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.
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.
I didn’t even know what a tankie was before today.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
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 a bigger dictionary to prevent inherit bias or enforce a more apolitical and centrist point of view for online discussions.
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? I’m confused
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.
[…]directly impacts your human rights, health, or safety in real-life they are by definition speaking hate<
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.
You’re right that we are explicitly taking a side, being a safe space for minorities is explicitly taking the side of minorities. But this is widely compatible with every political stance that doesn’t center or promote hate.
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
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.
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 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.
undefined>And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
But, it just does seem weird being federated with lemmy.ml knowing who runs it, and gives off the vibe of a more cleaned up and publicly palatable version of Stormfront if they wanted to draw in a community that isn’t initially apparent about the extremist views they hold.
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.
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.
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).
Reddit’s main motivator for dealing with its problems of hate speech, discriminatory content, etc.
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 asupporter?
…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.
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.
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/76193we’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.
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?
I thought the donations here were just to maintain this server,
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.
Removed by mod
@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.
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.
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
The authors ideals and beliefs are relevant, because those guided their decision to make a Free and Open Source, federated alternative to reddit, and avoid capitalist modes of funding (like integrating ads or other exploitative methods). That’s why this existed long before reddit was extorting through their API.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
Hypothetical example: am I allowed to take a socially conservative stance on gender-affirming healthcare or would that be considered ‘hate speech’?
It’s a stance that leads to trans people killing themselves.
There needs to be specific standards clarifying what the rule actually is.
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.
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”.
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 (in b4 lemmygrad calls me a UN shill). 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 <insert slur>”. 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.
Thanks for your response, it’s very helpful. If a user asking a very legitimate question in a civil and respectful manner 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
Hypothetical example: am I allowed to take a socially conservative stance on gender-affirming healthcare or would that be considered ‘hate speech’?
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.
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
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.
