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]   ( @alyaza@beehaw.org ) 
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    2 years ago

    I sincerely believe this but then again I would not want to use any tools developed by nazi freak at the same time. Just saying that the CCP definitely has major human rights issues and lemmy dev seems to be in favor of them…

    the whole point of this post though is that you almost certainly are, and you will continue to do so with no consistent objection because your outrage is informed as much by your own biases as by legitimate concern for the abuses you object to.

    simply put: if you’re looking for clean hands, i promise you will not find any in technology at any stage of the process. the devices we all use right now to write these comments are only made possible through a system of human rights abuses and callous disregard for human wellbeing–the conditions miners of rare earth minerals work in are appalling. the people who keep the websites you use from being a neverending torrent of horrifying gore, violence, rape, and abuse are exploited and underpaid by the social media corporations that hire them–they are frequently permanently scarred by that experience and left to rot. it is a well established fact that social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are breeding grounds for hate, terrorism, and even organization of genocide. critical infrastructure which underpins their function such as Cloudflare? they’ve gladly gone to the mat for preventing the removal of such “speech” from the internet until it was literally impossible to do so due to PR backlash. those are just four examples–i could spend literally hours railing them off with actual research.

    but, do you protest any of that? do you object to it or organize against it with even the outrage you’re mustering against the Lemmy developers right now? or us for using their software? and lest i be misinterpreted as running defense for their takes here: their opinions are bad. they suck. it’d be really cool if they stopped pretending all news about China is western Orientalism. but Lemmy generously has what, 200,000 accounts? Cloudflare is responsible for making like half of the current internet possible through their services. if you want to talk about tools which promote and allow for serious harm, their refusal to drop support for anything but the most vehemently and unambiguously terroristic websites online causes infinitely more harm than anything a Lemmy dev has ever said or ever will. and i promise you’ve interfaced with or make routine use of a service which does or has lobbied for the continuation truly heinous, unforgivable crimes every day–you just don’t know about it, or you’ve already made peace with it. that is the issue here. if you want to die on this hill, be consistent or at least understand what a paltry hill this is in the grand scheme of worldwide injustices.

      • i mean, if you cherrypick a point in a long post then yes you can mischaracterize it easily. but also respectfully: if your interest is in preventing harm in any meaningful way, i would strongly recommend that you do something that actually matters and not limit your harm-prevention praxis to “complaining a niche site that you use is hosted on niche software developed by people who you have a political disagreement with, and furthermore disagree with in a way which has no bearing on how those people actually develop the software”. this is unambiguously slacktivism and it’s very evocative of a person who is just lashing out because they can’t influence any other political situation they’re in.