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.

  • This. I like Beehaw and I respect it’s nature. I even maintain an account here just to separate my more boisterous posting personality from the one that I feel safer in expressing on Beehaw. While I do external-post from my other account; that’s usually to respond to either Beehaw users not behaving in a way I feel is consistent with Beehaw values or to address others from external instances.

    But I don’t want to see Beehaw closing it’s doors to the fediverse. If your staff team is getting swamped, you’re getting overwhelmed as admins, etc…then find more staff. You literally have the hugest pool of nice people right here on Beehaw, and I’m sure everyone who regularly posts here would likely be highly skilled at moderating somewhere on Beehaw if needed. Most of the time, Beehaw does not attract nasty people, and the hard work of the moderation done here shows.

    Spread the load. Don’t defederate or give up on Fediverse. Invest in mental health buffs for your moderation team as needed if necessary!