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 :)
Contrary to popular belief, there are actually three options. You can disagree with something by not upvoting it (instead of downvoting it). On beehaw, you can get an indicator of what the overall community thinks of a response by seeing whether or not it has a significant number of upvotes relative to the rest of the content around it.
I find that anything that I would want to downvote should instead be reported anyway. I reserve downvotes on other platforms for posts/comments that are made in bad faith, which on Beehaw is often enough to report for anyway. On other platforms, I’ve seen downvotes used in exactly the way you describe, and it’s led to at least me wanting to interact as minimally as possible knowing that as soon as I post something, some bot might just downvote it right away, immediately influencing the kinds of responses I get because apparently many people operate as part of a hivemind.