intent and purpose. Creation or developer of the tools should not factor into using such.
I sincerely believe this but then again I would not want to use any tools developed by nazi freak at the same time. Huge difference, I know. Just saying that the CCP definitely has major human rights issues and lemmy dev seems to be in favor of them...
I don't think forking is the right option either. It's just that we should be aware of that. That's all..for now.
the whole point of this post though is that you almost certainly are, and you will continue to do so with no consistent objection because your outrage is informed as much by your own biases as by legitimate concern for the abuses you object to.
simply put: if you're looking for clean hands, i promise you will not find any in technology at any stage of the process. the devices we all use right now to write these comments are only made possible through a system of human rights abuses and callous disregard for human wellbeing--the conditions miners of rare earth minerals work in are appalling. the people who keep the websites you use from being a neverending torrent of horrifying gore, violence, rape, and abuse are exploited and underpaid by the social media corporations that hire them--they are frequently permanently scarred by that experience and left to rot. it is a well established fact that social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are breeding grounds for hate, terrorism, and even organization of genocide. critical infrastructure which underpins their function such as Cloudflare? they've gladly gone to the mat for preventing the removal of such "speech" from the internet until it was literally impossible to do so due to PR backlash. those are just four examples--i could spend literally hours railing them off with actual research.
but, do you protest any of that? do you object to it or organize against it with even the outrage you're mustering against the Lemmy developers right now? or us for using their software? and lest i be misinterpreted as running defense for their takes here: their opinions are bad. they suck. it'd be really cool if they stopped pretending all news about China is western Orientalism. but Lemmy generously has what, 200,000 accounts? Cloudflare is responsible for making like half of the current internet possible through their services. if you want to talk about tools which promote and allow for serious harm, their refusal to drop support for anything but the most vehemently and unambiguously terroristic websites online causes infinitely more harm than anything a Lemmy dev has ever said or ever will. and i promise you've interfaced with or make routine use of a service which does or has lobbied for the continuation truly heinous, unforgivable crimes every day--you just don't know about it, or you've already made peace with it. that is the issue here. if you want to die on this hill, be consistent or at least understand what a paltry hill this is in the grand scheme of worldwide injustices.
"you should protest everything or nothing, no middle ground allowed", this has a big "and yet you participate in society" vibe.
i mean, if you cherrypick a point in a long post then yes you can mischaracterize it easily. but also respectfully: if your interest is in preventing harm in any meaningful way, i would strongly recommend that you do something that actually matters and not limit your harm-prevention praxis to "complaining a niche site that you use is hosted on niche software developed by people who you have a political disagreement with, and furthermore disagree with in a way which has no bearing on how those people actually develop the software". this is unambiguously slacktivism and it's very evocative of a person who is just lashing out because they can't influence any other political situation they're in.
How is this cherry picking...? Literally every paragraph you wrote can be boiled down to that.
I am not finding a clean hand. I realize that there are truckload of messed up problems in this world to be addressed first. I am definitely not trying to die on this hill that honestly, I didn't even thought it was one in the first place. I was just saying that it's something we might want to know before we make a decision of using this.
And I don't have political disagreement. How is human rights concern in Xinjian concentration camp an informed-by-my-own-bias outrage?
I never, ever want to have a political discussion on the internet(especially US politics. I'm Asian myself). I'm just saying that I definitely have some concerns about dev. Remember when Vue.js developer Evan You posted a tweet that basically condemned HK protesters? I'm an avid advocate of free speech but people can express concerns. You saying that do something that actually matters is just a classic case of whataboutism and your original comment is a longer version of it.
Just so you know, I sincerely appreciate for your contribution to this amazing community. I only have some concerns about quite the serious problem that Lemmy dev explicitly supported.
This thread might be going slightly off the rails. The point of this post is not to tell you that you can't discuss your concerns or be upset at the political leanings of Lemmy devs. The point was to ask people to stop requesting we fork because of their political ideology. It's simply not feasible at this point in time with no plan and very limited resources.
just to be clear: the decision has been made here. we've been here for a year and a half and have weighed this information in being here. there is neither a compelling argument for moving nor a realistic plan to do so even if there was a compelling argument, and that is the specific point of the post. if you disagree with that, then this is simply a "put up with it or leave" thing.
I meant that as a user(in hindsight, join would be far more appropriate), not as the whole beehaw itself.
The battles are so feirce because the stakes are so low.
Criticism is always warranted for things. But let's be real - having devs that stan the ccp for software that is, keep in mind, highly decentralized is low risk for the overall development of the platform for anyone worried. If we're talking ethics of it, I'd say buying chocolate bars from nestle is probably a greater evil in the scheme of things than developing software with tankies.
Personally, I always feel when people freak out over ccp aligned people, it's quite a bit of a double standard, and a lot of the time, it's clear there's some other equally nationalistic sympathies at play. Half of social media in general is used for propagandizing, and I don't think any country has its hands anywhere near clean. Hell, half of American media would blacklist people for talking out against the Iraq war not that long ago. Every place has its bias. Purity testing over something like that for a whole framework just doesn't make sense.
Authoritarians and authoritarian sympathizers should be called out at every opportunity, but the actions have to make sense
The issue with China is that it's powerful enough to be a serious threat to those living outside its borders. Few deny that the Khmer Rouge are horrible, but people not near Cambodia aren't afraid of them like they are of the CCP.
Thank you for differentiating why china is such a big problem and US, UK etc are not. This is unique to china.
Oh wait....
Its like babys first time on wikipedia dive in this thread.
Never said anything of the sort. Plenty of innocent people have plenty of reason to fear the US, much to my shame as an American.
You probably already are. The Nazis did a lot of extremely unethical medical experiments on human subjects, the results of which have been kept and used in medical research and development ever since. They also did a lot of atomic energy research, and the US wasted no time in recruiting those researchers.
Although it is certainly tempting to throw out the data from Nazi human experiments in particular, I can think of a pretty compelling reason not to: if we do, then those people will have died for nothing.
Not only that, but tons of advancements in female healthcare in the US was made because doctors often experimented on black female slaves with the permission of their owners. Obviously, these women did not consent, and you can surmise how horrifying this is.
You can enjoy the benefits of more advanced healthcare for women in many areas now because of the results of these without being complicit in these histories or endorsing the way they came about.
The knowledge and tools we now have can be used to make things better and use them to further good causes, despite their orgins. That does not put blood on your hands.
I'm fully aware of that. I think my country wouldn't even exist if it weren't for, for example, the fertilizer made by notorious Nazi scientist whose name I cannot remember. I'm just saying that we should be aware of it.
I feel that is different because that has the hate injected into the product itself. As far as I am aware, the Lemmy codebase has no mention of China or communism anywhere, it's just code.
I think the point is better made wrt operation paperclip than the human "experimentation". I do not think the latter turned out to be very useful. Their "experiments" were often along the lines of, "if we inject poinson into the eyeball of one twin, what happens to the other twin?" And other questions no one was asking. Afaik the most prominent "contribution" of nazi medical science post ww2 was the drug thalydimide.
Aside from the ethics i think it is really too generous to attribute to these particular methods of "research" much benefit. It gives the impression that if science wasnt so bogged down with IRB paperwork, theyd really be able to get stuff done... when in fact the opposite is true. People who are given a free pass to do whatever without accountability to humanity generally produce trash even from a very utilitarian pov.
I would not use such a tool if it brings them and their ideology funding or other benefits, but if I can use it for my purposes(which are likely not evil or harmful) without contributing to their cause, then I would.
If the tool can be used for good, then should it be ignored just because of the political inclinations of the creator?
You're using it right now without contributing to their cause.
Indeed.
Well, I haven't seen the comments(or screenshots. Doesn't seem to be shared) of the creator of lemmy, so I'm sort-of neutral on the matter.
Is it really that huge of a difference? He's practically more fascist than communist, and it's been know for at least 4 years, when he got banned from /r/socialism
https://raddle.me/f/lobby/96713/heads-up-the-tankie-behind-lemmy-ml-got-banned-from-r
The platform is a tool, a tool that we can use for free and for good.
And it's open source as well so we can make sure that biases that the person may have programmed into it (intentionally or not*) can be found and removed.
The more I've learned about FOSS over the years the more I love it. And learning about the new stuff behind federated sites is pretty cool.
There are links to donate to the developer right at the bottom of every page on beehaw. If that doesn't show explicit support, I don't know what does.
Modlog Instances Docs Code Join Lemmy
Where's the donate?
There's also a heart at the top of every page that links directly to a donation page, but I suppose that also doesn't count.
Thanks for bringing that to my attention. If we wished to change this without forking the software that we use, can you help explain to me how we might accomplish removing this link in a sustainable way?
It might be easiest to just hide it in the css.
I don't really get the rules about code sharing with agpl. To me it would be public simply by existing on your site. Everyone can right click and view source. I would ask a lawyer or at least a dev with experience with agpl license.
Oh wow this person literally has not even taken the time to find out the licensing logistics required to enact their plan. Quel surprise.
Docs Code And Join all have donate links
Okay so two links deep, on websites we don't control and connected to useful docs. I don't really think that justifies support but you're welcome to your own opinion. 💜
The donate link has now been removed.
I like this post! I follow some people elsewhere who are mostly hyping up kbin because the main developer of Lemmy is a tankie and the main developer of kbin maybe isn't - but it's such a weird thing to apply a purity test to. Other comments mentioned it but Lemmy is FOSS, so even if you disagree with the political leanings of the developers, you are totally free to do what you want with it. Barring the presence of any backdoors (which would likely/hopefully be caught because, again, FOSS) the main developers don't have access to any instances created with the software. I don't really understand the concern.
Now, if there's a functional concern with the Lemmy platform and how it's being developed, then yeah, that's when a fork should be looked at. It shouldn't be looked at by an individual community (with a lack of people who can help), but a more widespread effort. But forking because the "lead" developer doesn't match your purity test? Nah.
Personally I have a very poor opinion of tankies, but that doesn't really affect how I use Lemmy...unless all the good instances are taken over by them. I find the obsession with effectively random people who don't actually have that much influence over individual instance moderation a purity obsession.
I didn't even know what a tankie was before today.
Actually Kbin is FLOSS too: https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin
I never said it wasn’t, but I probably could have - my main point with mentioning that Lemmy is FOSS was that the developer’s politics doesn’t (necessarily) mean that the platform is bad.
After a buzz over to Hexbear, I find the strain of far-left over there that is more concerned with backbiting and defending former-communist and current parody-communist regimes because blind 'if west bad, not west good' thinking, than any of the useful zones of leftist activity.
I didn't observe anything that was explicitly hate-speech in my 15 minutes buzzin' around, but it didn't really feel 'kind', if you know what I mean. I get why Beehaw isn't federated with them. For the record, I am a deeply left-person. I do think that stating "Beehaw has no specific political affiliation" to be somewhat naive. Midnight fueled thoughts incoming.
If Beehaw is "explicitly a safe space for minorities", then we must ask "Why do we need a safe space for minorities?", "Where does this need come from?" all of which begs questions about power, hierarchy, control, the sources and motive of hate and oppression, and a dozen other related questions that will each need some meaningful response. This leaves you with a couple of choices.
Bullet 1 is (in my opinion) unsustainable; it will present a nice facade for a time, but eventually people and events will make people dig, and dig, and dig. Some of these incidents will put people in a place where they won't have clarity and purity that comes from deliberate soul-searching, but will be wrapped up in moments of fear, panic, hate, outrage, and other emotions that will bias the rudder towards things the admin may find unpleasant. People come to strange and often harmful choices and beliefs when they don't have a wellspring of strength to draw from, and instead have to find it in the moment, or as is often the case, give in to the storm (excuse the purple here. It's late as hell for me). I think this is evident in just about every major online community of the past.
So as I run out of energy: I think you start thinking about some broad stances, or people here will start thinking of them for you. That "we do not know what the political leanings of most of our users are" may be a dangerous sign that there isn't really a pulse on the kind of community you're building, and are accidentally just throwing together a place where people gather.
well, the we don't know here should mostly be understood as a very literal and very to the point statement of facts. we have 10,000 users when two weeks ago we had 700. we haven't run a survey and most of the people here are new. we're working on a survey to kind of get an idea of basic demographics; as far as what kind of community we want from a moderator side of this we already have a bunch of mods on the same page about what we want and how we want to do it. we are very aware of all the headaches that community building involves. this is stuff we've spent a year thinking about on here (and probably at least another year before the community was created) and now we get to put what we thought into practice and see how it goes.
Just took a stroll over by hexbear to see what you're talking about. To be honest, I really don't see those folks being pro-state communism. They are pretty clearly just anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and very much see them as being much more anarcho communism aligned than anything.
Is there widespread claims of them talking hate speech other than bitching about liberals? Hexbear seems annoying in the sense that they are extremely sarcastic and bitter. Then again, I'm a syndicalist myself, so I do agree with a lot of their points, but just hate that kind of /r/completanarchy style of board where it's clear everyone has a mix of major depression, anger, and trust issues, and everyone goes around enabling eachother.
As for the rest of your post, I don't think a message board needs to have a set political ideology per se - in fact, I think it's better to not have one. The admin team itself should disagree with one another to an extent imo. Specific communities might work with one cohesive set of ideology, but the instance itself should just have general rules imo, especially since a lot of instances seem to focus mainly on general topics. Anti-hatespeech rules in general cover a lot of ground in keeping conversation genuine.
The pulse of communities is not agreement, it's discussion. It's not kindness that's needed, it's good faith. Telling a TERF or a Nazi to fuck off isn't kind, but oh well it's warranted as they don't post in good faith. I don't think the admins need to do anything more than that.
And if people start to assume mass political bias, oh well, they can start their own instance
Just took a stroll over by hexbear to see what you're talking about. To be honest, I really don't see those folks being pro-state communism. They are pretty clearly just anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, and very much see them as being much more anarcho communism aligned than anything.
Is there widespread claims of them talking hate speech other than bitching about liberals? Hexbear seems annoying in the sense that they are extremely sarcastic and bitter. Then again, I'm a syndicalist myself, so I do agree with a lot of their points, but just hate that kind of /r/completanarchy style of board where it's clear everyone has a mix of major depression, anger, and trust issues, and everyone goes around enabling eachother.
As for the rest of your post, I don't think a message board needs to have a political ideology per se - in fact, I think it's better to not have one. The admin team itself should disagree with one another to an extent imo. Specific communities might work with one cohesive set of ideology, but the instance itself should just have general rules imo, especially since a lot of instances seem to focus mainly on general topics. Anti-hatespeech rules in general cover a lot of ground in keeping conversation genuine.
The pulse of communities is not agreement, it's discussion. It's not kindness that's needed, it's good faith. Telling a TERF or a Nazi to fuck off isn't kind, but oh well it's warranted as they don't post in good faith. I don't think the admins need to do anything more than that.
And if people start to assume mass political bias, oh well, they can start their own instance
Hot (maybe not?) take that I suspect may be in line with your thinking here: Acknowledging a community's political trends and Striving to build a community that includes people that may not align with the majority trends do not have to be mutually exclusive.
"Beehaw" as in the institution that maintains the community may not necessarily seek to brand itself as politically affiliated, but "Beehaw" as in the word and spirit of the law of the land will inevitably appeal to a particular audience, just as any community's policies would whether intentionally or not, and "Beehaw" as in the people that make up the community are going to have political leanings within it—that's just the plain and simple nature of people having opinions they bring along with them.
I can't speak for @Gaywallet nor Beehaw leadership at large, but @alyaza slipped right in as I was about to say: it wouldn't surprise me if "we do not know what the political leanings of most of our users are" is less speaking literally and more along the lines of "we'd rather allow the lay user describe their political leaning than we prescribe a political leaning on them." I suppose a census is in order when the dust settles a bit more 🤓.
--
Trends and Leanings aside, I think the most important role leadership can take here is to make sure this is a space that not only allows the lay user community to define itself, but allows users to also go against that grain. I suspect we're making progress toward Door #2 rather than #1. It's absolutely worth emphasizing that kind of conversation remains important, however. Not necessarily as something that's prescriptive like guidelines, but at minimum as a conversation the likes of "This is what the community typically seems to value, this is what it typically seems to protest. This is what seems to average out as its strengths, and these are its blindspots. What are we doing right, and how might we better ourselves to help make A More Perfect Community?"
I think you're right to point out that a community is always the sum of its parts. Voices will surface within the community and voice themselves. Part of managing a community is making sure that none of these voices end up drowning out or censoring the voices of others. We have a very different style of moderating here, and we encourage the community to have lots of discussions with itself as a means of moderation.
The main point of your post seems to be that you're arguing that we must tackle certain issues because they are so pervasive in our society. I would ask you this... why? There are spaces on the internet which cater to hyperspecific niches. For example, I might create a space where I only allow people to post pictures of their cats. The cat pictures can't have any edited text on top of them and it's impossible to leave comments. Is this a political stance? Must this place somehow still become a space to debate politics? I think it's fairly easy to recognize that no, this is simply just a space for people to share pictures of their cats.
The scope of this website and community is admittedly much larger than this hypothetical cat picture spot, but it doesn't matter how big the scope is. We can choose what we focus on and what we allow. We could ban all politics, but we didn't feel that was necessary. Will the sum of all voices in our political spaces be representative of our community? On some level, yes, but if on average orange cats are most posted in the hypothetical cat community does that signal a superiority for orange cats or a leaning towards orange cats? No, some people post black cats too, and that's representative of the space we're looking to have here. Yes, you're right to point out that human speech is more complex than pictures absent text and we need to be wary of political leanings creating an echo chamber or explicitly discouraging other voices but I've already addressed this and similar issues a few times in my other philosophy posts (this is a long discussion to have and a worthy one, but this is not the space for that right now).
We aren't taking a stance on which cat is superior because we are wholly uninterested in doing so. We are interested in having a space absent on hate speech, so that's what we don't allow. It just so happens that hate speech overlaps to some degree with nearly all political ideologies and this post was about clarifying that point.
Is it possible to have a list of de-federated instances from Beehive? I think it may be good for transparency, even if I am pretty satisfied about how things are being done here!
Go to the bottom of the page, click on the Instances link and you'll se 2 lists, all federated instances and all defederated instances.
Ah great! Thanks for pointing it out!
What's the difference between them defedersting an instance and just not federating with an instance in the first place?
Sounds very reasonable to me.
On mostly subbed to Bewhaw communities with some Lemmy.world and one or two lemmy.ml so far and I haven't noticed ant nastiness anywhere else so far. If it would start becoming common I'd just cut ties with those communities or maybe even all communities from a specific instance if it's gone that far.
I'm hopeful that Beehaw will stay wholesome and probably most other instances as well.
It would be kind if neatto have the ability to personally block instances as well as communities in the future but so far it's not needed. Plus I'm sure our administration would cut ties with instances that manage to actually turn bad.
If anyone is really bothered by the creators of Lemmy and don't want to use their product there are always kbib I suppose? When their federation is working again you should be able to sub to all your favorite lemmy communities there too right?
So.. not sure what my point with this post is except that I'm happy with the current situation.
Here's to bees! 🍻
Hopefully not repeating things others have said...
This is what I have failed to understand about people seemingly worried about this instance wanting to be a safe space. If they do not like it, they can just jump to another instance.
"Safe space" also doesn't have to mean milquetoast or self-censoring. I'm new to this particular community, but I expect there are all manner of topics that any of us could discuss passionately without being jerks. Reading the description of the founding ethos of this community suggested only that I make a commitment to being decent and that I respect the dignity and celebrate the validity of others who aren't like me. I don't see anything in there about restricting vigorous discussions about tax policy or guns or whatever the day's hot topic is as long as you're decent about it and start from the assumption that people can disagree in good faith.
I think it's the right decision.
We are not supporting fascism by using a software used by fascists. It's a tool, and it can be used to create something stunning and beautiful instead.
Lets do that.
Bravo, I couldn't care less about the historical context of the tool. I do care deeply that we have no hate.
Very well said. I can understand the idea and motivation, but forking would kill the community.
But if it’s still a fediverse site, would it? It would still play with Lemmy.
That said, I agree, forking isn’t a great idea. But I’m looking more at the lift required to organize people to contribute and maintain the code.
Wow thanks so much for putting these thoughts out there with all the complexity and in open language. I also (yes progressive left here) thought about the other sites and tools I use and made the decision to go with beehaw because of the community. As you say it's a messy colonialism-coloured world in many ways so the best place to start is with community values.
Thanks for your work
My thoughts entirely, and I've only been here for a few days.
I'd just like to commend you on your choice of language here. You're more diplomatic than most politicians! Well expressed and I support the principals you put forward.
Echoing the thank you for taking the time to explain and elaborate on yalls stance. I wasn't even aware of lemmy's roots - but I see beehaw's roots and that's all I care about. Looking forward to spending time and energy on kindness and love in this little space.
Excellent response. I joined Beehaw because I liked Beehaw's rules and philosophy. Kinda reminds me of Mozilla's in beta Mastodon instance. It stands complete separate from its technological roots and this post eloquently shows that.
I hope this eases any political harassment along those lines.
Any advice on how I can remove beehaw from my all feed in Jabora?
I find these types of environments produce echo chambers where suddenly I'm not even able to give my perspective on gender as a nonbinary person because it goes against some mainstream perspective.
I have other reasons, but yeah 😝 Fuck mods trying to control politics, I want free discussions, otherwise I'd just stay on Reddit lmao!
If anyone can give me instructions on how to remove beehaw that'd be greatly appreciated.
--edit--
Also if anyone can recommend any instances for open discussion!!
We're explicitly a safe space for minorities. I'm non-binary myself. But you don't have to participate here if you don't want to.
Same, I chose Beehaw in particular because of its stance on providing a bigotry free platform... that being said as a federated service you have many options for a "home instance" but if you still want to interact with a community on another instance you will still be subject to that communities and instances policies. As a lot of people like yourself have chosen Beehaw for its safe space nature, you may miss out on communities you would feel welcomed in if you were to completely swear off Beehaw, although you do have the freedom to choose that.
Its a tiny bit ironic that they want to be a "bigotry free" platform but then turn around and immediately shadowban every single user that's from the wrong neighborhood 😂😂😂
Regardless of the current situation, I think the option in general to "unsubscribe" from an entire instance could be useful. I know we can create our own instances and defederate, but not everyone has the skills, money, etc. to be able to do that.
If you want to do that specifically. You could start your own instance and defederate beehaw and you would see any content from it. That's kind of the point. Alternatively, don't subscribe to any beehaw community and click on "subscribed" and you won't see beehaw content. Or find an instance of your liking and then browse "local" and you won't see beehaw content.
That’s a very sensible approach IMHO and resonates in unison with my own opinions on the matter, so I couldn’t be happier about this post!
I have to say that I was a bit worried after the creation of /c/socialism, not because of the ideology itself (which, to be fair, is probably one of the political groups I feel the closest to, but that’s not the issue), but because I was worried that it was an “official endorsement” and political affiliation of Beehaw, and would create drama, discourse or echo chambers.
This post proves that it was not the case or even the intention, and that’s really reassuring. It might still cause issues as people from other political sides (rightly) ask for other communities to be created, which is not a problem in itself, but might still create conflict and discontent in either side.
The explanation in this post makes me quite confident that you’ll be able to handle these challenges in a smart and sensible way, though. Thank you for that, admins! I’m glad that I picked the instance I did.
From my perspective, I would say that Beehaw has somewhat of a leftward inclination, but overall, the only real official stance Beehaw has is to focus on being nice and cultivating a welcoming community that is also safe for minorities, which is really the moderation standard applied to everyone regardless of affiliation.
For me, it's fair enough if people have conflicting views and/or express their views in ways one might consider abrasive. I have no interest in policing people's tone. When they violate the main intention of this community and harm others, on the other hand, then it becomes important to do something about it, and I think Beehaw does a good job of applying that standard.
The biggest thing though is that the users play a pivotal role in how this culture and community manifest, and it's really to their credit if others find this place a welcoming place to be(e). It's just made better if admins are people we can trust to support that.
In any case, I hope you enjoy your time here. 🐝
I think socialism is a very broad subject and most people agree that some sort of group care is important in both politics and personal community life. Though, I agree with you that this subject, like many other political labels, often gets overrun by extremists. Maybe we just need a bigger dictionary to prevent inherit bias or enforce a more apolitical and centrist point of view for online discussions.
I think its interesting that most regular people even who describe themselves as socially or fiscally conservative, when it comes to very specific situations/policies, favour more "progressive" actions and outcomes.
apoliticalism and centrism inherently supports and reinforces the status quo. There is no thing as such, which is why I am a bit worried when it comes to this community and the stance of beehaw, as a new person. I as a queer person am sorta kinda allowed to be protected of hate-speech here but at the same time people are allowed to promote capitalism/liberalism/conervatism etc which directly impacts my human rights, health and safety in real-life?
If someone is advocating for anything which directly impacts your human rights, health, or safety in real-life they are by definition speaking hate. However, there are levels of hate speech and there's a lot to be said about the intent of the person speaking it. Someone may have internalized a deeply problematic viewpoint but not understand why it is problematic. If they go onto this website and try to proselytize it and refuse to listen to people from the affected community who raise concerns and help to explain why it is problematic policy, they are simply not welcome here. We also aren't going to punish people for being intolerant of people entering and proselytizing their uninformed viewpoints nor are we going to saddle any of you with the educational burden to do so.
but these human rights aren't something dictated by the universe like physics, but concepts created by humans and its these that are constantly getting challenged for better or worse depending on your political stance. And by saying you are apolitical or centrist means that there should be no change. Which directly contradicts your decision to protect minorities from hate-speech which would not be needed if the status-quo already includes this in the way you as admins or members of the community understand and define these concepts. So you are already taking a side
I want to point out that apolitical and centrist are different concepts, but I don't want to get caught up in specific nomenclature. I tried to do my best to outline what nice behavior is, how we're an explicitly safe space, and what criteria we're looking for when we talk about hate speech in the posts linked in the sidebar. If what's outlined isn't good enough for you to understand our goals, I'd suggest sitting back and observing our culture before deciding if its the right space for you.
I think i'll follow your suggestion and I appreciate the replies! I can only imagine how busy you all must be these days
And yet extremism just divides people and distracts them from real problems pitting all of the peasants about non issues.
Is that so? To me it seems quite the contrary, advocating for incremental change of superficial problems without tackling the root all inside the boundaries of the status-quo system all the while the 0,1% are profiting off of the whole process. And in the worst case the change comes too late(climate change) or just resurfaces in another form later on(homophobia->transphobia). Not to mention the damage/suffering that constantly occurs in the meantime. Labeling a certain ideology or system of values as extreme as a means to disregard or devalue it is frankly textbook reactonary, meant to scare people into reinforcing the status-quo. As an example, abolitionists were considered extremists back then. At some point the same could be said about feminists fighting for equal rights. In both of these examples it wasn't incremential change(treat your slaves better) or peaceful demonstration that led to the abolition or gave women the rights to vote. It was done by contemporary "extremists" having to literally fight for it
A few years ago it turned out a very promising python documentation library was using another library for a core aspect of the docstring comment parsing subsystem. I don't remember the names of either of these two, but as it turns out, the person who wrote the docstring comment parsing subsystem was someone who liked using the Nazi-Facing-Swastika as his repeating background image on his site and as textual glyphs to denote things like list items. He claimed it was everyone being too stupid to know he was using it in an eastern context, but he had an email like firstname_lastname88@gmail or whatever.
The point I made then is that even if FirstName LastName was running into a culture-shock situation, and even if they just happened to like the number 88 - or maybe they were born in 88 - there was simply no way I wanted to tie myself or my employer to that person. Nobody is going to extend any grace.
I guess I don't even think that is necessarily a bad thing. Why should people stanning genocidal authoritarian regimes be extended grace? Is it only okay if they can give us something, like a nazi scientist building space rockets? Is it simply because they gave you something you can't get anywhere else without paying more than you'd want to? I actually don't have an answer for this. I felt fine telling PossibleNazi88
No, and AccidentallyLinkedCompositionalLibraryAuthorSorry, I'll pass, and in large part that is because Sphinx does exist and I can use it, even if I'd prefer not to. But what if this library were the only one? Would I just hold my nose and use it anyway?Same with Lemmy - can I get it in a different package? A similar fediverse community package, without the gross genocide cooties all over it? This is a practical question; maybe this is reason enough to want to host a kbin instance over lemmy, eventually.
But philosophically: What if the next fediverse community package is from a Patriotic American, who has no problem with all the first peoples genocides and chattel slavery history because they believe in America so much that it's an intrinsic part of their identity?
It sucks because I want to make everything better, and I believe that to be true of Beehaw administration for sure as well, but navigating this shit is hard and even if you're principled you're probably only principled insofar as you're aware.
Conversely, doing the thing you know to be wrong just because the alternative is hard and maybe impossible isn't good either. But maybe you can use the genocide-fan's product to do more good than harm? But now you're back to nazi scientists making moon rockets, and nobody is happy.
I guess I'm just rambling while I admire the problem.
You’ve captured my own confusing and conflicting thoughts as well.
I have so far loved my experience here (just been a few days) beehaw is exactly what is what to see in an online community
But despite the federated nature of lemmy the code ultimately is (so I’m learning in this thread!) currently in the hands of people who are the opposite of beehaw. That’s a difficult pill to swallow.
If there were ever a row between the devs of Lemmy and Beehaw, could they retaliate against us in some manner using the code?
I'm struggling to think of an example of this, but maybe something like forcing a "captcha" before every comment submission that requires you to type in something like "Long Lives Chairman Mao" or something like that. It is clearly antithetical to what Beehaw ascribes, but would be ultimately powerless to stop.
I definitely agree and feel with the arguments you have here. It’s a challenging issue to resolve. On one hand there’s the practical Rock of “transitioning to another asset and engaging in the practical burden that shifting gears brings,” and in this circumstance, that would come with the extra caveat of trying to commit to that transition during a busy period as is. On the other hand is the moral Hard Place of “you’re working with an asset actively developed by someone or something with known issues—are you willing to accept, and to some degree associate, with that?” I don’t feel like there’s a clear-cut path that’s both morally bright and practically realistic, and it’s not the kind of thing that makes me dance with joy.
If nothing else, it’s good to respect that we have a dilemma in our hands. Whichever way the community decides to collectively stand, both in the short and long term, I’m happy that we’re having this conversation at all. I think it’s important to acknowledge what we have and have a meaningful discussion around it. Putting our heads in the sand and pretending it’s a non-issue at best delays the issue and allows it to fester.
I don't really get why the authors ideals and beliefs matter. For for-profit stuff, it does matter because I don't want to be supporting someone with that lifestyle or someone who actively wants me dead.
But for the open source stuff, he's not making any money off of me. And it's pretty safe since other people are vetting the code and they'll complain if something malicious is happening. In other words, since I am not contributing to the developer, his ideals don't really matter to me
I agree. The other consideration I would add is the possible association being an issue in some cases. While I believe there should be a dissociation between developer and software, on a practical level, it might be unavoidable in some cases. But this is not a moral or ethical issue, it's a practical one--the benefit of using the software versus dealing with the association (OP's post being a prime example of the work involved).
Something else to throw in to the mix: a lot of similar questions have likely been faced by developers to the FOSS community: "What if my library is used in abhorrent ways?" "Should I restrict usage of my software to ensure it's used in morally good ways?" etc.
In my experience, not too many people seem to take issue with FOSS in these ways--any usage of the software is entirely put on the person using it, and the FOSS developer is not held accountable for it. If we apply the same logic here, I would posit that the usage of FOSS developed by a morally questionable developer should have a similar dissociation applied.
I'll also challenge your analogy of nazi scientists. Hiring someone who has committed humanitarian atrocities is quite different from using FOSS produced by morally questionable developers. In the latter case, this person is not receiving any significant benefit (one could argue publicity, but the value of that seems debatable and minimal compared to a salary). A closer analogy would be something like: is it morally acceptable to make use of the code that those nazi scientists produced for an authoritarian regime? Still a complicated question, but more related to the issue at hand, I think.
This makes complete sense, I also think open source and federated platforms like this give users the most autonomy from the creators of the software when compared to other platforms. I do wish there was the ability to port users and communities across instances, though, kinda like you can do with mastodon. I understand that would be hard for the developers to create, but I think it would help with the creation of a truly free platform.
Furthermore, I think some of the concern around some primary instances is a little overblown, as most of the larger ones have their own policies against bigotry and fascism. However, I understand that the type moderation between instances differs, and that is the best part about federated services.
I don't pretend to change anything of how this place works, specially considering it's federated and, as you say, presumably different spaces can be forked and "set up their own rules".
I remain, however quite keen to see if the "no hate speech" is a consistent thing or simply a "hate is ok against the right targets" and "being on the other side of X issue is hate speech" (e.g.: any controversial topic such as being against a particular war, being in favor of/against political party X, expressing views opposed to government policies, not sharing a specific view by the demographic majority of the site (Usually US/UK/AUS)).
Ideally, I can set up something where I can get exposure to many views and go here and there without having to feel I'm in X circlejerk and the narrative is packet Y, that comes with all these predetermined views in this overton window.
In a way, the more I have access to, the better. Because I can move from side to side learning about the others. Obviously, this view is not shared by many and thet would gladly censor 75% of the space to preserve the right way, claiming it's "moderation". I don't disagree on moderation but I think that we're too interfered at this point that we don't even see how little room we have for discussion (which then creates very narrow discussions in different niches).
In any case, sorry for the stream of consciousness. Excited to see how all this works and hopefully I'm able to participate and gain insights from a wide array of perspectives in a wide descentralized network.
As is stated elsewhere, we are explicitly intolerant of the intolerant. Hate speech in response to hate speech is perfectly acceptable and encouraged - calling Nazis out is cool and correct.
Absolutely love this philosophy! Keep up the fantastic work.
I'm very glad to have you running a space like this. It is spectacular.
At the same time I can sympathize with what he said to a point. I don't want to see hate speech just casually existing in public forums, but I also sometimes look at the spaces they use, out of a sort of morbid curiosity of what they are up to. It is often depressing and I consider it a bad habit, but knowledge is also power, and knowing what they are thinking can help a person avoid it.
With the nature of the fediverse and how accounts can be made on multiple instances no issue, I don't think it is by any means your job to facilitate that sort of thing.
Yeah. Don't want you to feel the need to justify yourself. I appreciate the efforts regardless of whether we end up agreeing on moderation policies (and I think not agreeing on everything and coexisting is awesome). Was just adding my 2 cents, which I feel will be different from many.
I obviously have my concerns on the "call out a nazi" because holding the wrong (TM) opinion will get you called a nazi but that's just par for the course. I don't particularly need a safe space and it would be bad (imho) if ALL spaces were so but, again, presumably the ability of a descentralized network is that, that everyone will always be able to launch their instance with their rules to mitigate that concern.
I'm perfectly ok to play by the rules here and see how it goes.
But you have not addressed my main concern regarding the definition of words. Here’s a perfect example from your comment:
I already see based on the comments here that anyone who votes for a Republican is going to being considered a Nazi and therefore used as justification for the rules to be applied unevenly against certain political affiliations.
Do you at least see and acknowledge my concern? Because this is going to turn into another dead and boring echochamber extremely quickly if these questions are not addressed head-on upfront.
You claim that this is a non-partisan space. Is it or is it not? Be upfront about what the rules are if you want real honest and well-intentioned engagement from a diverse group of opinions.
Nazism is not Republican
I have been explicitly upfront about what the rules are. Please review these two posts for more information.
You haven’t defined the rules until you define ‘hate speech’ which is a core part of the so-called rules.
They have defined the rules - multiple times and at length. If you're dissatisfied with the lack of formal definition of 'hate speech' then that's fine, but even vaguely defined rules are still defined rules.
This concern is explicitly addressed in the links I have provided you.
other people have covered the rest here, so i'll just point out that if you're interested in soapboxing about "well-intentioned engagement from a diverse group of opinions", you should probably take a second to consider why you're seemingly unwilling to take such engagement from the other direction--or to even engage with why people might believe what you're describing. i feel comfortable saying this because you were also unwilling to hear out the other side in a previous discussion on here, even when provided with evidence and points from multiple users that directly contradicted your assertions.
I’m in a forum where I am dominated by opposing viewpoints. To say that I’m unwilling to engage is laughable.
And the linked example is a back-and-forth with disagreement. Everything was completely civil. Are you saying that disagreeing with the established hivemind-narrative is “refusing to engage”? Disagreement and debate should be encouraged as long as it’s civil. I really don’t understand the point that you’re trying to make here. And I absolutely loathe the Reddit-like behavior of digging through someone’s post history with the ill-intent to smear them.
Later in that thread you say
Which doesn't really read as "completely civil".
The discussion that was linked quite literally shows your unwillingness to engage. I don't get lying about something that everyone can check, I can only assume this is your genuine POV. That coupled with your comment earlier in this thread about how "here anyone who votes for a Republican is going to being considered a Nazi" gives the image of someone who does not actually care about "well-intentioned engagement from a diverse group of opinions". It just reads as a persecution complex. You can't even give well-intentioned engagement for your opinions!
It's a conversation you had with that person like 3 days ago that helps highlight the bad faith engagement here. It's not like they pulled out some unrelated tweet you made 8 years ago, lol.
He spit out a conspiracy theory and I called him out on it. Jesus Christ.
I would love to have this as a generalized text to be shared between instances. I'd use the general mood of this post as basis for the rules for all my instances. Maybe on GitHub, which then can be edited through pull requests and discussed.
I originally joined Beehaw, but decided to run my own instance because why not. I still prefer subscribing the communities in Beehaw just due to this way of thinking. I hope the moderation works for you and doesn't get too bad.
You're welcome to take my text and use it as a starting point for self-organizing around governance to fit your needs.
I am curious of this. Just trying to get some perspective. You say some political "parties" facilitate hate speech. I guess I am curious how tight that belt squeezes.
For context, I am pretty far to the left politically. Farther left than any of the parties in the US. But some would associate the entire Republican party to facilitate hate speech. While a large bunch, if not most of loud ones on the internet do right now, a lot of them that I know personally, hate Trump and agree with most liberal social issues but are just against tax dollars being used for certain things. "Fiscally conservative" as they say. Conversations are fine with these people, we just don't agree.
You are allowed to do whatever you want on your server and I can understand not wanting to pay to host something that disagrees with your values and beliefs. I am just trying to understand how this goes. If someone was having a peaceful discussion about a political non hateful subject without any hate in it, would they be removed purely because they revealed they are a Republican?
I understand the possibility of that hypothetical scenario gets lower every day unfortunately, especially on the internet.
I've explicitly stated that we are focused on the hate speech and only the hate speech. I don't care what political affiliation you have. I only care if you're spreading hate speech.
"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."
I guess this is where it got muddy for me. Thank you for the response.
Couldn't have said it better myself. I definitely appreciate this piece and the body of pieces around Beehaw's policies and philosophies. I can imagine it eats at time that's likely quite important to have in the current circumstances, but the writings are invaluable insights to consider and try to apply going forward.
The fact that we have Lemmy at all, let alone the growth of ActivityPub and federated platforms, feels like the kind of miracle that would stop Aaron Swartz from spinning in his grave. Tech often has a particularly wild way of making one face their values and pick their battles. I have issues with Amazon, for instance, but I can't stress enough how a massive chunk of the internet these days relies on Amazon Web Services to get online, and I could say likewise for Microsoft or Google. I'd swear off their services if I could and embrace a hardline FOSS stance, but if I went through with that, a lot of my employment opportunities wouldn't consider me. I could probably make it happen if push came to shove, but it would be a legitimate challenge that I'd feel a lot less secure in, and I don't exactly have the safety net to afford that.
I wouldn't consider it to be hypocritical or a bad thing to pick and choose your battles. On the contrary, I think it's a mature and necessary approach in a complicated and difficult world. I'm finding it hard to think of anything in my life that doesn't have controversy and tragedy at some point in its production or history. All of it warrants resistance and change, but if I were to give everything the drive it deserves, I think I'd turn to dust.
--
I agree that a fork isn't necessary right now. It certainly has no technical necessity—if anything, it would probably be technically worse to splinter the developer force. I can respect there's a moral argument to be made for it, and I wouldn't fault someone for preferring another platform over it. I think Beehaw has done a respectable job at philosophically separating itself from the controversy, however, and at this time, I'd say that's enough for me at least.
I assume you mean because you work in tech and these are the tools of the trade.. but who in the world doing anything can actually avoid these? Try setting up a firewall that fully blocks them and try to use the internet. Nobody can avoid the services run by people with the most reprehensible ideas who have the means to put the into action, and do.
Pretty much—I’m in education for the trade, at least. I definitely agree with your sentiments here.
The services that Amazon et al. provide are a backbone for much of the internet and is just one example I can give off the cuff. A similar idea comes to mind when I hear about people disabling JavaScript on their browsers: sure, doing that would likely do good for your privacy and security, but a lot of the internet just doesn’t work, full stop.
It’s technically possible, and I can see why it may be the best choice depending on the lens. I have mad respect for people that pull it off, but I see it as practically unrealistic.
Out of curiosity, how did you come up with the current list of defederated instances? Clicking on the first several links leads me to believe most are Mastodon servers and a good chunk of them don't even exist anymore. Is the list largely based on some pre-existing list maintained elsewhere in the Fediverse?
Some of these places used to exist and no longer do. We have also incorporated tier0 from this list. Otherwise it comes to us from other users or what we run across.
I just read your article and have to say your approach resonates with me and I appreciate your transparency. Do other instances use this too and is there may even a collaboration with other instances on this list? It's not going to become easier keeping this list up to date I guess
Would love to see groups self organize around this emerging need. I do not know who else uses this specific list, it's just something we stumbled upon
How can you view the list of defederated instances?
Edit: Nevermind found it, it's at the bottom of the page click Instances and then scroll to Blocked Instances.
I am new to Lemmy and also to Beehaw. Does defederation mean that we can't load comments/threads/communities from defederated servers via Beehaw (and vice versa for users of instances Beehaw has defederated from)?
If federation works the same on here as it does on Mastodon, then yes. When you defederate a server you can't see their users, communities, posts, comments, etc and they can't see yours 🙂
Honest question: can you define ‘hate speech’? Because in theory I agree it should not be allowed however in practice it generally means ‘political ideas that I disagree with’ are banned under the guise of hate speech rules. There needs to be specific standards clarifying what the rule actually is.
we're not going to suddenly deviate from doing our One Rule thing and break out a legal contract and definition for what hate speech is and isn't--and frankly, even asking this is already kind of a self-report.1 this reply also heavily implies you don't really get why we've structured things the way they are here. as for the other question: if you think that gender-affirming care is wrong or immoral or whatever or that trans people are freaks (because that is basically always the unstated implication of such a belief) then no, this really isn't the instance for you.
Footnotes
because let's be very clear: the vast majority of people do not have to ask this question. ↩
What about something like talking about LGBTQ grooming? Like I'm queer, I'm nonbinary, I date other queer nonbinaries, and some of these people have kids, and I've had a nonbinary parent tell me they want their kid to be queer, and I've seen them pressure, and push their kid into Pride events.
A lot of people would consider me expressing myself in the way I just did hate speech, and I've been banned from subreddits for expressing it, which I think is absurd. I should be able to talk about my experiences regardless of the political implications.
Like just typing this I have that anxiety I'm setting myself up for a ban, and I don't think I've don't anything wrong aside from expressing a contrary opinion. I feel a moral imperative to talk about this stuff, it doesn't come out of malice.
this is the most /r/thathappened story we've received so far and you explicitly said you don't want to be here in your first comment, so we'll send you on your way to respect your wishes and help you avoid the True Oppression of "mods trying to control politics" by doing moderation. i'm sure you'll find an instance more in-line with your values, especially since you're not even registered on our instance
Well this was certainly a way to handle it....You realise you just proved them right and confirmed a lot of the "fears" people have around these subjects?
I think the issue with that is that dog whistles from far right extremists is constantly changing. And to outline an exact rule of what defines hate speech invites people to find loop holes in the rule.
This is just something that you have to trust the community on. And I can understand that sounds way too risky and vague.
I think with things like this, err on the side of caution, be excellent to one another, and keep politics to what you can do rather than what you should do. In my time, the "should do" arguments is where I found most of the division in communities that aught to get along come from. Just my own thoughts though.
Still, if any mods could give their word on the matter, that'd be(e) fantastic.
Hard disagree. one of the most annoying things about some reddit moderation is that people would play the "hey technically there isnt a specific point by point rule for the thing so you cant ban me!" and reddit culture was such that the jackass could then start subreddit drama over the power hungry mod "that banned me from being a loud obnoxious jerk, but technically the rules specify loud jerk, but not loud AND obnoxious".
This isnt your living room and I think as long as the mods and admins have a good head on their shoulders they should allowed to have a set of rules along with discretion for when some users need a timeout.
yeah bluntly and to emphasize your point: if you don't like this standard, don't post here. this is an inflexible part of how we want to do things here, and it's specifically because we're uninterested in this kind of rules lawyering. the whole point of the Fediverse is there are countless other instances and communities being spun up with clearly enumerated rules you can go be on if you disagree with us.
Yeah Reddit has far too many wannabe Harvey Specters who think 'anything that's not prohibited is permitted' is a challenge rather than a principle. I think how people react to this stance is quite telling sometimes, 'Moderator discretion' means 'moderators can keep your rule-breaking post up if it's a genuinely good contribution' as much as it means 'moderators can remove your posts and ban you arbitrarily'; it'd be a poor start coming to this place not to assume good faith in the moderators especially as most of us are here in response to bad faith on Reddit's part.
I want to provide a bit more of a nuanced answer here, because I suspect there are users for which a wee bit more clarity would be helpful. A quick google on hate speech reveals that the UN has a pretty simple page and info-graphic capturing what hate speech entails. As alyaza mentioned, we're not interested in rules lawyering about this, if enough people are concerned about speech that's present, we encourage the entire community to step in - this means members can remind you keep it nice, moderators might, or admins. We aren't looking to ban people permanently over a single comment that isn't extremely obvious and explicit hate speech such as "we should kill all ". But we also aren't tolerant to implicit hate speech, and we will step in if you make an argument such as "we should use phrenology".
As a general rule (again, not interested in rules lawyering here), if you are trying to advocate for a stance and members of the affected community are pushing back strongly against that stance, it's probably not something we're going to let you say around here because we are explicitly a safe space. Your stance on gender-affirming healthcare, for example, could make people who pursue this healthcare who exist in our space very upset and is something that you shouldn't be attempting to proselytize here. We're asking you to be considerate of the thoughts and feelings and well-being of our members. There's a lot of other reasons why you should probably change your stance on this, including that even if you disagree this group of individuals has an extremely high suicide rate and thus preventing access to medical care is indirectly arguing for violence, but that's outside the scope of this comment and not an educational burden I'm particularly interested in giving to a stranger on the internet who's asking me questions which raise an eyebrow. I'm trying to treat you with good faith, but even I have limits.
One final note, we are explicitly intolerant of intolerance. Thus if someone using hate speech enters in here, we are not moderating people being hateful in response. They brought that on themselves by being hateful.
I love this comment - it makes me feel really good about my decision to make Beehaw my homebase. Your stance is refreshing and thoughtful. Thank you!
I'm gathering there is some sketchyness about lemmy.ml, but I don't know what I'm talking about just yet. I hope not, because they have some of the larger communities, it seems. They have the only vegan one, I think.
So like... Explicitly beehaw is conformist?
What about minorities that aren't represented by your userbase?
Thanks for your response, it’s very helpful. If a user asking a very legitimate question is “eyebrow raising” and at the limit of your ability to act in good faith then this community is probably not for me.
Peace out! I probably won’t be missed anyway. I just wish there was a single community online that was non-partisan and open to real debate and discussion.
I don't think it's fair to characterize "eyebrow raising" or my detailed response in which I spent mental time and energy to educate you as malicious, but I wish you luck on your journey. Everyone deserves a space in the world and I hope you find yours.
This person will be a victim no matter where they go. They are self filling prophecy
It's a stance that leads to trans people killing themselves.
i mean, you have just explained why we are extremely likely to not do that and huge drawbacks to doing so, so i think you've answered your own question here absent huge changes to the character of people interacting with us from lemmy.ml
Well that being said I think for many of us being connected to and associated with people that spread obvious lies does not feel great. Like genocide denial, and general tankie-isms, for me personally at least someone that denies that fascist governments like Russia and China is something that is bad for us all, and especially for the Russian and Chinese people feels awfully close to hate speech to me at least. And I'm someone pretty much on the left fringe, I have no problem with communists, the problems are when they tip over into supporting Authocratic or Fascistic governments. And we're already being connected to it by many people off site as long as we don't defederate.
Just figured out the developer behind the jerboa application also is a genocide denier, it feels kind of really bad, I don't know it makes me feel really conflicted.
it's 1:40am so i can't exactly get into nuances here, but please--for all people who have this worry--consider if you'd even given a second of thought to what you might be connected to and "supporting" by using Reddit, a website you were actually on and not just using the software of but otherwise doing your own largely unrelated thing somewhere else. this is a big part of what we're getting at here, and a big part of why we're not interested in forking.
it's pretty well established that many of the people running Reddit like u/spez (and previously Yishan Wong) are conspiratorial, nihilistic, and generally misanthropic libertarians who are prepping for the end-times. it's also pretty well established that Reddit's main motivator for dealing with its problems of hate speech, discriminatory content, etc. are that it looks bad to advertisers and not some principled objection to hosting that stuff. these are things that were and continue to be the case, and were and still are much worse on Reddit. if you did not think about the nebulous concept of what you're connected to or "supported" at all while on Reddit, but suddenly are now: it's probably worth analyzing why that asymmetry suddenly exists now that you're here (or why you didn't leave Reddit before now if this stuff is a dealbreaker).
I'd Iike to punctuate that in this case to ETC includes subreddits like /r/jailbait and a plethora of gray area underage content that was mostly made up of images stolen off facebook, myspace, photobucket, privately to their scumbag partner, and any other social media that was not meant to be distributed as porn online.
Everytime people talked about it there was a huge discourse where people would go "BUT MY FREE SPEECH!" and it wasnt until a news outlet wrote an article about reddit as it was on the rise highlighting the jailbait sub in particular. Coincidentally once they got mainstream attention the reddit admins suddenly found their morals and decided to clean house. Very specifically the parts of the house that were mentioned in this article.
Well, yeah, you're not wrong :) That's a perspective I didn't look at it from, yeah, the whole american corporation thing of reddit is also one that I don't like much either :)
Why do you continue to claim using reddit is the same as you soliciting donations for a genocide supporter?
...do you sincerely and earnestly think that your use of Reddit has not happily lined the pockets of some truly, deeply evil people on a level that is hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than anything you're freaking out about here--which, to be very clear, is a barely visible heart on every page that we don't even advertise as existing and have no control over the display of? and i would reiterate: if your concern is actually principled, i'm sorry to report that you're going to just need to go into the woods and live as a hermit. the things necessary in modern society to have your standard of living alone finance an astonishing amount of suffering. the distinction between what you're calling "soliciting donations for a genocide supporter" and the outcomes of buying a shirt at Walmart are basically nonexistent by your standard.
By the way, this was reported at least once 9 days ago by your users. I don't care to go digging to see if anyone brought it up before that.
https://beehaw.org/comment/76193
we're not omnipresent and i have no idea what this proves besides "someone commented on it somewhere". to be very clear: we're constantly busy keeping the site from completely keeling over and moderating literally thousands of comments a day, so things like this routinely slip through the cracks. there are dozens of people i have likely not gotten back to who asked questions days ago. i, for one, didn't even notice the heart or its function until you pointed it out because i have no reason to suddenly investigate buttons i don't use--but if you just assume bad faith in everything, i suppose you can twist these things however you want.
We just ran this site for a year. We have no control over it!
at this point you're fairly obviously just participating in bad faith and your only participation in this community to this point is this kind of stuff so i think a day ban is warranted. we've been quite nice and patient with you, and that's not been reciprocated. if any of the other admins disagree with my judgement, they're free to overturn your ban in the morning.
I thought the donations here were just to maintain this server, but I am new and very easily could have missed something or misunderstood. Could you link or otherwise share what you are specifically referring to?
correct. all donations to our Open Collective go to maintaining the server and to any potential costs running the site we contract out. we do not actively advertise where to donate to Lemmy, except the heart at the top of the screen, which we don't control the display of.
Thank you, that makes the situation very clear. Idk how much control you have over the layout of lemmy and what is included this instance, but it makes sense that the lemmy devs wouldn't be willing to make their revenue stream an optional thing to include.
The donate link at the top of the page goes to the devs.
Jerboa and Lemmy are the same developer. He's not a genocide or massacre denier, but rather a supporter. Here's a reddit post where he managed to work in both.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/lua87n/why_does_china_have_so_many_cameras_on_the_streets/gp67qx9/
USA has plenty of cameras as well, they're just owned by private companies instead of the state.
Another consequence of hate speech shifting from intolerable to a mainstream political opinion over the last few years. It's sad to see, and crazy to watch happen in real time.
Thank you for creating a safe space! When I look at other communities many people are arguing about some content filling their feeds and I was wondering what their problem was until I discovered Beehaw did a great job avoiding instanciating (is that a word?) with problematic places, keeping my feed clean and safe ☺️
And I agree about the forking not-issue. If we had to look at every item, service, or infrastructure we used every day to check for its origin we wouldn't leave our bed, and probably our bed could be part of the issue too!
Federating is the term for 1 instance interacting with another instance.
Defederating is the term for 1 instance ignoring another instance.
Part of the divisiveness of our politics today is that people segregate off into their echo chambers where extreme positions are rewarded, amplify, and a purity contest of one-upmanship emerges. When you gather people to talk about issues rather than team affiliations the exteme divisiveness subsides because it becomes less about personal identity.
Also, some people are just dicks and it's better if they're not provided with a safe space where intolerable behavior is reinforced as acceptable.
Unfortunately, they're capable and willing to make their own safe spaces for themselves (and arguably did before a lot of us were, technically "truth" social is a mastodon instance). I'd rather them there than here though, especially if they have no willingness or intention to change.
I mean, the lovely thing about them doing that is that it then becomes increasingly easy to identify and communicate which places are cesspools to be avoided and also to mitigate access when possible. Quarantining isn't really an option when everyone's on one big website, but it's a lot easier when folks are running their own boards and building their own communities.
Question, you mention that the only instances you block allow fascism, however you have blocked both Lemmygrad and preemptively Hexbear, both of them are Communist in nature, and I feel that this is crazy to need to point out, but communism is the polar opposite to Fascism, and they are ideological opposed in every way, You will never find a more ardent anti-facist than a communist, so I feel like this is a bad faith attack on these instances. I also would like to point out that First Hexbear has not federated, nor made any plans to federate with Beehaw, over concerns with Beehaw moderation, and Lemmygrad has Rule 2. No Bigotry Rule 3. be Respectful and Rule 5. No Right Deviationists (No fascists), and they are very well enforced, and Rule 3 in particular is better enforced there than over here on Beehaw.
Fascism was merely an example of politics that explicitly endorses hate speech, because that's the criteria we're using to defed. We are not anti communist, we are perfectly fine with communists that don't harass users or spread hate speech.
Anti-fascists? These people revere the likes of Mao and Stalin. In what meaningful way were Mao and Stalin different from fascists?
All fascists are authoritarians, but not all authoritarians are fascists. It's possible, albeit not very self aware, to be a left wing authoritarian antifascist.
I'm kinda interested to read that because I've personally read the opposite.
Authoritarian communism is fascist
Only if you drop all nuanced analysis of what fascism is and just define it as authoritarianism. I don't like authoritarian communism, but I don't think it makes sense to describe it as fascism.
I just made a lemmy.world account after hearing about the mods on lemmy.ml, but when I posted a picture of winnie the pooh, the comment was deleted, and I was marked as a bot. And it sounds like beehaw's not open for new registrations.
Oh well, guess I'll be a tankie now. :/
Yeah. I tried to register at beehaw a couple of days ago... Without success:(
Join sopuli!
Try lemmy.one. It's smaller and not open registration, but so far the only instances it's defederated from are Lemmygrad and fellow travelers.
What is going on with the mods on lemmy.ml? Tried a quick search but nothing came up.
They're Stalinist
Where on lemmy.world did you post this picture?
Edit: looks like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works is also affected, due to open sign up policies. https://lemmy.world/post/145337
I'm not fully understanding this situation. I get lemmy.ml and lemmygrad are run by the same guy(?) and beehaw has defederated from them.
What does this have to do with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works? As mentioned here. https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/24341/How-the-beehaw-defederation-affects-us
They defederated from those since they have open signup.
What's going on? I tried to sign up, they ask you to write an essay, when I click submit, I get the spinny of death. And now I'm trying to troubleshoot using my lemmy.world account and now apparently I can't even use this account on their support forum.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what defederation means, but I am now test posting from my Lemmy.world account.
Edit: Oh, I see. My comments are only visible to other lemmy.world users. Tbh this is annoying. I'll have to wait to see how the federation/defed politics play out before settling in my final instance choice, I guess.
@Gaywallet I believe software is political
I imagine that the values that someone has to have in order to support the idea of free software will be vaguely political. But of course, free software will inevitably get stolen by people with different political values who do not believe the ethos of its licensing.
That's all true, but also free software is political. The idea that we should be using software that anyone can contribute to and no one person can control is in and of itself a political idea. Politics are how we decide how things are controlled. Free software is part of that regardless of what you think about economics or other more traditionally political things.
Can someone please link a list of offending material? Are both devs at fault or just one?
They, reportedly, run the lemmygrad instance
I’m fine with them being communists. I’m also fine with them not moderating things. I’m not fine with them denying genocides or denying repressive facts about historical or present socialist regimes.
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/668436 says they're pro-Stalin, pro-North-Korea and pro-CCP, but dresses that up as just pro-Marxism.
Generally, it's a good rule of thumb to see if people list things like worker ownership over the means of production and the abolition of the owning class, or a bunch of authoritarian regimes to judge if they're keener on the communism or the authoritarianism.
How does one become pro North Korea etc? Lol. That'd take gymnast abilities I'm not quite capable of yet.
It's honestly hard not to feel sorry about them after the Korean War. A lot of pro-NK sentiments are linked to anti-US and anticapitalist sentiments, seeing them as the desperate victim of invasion.
I'm not a fan of them, there is plenty they are doing wrong, but they're also far from the comical villains they're seen as by Western media. You know, "NK declare unicorns exist", " everyone has to have Kim's haircut " and also "you get executed for having his haircut", "political rival executed by anti-aircraft gun" and then later photographed alive.
The answer is somewhere in the middle and in many ways a product of their absurd, tragic history.
Yea I can see that. I do feel sorry for the people. And I do personally hate capitalism, so I get it, there's just a difference between understanding and glorification, like you said.
That gives me a 404: deleted error
It's still up for me, but I have to open it with a browser rather than Jerboa. I'll see if I can figure out posting screenshots from this app.
Is that poster one of the devs?
Very sus that they’d support those regimes, not all MLs do.
I respect your philosophy and believe you should do what is best for yourself and the community. Also want to point out that by forking, you might be closing the door to allies and those who fall through the cracks due to the registration system.
For example, I initially tried to make beehaw.org my home base, but maybe I didn't include enough info in my registration statement, because I'm still not approved. This was what I wrote:
"I'm signing up for Beehaw because Reddit is essentially killing the 3rd-party app I use to browse reddit (Reddit is Fun) and I refuse to use their mediocre official app. I want to join this community because it seems diverse and polite, and if Reddit is preventing me from using their site the way I've been doing for the last 9-ish years then I'd rather go elsewhere. As to what I can contribute, hopefully add to the conversations here and be a part of this growing community. The wonderful thing about Reddit is that for the past 9 years I've been a user, there was always someone who could answer my questions on virtually any topic, and sometimes the roles are flipped and I'd be lucky enough to be able to provide answers to a random stranger instead. I've shared mods I made for games on the site and participated in gaming and political discussions, but otherwise mostly spent my time scrolling through the news and enjoyed reading discussions on various topics. I'm sure you guys have received an influx of Reddit refugees recently, and like them I hope to make Beehaw my new home."
Like I said, maybe not enough info, but I believe my politics and philosophy jives with the Beehaw community. Now, getting rejected (or put in limbo) is not a big deal because I can still participate freely from lemmy.world, and most of my subscriptions are to Beehaw instances (news, politics, gaming) so in all honesty it doesn't make a big difference. But the point is that if Beehaw was forked, then someone like me would be cut off from this community. As a minority myself and someone who considers themself an ally, I want to reiterate that you should do what you believe is best for the community and yourself. I just wanted to give my own (biased) opinion on the matter.
in all probability it just got lost in our sea of applications (our backlog is 4.5k)--we know for a fact we've left a bunch of very good people on read because of the limitations of what we're working with and you're probably one of them
I do not think a fork of Lemmy would necessarily break AP federation with your instance. Heck, we even have Mastodon and Friendica accounts post and reply here. Eventually smartphone apps like Jerboa would stop working if the codebase would deviate too much, though (unless app devs start supporting both Lemmy and the fork).
Regarding your application, I am reading a lot of stuff about Reddit (and you on Reddit) in your post and maybe that was not the kind of answer the team behind Beehaw was looking for. No offense intended, BTW.
The question for me is actually is it ethical to contribute to his repo.
I think my idea is maybe the contributors are seperate from the code. A fork happens when code is rejected because a maintainer does something unpopular. Wait for that to happen. FOSS has a history of dealing with uncomfortable maintainers, like Linus.
Well said!
Thank you for keeping this community welcoming and safe.
First off I would like to thank the beehaw team for there excellent work. I doappreciated your work.
However, as someone who has conservative values, I disagree about your statement of neutrality. Your choice to use the word "minorities" clearly demonstrates that you have a political agenda. Furthermore, you use the term hate speech without actually defining it.
With that being say, I agree that we should not allow offensive or harmful language. I think all people deserve the right to not be targeted for personal choices or characteristics that they can not control. I also think people should be respectful of ideas even if they disagree. Targeting someone because you don't agree with them should be prohibited. It also comes to my attention that many alternative social media sites end up becoming home to antisemitic and racist ideas. I support free speech but it can get out of hand quickly. Beehaw should work to have a clear system for moderation that is fair and can be protested in the case of bias. There also should be a transparency report by users in order to keep the administration honest. We must not let this community be tained by harmful speech but we should try to address it with compassion.
Cheers, Possiblylinux127
We are explicitly anti free speech. This is also explicitly a safe space. Using the word minority does not constitute a political agenda. If you disagree with any of those statements you should move along as this is not a space for you.
I think I'll stay since all the other instances have a lot of negativity. I just wanted to highlight some of your bias.
we are extremely fine with being "biased" or perceived as biased in favor of minority groups, to be very clear.
Yes, I am absolutely biased. I prefer uplifting and wholesome content. I love positivity. I want humans to unite instead of divide. I am not worried about my biases or of being biased because I know the benefits it brings to the world.
The mere mention of the term "minorities" implies a political agenda?
It puts focus on small groups of people instead of the general public.
"explicitly a safe space for minorities" - when discussing certain groups of people not being safe - it is automatically focusing on a small group and not the general public - focus is very often put on not-the-general-public - 'the general public' is not in any danger ever (unless you're talking about global nuclear war)
Yes, genuine safety isn’t a zero-sum game. Making a space more safe for minorities doesn’t make it less safe for anyone else.
(Unless by “safe” people really mean “safe to express intolerance”, which is I think what these things often come down to…)
My general experience is that anyone who claims an ideology is ipso facto imposing the opposite of their claimed belief on others. So given how I bristle when people do that, I get the feeling this community isn't for me. I don't need to read between the lines to see how it is already playing out here in this very thread. Anyone can see you are being brigaded, even if you just didn't agree with the terminology being used. Despite the words, this doesn't seem like safe space for civil disagreement.
As a neutral observer, I'm curious: what about the term "minorities" signals a political agenda?
It seems like a fairly standard term to me
When you come from a place of privilege, not being centered feels like an attack. This is the fallout of white supremacy specifically, and part of the trauma that it inflicts on those it benefits. White people hurt by white supremacy bristle when minorities are centered in a conversation and call it political/ideological - see christo-fascist “anti woke” messaging by Florida Governor DeSantis.
It’s also a mechanism by which the ultra wealthy can separate poor whites from people of color making it easier to maintain power.
I personally find your comment to be a bit offensive. I do not consider myself to be in league with the governor of Florida and I would never use the word "woke"
I do my best to treat everyone with respect and dignity. I feel that hyper focusing on small groups of people is harmful and we need to focus on creating a fair and equal world. I am aware that there is plenty of racism and sexism in the world but I am only a person so I can't fix everything. Just because I am conservative does not mean that I am christo-fascist
This particular group/instance seems to be in support of "equity", not "equality".
If that is an issue for you, there are many many many other places better suited for your needs & wants.
As a progressive: the way people tend to use the term minorities (demographics which are marginalized on the basis of their identities) is practically a declaration of progressive political beliefs
This is why I feel that the word "minorities" should be avoided. It might be better to say "safe place for all".
Just to be clear here, I do think creating a space that is specifically safe for minorities is a good thing, and that trying to prevent or interfere with that is bad
Is existing as a minority inherently part of a political agenda now?
Is making sure that minorities that are often targeted or made to feel unsafe have a place where they aren't made to feel that way also a political agenda now?
Come on now.
I zeroed on that too. Ive never thought or seen the very word "minorities" as a political dog whistle but I guess thats just sign of the times
(For real it does suck to be seen as political just for being)
The problem with people who have this mindset is that they've simply dehumanized people who struggle.
Poor people? Political agenda. LGBTQ? Political agenda. Minorities? Political agenda.
They refuse to think about ways these people can be helped or why these people are in these positions in the first place.
It bothers them because it is not a problem they have to deal with, so when it pops up, they get annoyed because "I've never seen/experienced this happening in my own life, so it's either A). wildly exaggerated or B). it doesn't actually exist."
They're not thinking about the people who face these issues on a constant basis: they're thinking about "the issue" removed from who it is affecting. Thus: it's political. So of course they hate when it's brought up. It's meaninglessness to them! You're just trying to "stir the pot" if you mention it.
this is exactly true (sorry if this is off topic and/or preaching to the choir).
This is also is why I'm often so wary about people who talk so loudly about being able to treat one anotherwell regardless of political beliefs. Sure it sounds good in a vacuum, and I'd agree with it otherwise but when the said politics often includes "trans people dont exist" and "marriage is for one man and one woman" that makes me feel less welcome. IMO human rights issues shouldn't even be a political contention but unfortunately thats the reality of the world we live in.
Personally, I don't think you have to try to get along with someone who wants to cause harm to or supress the rights of certain people that they don't like/agree with .
It's wrong, and it makes me sick.
Had to cut off a dear friend of mine recently for just that reason, and we'd been friend for nearly 20 years. I don't have to tolerate hate or intolerance in order to "get along" with people.
Antisemitic terrorists are minorities, should we include them as well.
I don't like the term minorities because it is overly vauge and often takes on a bigger meaning than just the original word.
There's not a single person here who cannot infer from the context that the term "minorities" used in this instance in referring to "historically oppressed racial minorities". You also know this. This is semantics, at this point.
But I'll bite: in your opinion, what term/word should be used instead of "minorities"?
True freedom is the ability to spout nonsense on a forum, label a community the way you see it, call the people illiterate and see the moderators as authoritarian without getting punched in the face.
Ohwww the irony.
It would not be a wise choice to limit your news article input to one source, whether beehaw, fox, or ARD.
I thought this might have been sarcasm, but looking at the stuff you've posted... Yikes. I feel completely comfortable saying that I think anyone who posts content that attempts to downplay North Korea's atrocities can be disregarded entirely. Just to be clear, this is not an invitation to discussion with you, but a warning to others who might see your comment.