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 :)
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.