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.

  • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgM
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    1 year ago

    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).

    • lemillionsocks@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • sotolf@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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 :)

    • arkcom@fedia.io
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      1 year ago

      Why do you continue to claim using reddit is the same as you soliciting donations for a genocide asupporter?

      • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgM
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        1 year ago

        …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.

          • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgM
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            we’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.

          • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgM
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • Stoneykins@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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?

        • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgM
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Stoneykins@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            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.