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.
A few years ago it turned out a very promising python documentation library was using another library for a core aspect of the docstring comment parsing subsystem. I don’t remember the names of either of these two, but as it turns out, the person who wrote the docstring comment parsing subsystem was someone who liked using the Nazi-Facing-Swastika as his repeating background image on his site and as textual glyphs to denote things like list items. He claimed it was everyone being too stupid to know he was using it in an eastern context, but he had an email like firstname_lastname88@gmail or whatever.
The point I made then is that even if FirstName LastName was running into a culture-shock situation, and even if they just happened to like the number 88 - or maybe they were born in 88 - there was simply no way I wanted to tie myself or my employer to that person. Nobody is going to extend any grace.
I guess I don’t even think that is necessarily a bad thing. Why should people stanning genocidal authoritarian regimes be extended grace? Is it only okay if they can give us something, like a nazi scientist building space rockets? Is it simply because they gave you something you can’t get anywhere else without paying more than you’d want to? I actually don’t have an answer for this. I felt fine telling PossibleNazi88
No, and AccidentallyLinkedCompositionalLibraryAuthorSorry, I'll pass, and in large part that is because Sphinx does exist and I can use it, even if I’d prefer not to. But what if this library were the only one? Would I just hold my nose and use it anyway?Same with Lemmy - can I get it in a different package? A similar fediverse community package, without the gross genocide cooties all over it? This is a practical question; maybe this is reason enough to want to host a kbin instance over lemmy, eventually.
But philosophically: What if the next fediverse community package is from a Patriotic American, who has no problem with all the first peoples genocides and chattel slavery history because they believe in America so much that it’s an intrinsic part of their identity?
It sucks because I want to make everything better, and I believe that to be true of Beehaw administration for sure as well, but navigating this shit is hard and even if you’re principled you’re probably only principled insofar as you’re aware.
Conversely, doing the thing you know to be wrong just because the alternative is hard and maybe impossible isn’t good either. But maybe you can use the genocide-fan’s product to do more good than harm? But now you’re back to nazi scientists making moon rockets, and nobody is happy.
I guess I’m just rambling while I admire the problem.
You’ve captured my own confusing and conflicting thoughts as well.
I have so far loved my experience here (just been a few days) beehaw is exactly what is what to see in an online community
But despite the federated nature of lemmy the code ultimately is (so I’m learning in this thread!) currently in the hands of people who are the opposite of beehaw. That’s a difficult pill to swallow.
If there were ever a row between the devs of Lemmy and Beehaw, could they retaliate against us in some manner using the code?
I’m struggling to think of an example of this, but maybe something like forcing a “captcha” before every comment submission that requires you to type in something like “Long Lives Chairman Mao” or something like that. It is clearly antithetical to what Beehaw ascribes, but would be ultimately powerless to stop.
I definitely agree and feel with the arguments you have here. It’s a challenging issue to resolve. On one hand there’s the practical Rock of “transitioning to another asset and engaging in the practical burden that shifting gears brings,” and in this circumstance, that would come with the extra caveat of trying to commit to that transition during a busy period as is. On the other hand is the moral Hard Place of “you’re working with an asset actively developed by someone or something with known issues—are you willing to accept, and to some degree associate, with that?” I don’t feel like there’s a clear-cut path that’s both morally bright and practically realistic, and it’s not the kind of thing that makes me dance with joy.
If nothing else, it’s good to respect that we have a dilemma in our hands. Whichever way the community decides to collectively stand, both in the short and long term, I’m happy that we’re having this conversation at all. I think it’s important to acknowledge what we have and have a meaningful discussion around it. Putting our heads in the sand and pretending it’s a non-issue at best delays the issue and allows it to fester.
—
That’s a great point I almost forgot to highlight. Even if I think I got my things sorted in such a way that I think my hands are clean in something, I typically end up finding out of nowhere that something down the line has some issues behind it that I need to resolve somehow. It’s a process that doesn’t seem to end, and it can feel exhausting sometimes.
I don’t really get why the authors ideals and beliefs matter. For for-profit stuff, it does matter because I don’t want to be supporting someone with that lifestyle or someone who actively wants me dead.
But for the open source stuff, he’s not making any money off of me. And it’s pretty safe since other people are vetting the code and they’ll complain if something malicious is happening. In other words, since I am not contributing to the developer, his ideals don’t really matter to me
The authors ideals and beliefs are relevant, because those guided their decision to make a Free and Open Source, federated alternative to reddit, and avoid capitalist modes of funding (like integrating ads or other exploitative methods). That’s why this existed long before reddit was extorting through their API.
I agree. The other consideration I would add is the possible association being an issue in some cases. While I believe there should be a dissociation between developer and software, on a practical level, it might be unavoidable in some cases. But this is not a moral or ethical issue, it’s a practical one–the benefit of using the software versus dealing with the association (OP’s post being a prime example of the work involved).
Something else to throw in to the mix: a lot of similar questions have likely been faced by developers to the FOSS community: “What if my library is used in abhorrent ways?” “Should I restrict usage of my software to ensure it’s used in morally good ways?” etc.
In my experience, not too many people seem to take issue with FOSS in these ways–any usage of the software is entirely put on the person using it, and the FOSS developer is not held accountable for it. If we apply the same logic here, I would posit that the usage of FOSS developed by a morally questionable developer should have a similar dissociation applied.
I’ll also challenge your analogy of nazi scientists. Hiring someone who has committed humanitarian atrocities is quite different from using FOSS produced by morally questionable developers. In the latter case, this person is not receiving any significant benefit (one could argue publicity, but the value of that seems debatable and minimal compared to a salary). A closer analogy would be something like: is it morally acceptable to make use of the code that those nazi scientists produced for an authoritarian regime? Still a complicated question, but more related to the issue at hand, I think.