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.
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!
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.
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.
Hopefully not repeating things others have said…
- Thanks for taking the time to write long thoughtful posts explaining the admin thinking, rather than just “we have decided X, live with it” posts.
- It seems entirely appropriate to me for the admins to set the tone of this instance, through explicit rules, through deciding who to add as a user and who to make a mod, and through deciding which other instances to federate with. Anybody who disagrees can always start their own instance. That you’re opening a coffee shop doesn’t mean anyone can come in without shirt and shoes (bad analogy like all analogies).
- It’s entirely possible that I (older white male with plenty of income raised in a homegeneous white suburb) have some opinions that would be appropriate on one of those defederated instances but not here. I can always make an account over there if I feel the need to post those opinions. Likewise, if someone on a defederated instance wants to post here and can behave themselves according to the house rules, they can create an account here. This doesn’t seem like a huge burden to impose on anyone.
- During a long career as a software developers, just about every successful fork I can recall came about because a majority of a project’s developers (not its users!) decided they had to leave a dysfunctional project. Until/unless Lemmy gets to that point it seems pretty silly to me to talk about forking the codebase.
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 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 🙂
Thank you. :)
When you defederate a server you can’t see their users
What are the implications for triangle constellations? Instances A, B and C.
A defederates B. Users from both A and B submit comments in a post in a community on C.
Do users from A and B get different views of the comment section on C? Or can they still meet and engage with each other on this neutral ground?
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 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
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.
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.
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:
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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?
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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? 😑
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The ability to hide the downvote button, probably on a per-instance basis, as some allow downvotes, and some don’t.
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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? 😬
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).
Me too!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- We become horribly reductionist (and naive) and just handwave and say “Because we need kindness, and there is hate.” But then, why are we in need of kindness, why is there hate? Why do we need more love? Different hole, same warren. This route I think trips you up in the “unable to explain the issues themselves.” You might retreat to the escape hatch of “focused on politics”, but ignoring something so pervasive and in-your-face as politics is a conscious and focused political act. People who ignore politics are some of the most deeply political people on the planet. There is no escape from politics.
- The other option: We confront and grapple with the beast, and reach conclusions, answers, and stances to the best of our ability about these issues that lie at the heart of a community’s formation, what we want for it and for people. This is basically the formulation of an ideology or identity. Maybe not a concrete one, but one that will broadly align with some subset population and unalign with another. Maybe this doesn’t quite fit with Beehaw’s vision of community, but at its most over-simple, a community basically defined by both who is in, and who is out, and the nature of those assertions.
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.
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
Completely agree on the notion of the community needing “good faith” over “kindness”.
A discussion forum loses much of its value when even a modest percentage of its userbase isn’t participating in a free exchange of ideas, but rather evangelising their favorite ideas or beliefs by abusing the tools provided by the forum in bad faith to promote or suppress ideas that respectively support or contradict their ideology.
It’s one thing to present your contradictory/minority beliefs with supporting evidence to the forum in the hopes it stands on its own, and quite another to coordinate w/ others or create alt accounts to invade that forum and create an illusion of consensus through voting/commenting accordingly.
It doesn’t matter whether the ideology is white supremacy, communism, or even something apolitical like preferring Linux over Windows – astroturfing and bad faith interactions of any allegiance are toxic to a discussion forum.
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.
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.
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.
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. :/
What is going on with the mods on lemmy.ml? Tried a quick search but nothing came up.
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 actively 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.
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.
No.
That’s the admin of Lemmygrad. They are not a dev or staff or… anything of lemmy.ml
Bravo, I couldn’t care less about the historical context of the tool. I do care deeply that we have no hate.
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!
Excellent response. I joined Beehaw because I liked Beehaw’s rules and philosophy. Kinda reminds me of Mozilla’s in beta Mastodon instance. Beehaw as an entity is completely separate from its technological roots and this post eloquently shows that.
I hope this eases any political harassment along those lines.
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
