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.

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.

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.

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)?

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.

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!

Hopefully this is not inappropriate, but regarding the “this platform was made by tankies”–argument:

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.

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.

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.