I saw this discussion brought up on a different thread and I though I’d get some more opinions on the matter.
The Beehaw community guidelines describe a place that’s meant to be safe, friendly and encourages people to discuss their ideas in good faith. For the most part I feel like this community lives up to that; users of this instance are generally thoughtful with their responses. However, I don’t feel like that level of quality extends to the users who post from other instances. Responses from those users are more likely to pendantic, overly argumentative, and unhelpful.
Now I may just be an elitist fuck so I’d like to hear your opinions on this. Does Beehaw benefit from federation? Do the community guidelines even matter if they don’t apply to many of the people who engage with this instance? Am I just looking for a reason to complain?
EDIT: This post isn’t a request for Beehaw to defederate btw. I just wanted to discuss the negatives of federation and what we can do to alleviate them :)
When an online forum, social network, blog, etc. has a lot of users, it’s easier that bad elements are present inside those communities. That’s something that not only happens online, but in general. Compare a tiny village with 1.000 inhabitants, to a big city with 7.000.000 inhabitants. Where do you think there are more murderers, robbers, kidnappers…?
But defederation must not be the most useful resource to avoid those bad elements. You can’t place a dome above that big city with 7.000.000 inhabitants to avoid those murderers from going to other places and starting murdering. Good laws and police officers can do really good to minimize the damage. In the same way, good admins and moderators can really improve how nice a server is.
It’s true that when another server has bad policies or bad admins, we can’t do their job from here, because that’s not only our responsibility. If we do the hard work while they do nothing, it’s obvious that defederation can be a good tool, until situation improves over there. But that’s one thing, and another thing is complete and absolute defederation. Nobody deserves that, and, in the end, everything will be detrimental.
As time passes, people will realize that things in the fediverse are completely different to things on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram… and they’ll adapt their bad behaviour, influenced by those trash places, to a more healthy one.