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.
I think that if we defederated, Lemmy would be much worse off for it. I think we’d also be a lot slower, and I’d be checking it a lot less.
Beehaw brings something to Lemmy that Lemmy really needs. It’s leftist, but it’s also very compassion-focused, and we kind of lack that elsewhere. The rest of the otherwise kind of similar communities largely lack the spirit of getting along in good faith that I see here.
Like, what other community do you ever see people responding to hostility by reminding people where they are and it actually mattering? People seem to largely respect the space. Not to say it doesn’t ever have a need for moderation, it clearly does and y’all do a great job, but with that moderation it manages to be an exemplary space.
It would be a shame for Lemmy to lose that positive influence and that good example. And it would leave the more lefty-leaning options kind of… meh.
But it also really helps to bulk out the experience of using Beehaw. We don’t get that many posts, so it’s nice to be able to go to subscribed or all instead of just local. It’d definitely be a bummer to lose that.
Anyway, I think you’re much closer to your goal than you might see while you’re on the moderating and administrating end. You see all the nasty stuff up close, but we get to see the result. And compared to the rest of the internet, it’s an oasis.