Over the years I’ve been trying to encapsulate, as simply as possible, what Beehaw interactions would look like ideally.

I kept coming back to all of my personal memories having holiday meals (Thanksgiving and Christmas for example) with very close family and friends.

Thinking back through decades of these meetings, I cannot remember anything but everyone being kind and charitable in action as well as speech.

Many pages of very thoughtful and reasonable philosophic explanations have been written, on our sidebar, about the behavioral expectations of Beehaw.

Let’s go back to the holiday meals for a moment and imagine having an open invitation for anyone to join. What do you think the outcomes would be?

This is the problem that our endeavor is experiencing. The open nature of ActivityPub (allowing anyone to join our table) is defeating our purpose.

The administrators, moderators and community members have been thinking about this for several months.

I, personally, believe that we all will come to a comfortable consensus moving forward.

  •  Elise   ( @xilliah@beehaw.org ) English
    15•4 months ago

    From my side of the screen I can say I believe there’s a lot of untapped power in moderation tools. I know there’s issues surrounding development but I hope these will be resolved with time.

    For example I block several users and communities on a daily basis. There must be others who do this as well. It doesn’t bother me at all. Perhaps we can tap into that. I’ve read about this moderation technique where you subscribe to the moderation of one or more other users that you trust. It’s an interesting idea worth trying out.

    The truth is that moderation is a complex topic in society and I feel we are a part of moving that forward. Just look at any popular social media platform and how badly it’s managed there. Add to that that development is complex too and that any system design will tend to naturally align to certain biases.

    Making a walled garden is a bit like leaving the table, and it’ll rob many potential future users of finding us. So ya it is the wild west right now but maybe we together can be a voice of reason and compassion.