in summer 2023, when I moved here from reddit, the lemmy instance beehaw.org was extremely divisive. they wanted to create a website according to certain rules rather than a free for all. some people were saying it would be the end of the threadiverse before it even began.
since that time, there have been various other intrinsic and extrinsic threats. I do not see much panicking about beehaw. did the threadiverse survive beehaw? or is this only a shell of what we might have had otherwise?
Tell that to metafilter, or hackernews? Or a multitude of other smaller niche communities that chug along perfectly happy (Yes there are less now than there used to be but that is mainly because of the insanely aggressive way Discord is being pushed on communities all over the internet and destroying their foundations). Sometimes a nice little garden with a wall to help transport you away from the hustle and bustle of life is exactly what you need.
We shouldn’t aim to build the Fediverse into a walled garden but there is nothing wrong with small walled gardens interspersed along the periphery of the Fediverse. It is a good thing. Let them be their own place!
I think this is a really good point. It’s a shame that they don’t want to Federate with some of the larger instances, but that’s the whole point of the fediverse. If you Federate with who you want to Federate with, and you have control over your own moderation and red lines. It’s virtually impossible to have meaningful conversation among a broad group without someone getting offended. So you might choose to let people occasionally be offended, or you might choose to create a safe space for a limited group.
It’s a philosophical question with no single right answer. The fediverse doesn’t have to be all things to all people, which is exactly why it can be all things to all people. Corporate social media has to have one set of rules for everyone, and the system for deciding and enforcing the rules is generally just about money
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Exactly but people on Metafilter do generally enjoy the fediverse, I believe there is an instance on the fediverse run by a Metafilter person. I don’t know if Metafilter users want the world of their site to directly intersect the fediverse but it doesn’t have to for there to be a healthy exchange of ideas and people from one to the other and back.
To be very specific about what I mean here, people getting in the habit of using Metafilter as a social and community place outside the context of giant corporate social networks are training their minds to do the most important thing necessary for a greater context of people to use the fediverse, which is thinking of the possibility of digital social and community spaces as possible and desirable outside the context of venture capital, massive corporations, capitalism and profit. Metafilter doesn’t need to connect to the fediverse to have a positive synergy with it necessarily. Beehaw can be seen in a similar way.
Besides, we are many people in many different contexts, people shitposting in one context might be extremely well spoken on a technical subject in another. It matters which version of people we invite in and it matters that we let there be places for those different versions of people.
A walled garden is a suffocating structure when you are trapped in it with nowhere to go, but at the edge of the busy city of the fediverse, a walled garden is sometimes exactly what is needed. The walls of the garden no longer dictate the edge of the possible space of internet communities but rather the transition space between a niche community purposefully separated from the broader network and the broader network.
We are stronger together and a vital feature of the fediverse is federation, but we are better together when “together” means a tangled knot of interrelationships and boundaries, not a giant unified monolith. We are trying to make a city and this is the nature of them.