I saw this discussion brought up on a different thread and I though I’d get some more opinions on the matter.
The Beehaw community guidelines describe a place that’s meant to be safe, friendly and encourages people to discuss their ideas in good faith. For the most part I feel like this community lives up to that; users of this instance are generally thoughtful with their responses. However, I don’t feel like that level of quality extends to the users who post from other instances. Responses from those users are more likely to pendantic, overly argumentative, and unhelpful.
Now I may just be an elitist fuck so I’d like to hear your opinions on this. Does Beehaw benefit from federation? Do the community guidelines even matter if they don’t apply to many of the people who engage with this instance? Am I just looking for a reason to complain?
EDIT: This post isn’t a request for Beehaw to defederate btw. I just wanted to discuss the negatives of federation and what we can do to alleviate them :)
An increasing percentage of what I read is from federated instances. If Beehaw isolated itself I’d probably make an account elsewhere and hook into the fediverse from elsewhere, leaving Beehaw behind. Beehaw is great, but it’s not enough of a community by itself.
I agree, we are already defederated from big instance like LW. If beehaw isolates itself it would just be a forum with a few thousands more or less inactive people and would die.
i don’t think being a small forum is necessarily a bad thing. smaller places are easier to moderate, and they tend to be more chill. i’ve run another forum for about 10 years, and it’s still going strong with only a few hundred active users at any given time. we very rarely have issues with people upsetting the flow. we’ve always managed to recover when that does happen.
Are they defederated because it’s so big?
No, they were federated, but in the beginning LW had some problems with trolls and were not able to mod everything, so beehaw defederated with LW because of this…
Well I hope they can get it under control, there’s a community with double digit members I’d like to join.
Not the most idea solution, but you can make an account on another instance (LW for example) if you want to contribute to instances that aren’t federated with Beehaw. Hopefully one day we’ll be able to refederate with them, although I expect that there needs to be an increase in moderation bandwidth from the Beehaw side before they’ll be able to handle that kind of load.
On the plus side, it seems like mobile apps for Lemmy are already designed to handle switching between multiple accounts.
Existing apps made switching pretty good and I’m now loving sync’s ability to apply custom themes. My beehaw acct has a nice honey tinge.
I’m on Kbin and subscribe to some Beehaw communities and enjoy interacting with them (in a good way I hope!). Generally for the fedi to work I think people need to forget about where people are posting from and deal with comments and users as they stand on a case by case basis
I think you kind of say this yourself:
For the most part I feel like this community lives up to that; users of this instance are generally thoughtful with their responses.
Basically things are generally working except for a few people who have just started using Fedi instances. Maybe discuss with them, report them or whatever but defederation when things are more or less working out seems a bit OTT to me
I am not even sure what elitist means in any real sense. Just an attempted jibe I guess. Ignore it.
Behaw benefiting from Federation, sure it does. I would not be here without it. As for trolling, I have not seen it. Maybe I look at different communities
Frankly what the threadiverse needs is more collaborative and granular admin and user mod tools. Reason I joined Beehaw is so trolls would get push back and blocked. Sad we lost lemmy.world and that lemmey.ml does not accept subscriptions though. Loosing st.itjust.works was a loss too.
Now I may just be an elitist fuck
Sounds about right.
Did this reply contribute anything meaningful to the discussion?
Is generalizing large amount of people, just because they signed to another instance a good contribution to anything?
This feels like a bad faith argument. OP correctly identifies that users from instances other than Beehaw tend to be more likely to engage in argumentative and pedantic commentary, which you prove in your interactions so far.
Also OP recognized that it sounds elitist, which I initially just agreed with. Not sure why you interpret this as a bad faith argument.
Beehaw already isn’t really federated since it has blocked lemmy.world, which is 10x the size of Beehaw now and will likely be more like 100x the size of Beehaw at some point.
I personally’d prefer if Beehaw was fully federated (especially with lemmy.world), but I think this weird half way point is bullshit. Fully defederating would be better than the current situation.
As for arguments/etc… I don’t think the quality of discussion here is any better than Lemmy.world.
I disagree, I have an account in both places and lemmy.world feels a lot more like reddit did than beehaw. I can hardly ever tolerate to use that account. And I left reddit because everyone was mean, not because of the API stuff.
@bijuice
Hey, from Fosstodon here. If I hadn’t already created an account at fosstodon, I’d probably be at Beehaw. Yes, it does benefit from federation. Smaller-like minded communities are usually better at self policing than one large one that does it for them which is why I think the model works.I was merrily using Lemmy, and later on Kbin in addition to that, for many months.
But then in recent weeks the culture seemed to change: More aggressive, insulting, and rude posts, even over nothing; some of them first responses to posts, others over nothing particularly political, just pop culture opinions and the like. And way, way more downvotes. And that last one was particularly new to me personally.
I’ve always been a laughably polite person, even irl, according to folks who know me, and had been the same online unless someone was outrageously offensive and mean (though in recent years simply handled that by a process of mute > report > block, rather than waste energy). But in recent weeks I’d noticed way more downvotes coming my way on innocuous posts, which was a first for me. I’d even told folks who were unsure about joining Lemmy, “Ah, don’t worry about the Marxist-Leninist reputation and the bad rap; I’ve never experienced any tankie stuff on there, and only ever had positive experiences - I mean, look, I’ve barely ever been downvoted, only ever received kind upvotes for what I’ve tried to ensure are thoughtful, positive contributions!”
Lately it’s turned nasty, and negative. I joined Kbin and most discourse on there was either polluted by the same culture rising on Lemmy, or dominated by people mocking Beehaw for wanting no part of what many agree is a recent influx of bad habits from Reddit folks. This theory is particularly popular on Mastodon, where people pointed out the switch from Twitter to Mastodon was more politically motivated, whereas the Reddit exodus was more about convenience. I thought that was an interesting explanation for these more negative experiences of late.
I’m sorry if this is a long post that doesn’t at first seem to address the actual question, haha! I guess I’m just trying to contribute my own personal perspective that is related to the topic - and demonstrates why I’ve recently arrived at Beehaw, as an online space that appeals to me, in contrast to those other aforementioned places.
Elitist in his ivory instance over here. (Kidding). But a little offense with me and my Taylor Swift community over here, other instances aren’t bad by any means, and the more federation the more communities.
Nah I like what beehaw is doing, and defederation should always be the last line of defense. However the middle ground is good moderation and enforcement of the rules. Mods are overworked on beehaw, maybe it’s time for others to stand up and offer to take on some of the mantle.
I’m sure you Swifties are lovely people :')
I don’t think this is a moderation issue and I’ll give you an example to highlight why. Someone recently posted to the gaming community asking for advice on a something very basic but easily overlooked. The highest rated comments were basically mocking the poster. Not direct insults or anything ban-worthy but they were unhelpful. I don’t think that’s the type of engagement that people who signed up for this instance would like to see here.
Did you report the offending comments? Reply to them and ask them to be nice? We aren’t running a panopticon here and the reality is that many people who register here, even when they explicitly say they will be nice, occasionally exhibit not nice behavior. I don’t think defederating will solve the problem, but rather more aggressive reporting, more people stepping up to help moderate, and perhaps most importantly people nicely reminding each other to be nice and steering conversations in the right direction are the only levers we have at our disposal.
Responses from those users are more likely to pendantic, overly argumentative, and unhelpful.
I’ve noticed a small uptick in responses like that (which, admittedly, may just be confirmation bias).
I think it might be due to the large influx of reddit refugees (full disclosure: I’m one, too). It takes a while to get used to the fact that the “atmosphere” of fediverse instances is different. It takes time for people to realize that this isn’t a toxic environment that encourages assholes. They’ll just keep on being hyper-defensive, confrontational, and/or deliberate misinterpreters of things while they focus on irrelevant points. After all, that was the norm on reddit for years.
Good users grow out of that. Unfortunately, some users just don’t want to. We have to take the bad with the good, though. Defederating completely would make Beehaw much less interesting and fun. The community just isn’t big enough by itself.
TL;DR: Yes, Beehaw benefits from federation. Federation has its drawbacks, but they are massively outweighed by the advantages.
I think there is a very toxic trait that ex-Redditors need to shake off: every response to a comment DOES NOT need to be a rebuttal.
Agreeing is allowed, and I agree with you.
Just a thought. So far I’ve only had a bad experience with two people. One was unabashedly transphobic and was banned.
The other was overly argumentative and pendentic, and wouldn’t let up. That made me think about inclusivity. What if this person has autism? Shouldn’t we be extra patient with some people?
To be perfectly honest if I’d have to choose between meeting either of them irl I’d probably prefer the transphobe.
What do you think?
As an autistic adult, it makes me incredibly sad that you would prefer to meet a transphobe. Occasionally (not on Beehaw as far as I know) I’m accused of being pedantic and argumentative online, but often the cause is a total misinterpretation of my tone and intent. I find it heartbreaking that hanging out with a transphobe is preferable to trying to understand an autistic person, and in all sincerity I hope you will explore the cause of your ableism so you can overcome it.
I think we still have two “shields” protecting our ways in Beehaw:
- the lack of downvotes. Perhaps people will downvote you from other instances. But you won’t see those, so you will not care. I find that this removes a lot of negativity on its own.
- when someone posts from another instance, you can see it in their name: so you can take what they say with a pinch of salt. “Oh, he is not from Beehaw; it is more normal for them to behave like that. No use to argue strongly against them”.
As long as we have those, and as long as the federated instances moderate harmful content, it is OK for me to remain federated with them.
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Yeah, same. I went back to my facebook groups and instagram pages for a while when reddit went crappy, and it really highlighted how helpful downvotes were
Downvotes are helpful if they are used properly (off-topic, hate speech, rediquitte, etc.), but I see people using it as a dislike button lately and that has made many discussion annoying and exhausting. Also, downvotes latently breed a hivemind which is like one of the worst parts of reddit.
I’ve found myself unsubscribing from beehaw communities that I had previously subbed to initially because I find they have a certain style and direction that isn’t balanced enough. Your message posed as a question more or less explains why I feel like that. Now I only see beehaw content when browsing ‘all’ because of it.
Isn’t balanced enough? How do you mean?
Beehaw is dangerously close to group think that shouts down/deletes other viewpoints. There is a difficult to discern line between a view you don’t agree with and what is labeled here as “close minded”.
I myself experienced that when I posed a opposing viewpoint regarding a search for non right wing podcasts. I can understand wanting a podcast without any mention of politics but to say I don’t want to listen to X group because I don’t agree isn’t a positive way to take disagreement.
I have noticed that beehaw tends to shout down people that disagree which is not beneficial. The more you shout down/ignore a group the louder they become. That is the main reason why I think, at least the US, is in the polarized political environment it is in now. We have lost our thought of empathy, discourse and evaluation of ideas different from our own.
I think the main issue is the tone with which an idea is presented, not always the idea itself. I’m open to many viewpoints; in fact, that’s how I learn and understand best. I don’t only want to listen to people who already think like I do.
Some things can’t be compromised on, though. In my opinion, US conservatives have become blatantly bigoted, sexist, and fascist. In the past, one could give them the benefit of the doubt, but they’re not even trying to hide it anymore. I don’t care how they “present” their ideas. When someone tries to explain why tacitly supporting bigotry is okay, it doesn’t matter how eloquently they make their point. They are actively opposed to tolerance, and therefore don’t deserve it.
