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.

  • First off I would like to thank the beehaw team for there excellent work. I doappreciated your work.

    However, as someone who has conservative values, I disagree about your statement of neutrality. Your choice to use the word “minorities” clearly demonstrates that you have a political agenda. Furthermore, you use the term hate speech without actually defining it.

    With that being say, I agree that we should not allow offensive or harmful language. I think all people deserve the right to not be targeted for personal choices or characteristics that they can not control. I also think people should be respectful of ideas even if they disagree. Targeting someone because you don’t agree with them should be prohibited. It also comes to my attention that many alternative social media sites end up becoming home to antisemitic and racist ideas. I support free speech but it can get out of hand quickly. Beehaw should work to have a clear system for moderation that is fair and can be protested in the case of bias. There also should be a transparency report by users in order to keep the administration honest. We must not let this community be tained by harmful speech but we should try to address it with compassion.

    Cheers, Possiblylinux127

    • We are explicitly anti free speech. This is also explicitly a safe space. Using the word minority does not constitute a political agenda. If you disagree with any of those statements you should move along as this is not a space for you.

        • “explicitly a safe space for minorities” - when discussing certain groups of people not being safe - it is automatically focusing on a small group and not the general public - focus is very often put on not-the-general-public - ‘the general public’ is not in any danger ever (unless you’re talking about global nuclear war)

          •  floga   ( @floga@beehaw.org ) 
            link
            fedilink
            English
            131 year ago

            Yes, genuine safety isn’t a zero-sum game. Making a space more safe for minorities doesn’t make it less safe for anyone else.

            (Unless by “safe” people really mean “safe to express intolerance”, which is I think what these things often come down to…)

      • When you come from a place of privilege, not being centered feels like an attack. This is the fallout of white supremacy specifically, and part of the trauma that it inflicts on those it benefits. White people hurt by white supremacy bristle when minorities are centered in a conversation and call it political/ideological - see christo-fascist “anti woke” messaging by Florida Governor DeSantis.

        It’s also a mechanism by which the ultra wealthy can separate poor whites from people of color making it easier to maintain power.

        • I personally find your comment to be a bit offensive. I do not consider myself to be in league with the governor of Florida and I would never use the word “woke”

          I do my best to treat everyone with respect and dignity. I feel that hyper focusing on small groups of people is harmful and we need to focus on creating a fair and equal world. I am aware that there is plenty of racism and sexism in the world but I am only a person so I can’t fix everything. Just because I am conservative does not mean that I am christo-fascist

      • I zeroed on that too. Ive never thought or seen the very word “minorities” as a political dog whistle but I guess thats just sign of the times

        (For real it does suck to be seen as political just for being)

        • The problem with people who have this mindset is that they’ve simply dehumanized people who struggle.

          Poor people? Political agenda. LGBTQ? Political agenda. Minorities? Political agenda.

          They refuse to think about ways these people can be helped or why these people are in these positions in the first place.

          It bothers them because it is not a problem they have to deal with, so when it pops up, they get annoyed because “I’ve never seen/experienced this happening in my own life, so it’s either A). wildly exaggerated or B). it doesn’t actually exist.”

          They’re not thinking about the people who face these issues on a constant basis: they’re thinking about “the issue” removed from who it is affecting. Thus: it’s political. So of course they hate when it’s brought up. It’s meaninglessness to them! You’re just trying to “stir the pot” if you mention it.

          • this is exactly true (sorry if this is off topic and/or preaching to the choir).

            This is also is why I’m often so wary about people who talk so loudly about being able to treat one anotherwell regardless of political beliefs. Sure it sounds good in a vacuum, and I’d agree with it otherwise but when the said politics often includes “trans people dont exist” and “marriage is for one man and one woman” that makes me feel less welcome. IMO human rights issues shouldn’t even be a political contention but unfortunately thats the reality of the world we live in.

            • Personally, I don’t think you have to try to get along with someone who wants to cause harm to or supress the rights of certain people that they don’t like/agree with .

              It’s wrong, and it makes me sick.

              Had to cut off a dear friend of mine recently for just that reason, and we’d been friend for nearly 20 years. I don’t have to tolerate hate or intolerance in order to “get along” with people.

        • There’s not a single person here who cannot infer from the context that the term “minorities” used in this instance in referring to “historically oppressed racial minorities”. You also know this. This is semantics, at this point.

          But I’ll bite: in your opinion, what term/word should be used instead of “minorities”?