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.
I’d prefer if you guys stayed in the fedi, but this is probably the 10th time you guys have asked this same question on if you should stay. If you have to keep asking, I think you know the answer. No need to ask an 11th time.
Its an on going discussion and not a take our ball and go home situation. I think its important to gather support and insight with a big decision and not play dictator. Also, now the hectic holiday season is mostly over in the states, others opinions may differ from before.
This is more of an internal conversation, so I can totally see why this topic coming up yet again is a bit much for the rest of the fediverse. I have to admit, reading your comment made laugh though, thanks for that.
If Beehaw chooses to leave the fediverse and defederate everyone, I wish them all the best, but I know I personally will not be joining.
I’ve had enough of walled gardens and private spaces, I chose the fediverse because Reddit started forcing decisions I didn’t like, like which apps I could use or how I interact with the communities I enjoy. The fediverse allows me the choice to choose what communities I want to subscribe to on my own terms, and that isn’t something I want to let go of easily.
There are downsides, there is noise, but that’s the role of hosting social media. It’s inevitable that as a community grows with more people who enjoy it, that there will also be people who want to tear it down. To me, that’s just a fact of the internet.
I’ll be disappointed, Beehaw is what inspired me to set up my instance and my communities and nurture my tiny instance - but I still believe in the fediverse. Welcoming differing opinions - not shutting them out.
A big general problem I have with the fediverse (as do others I’ve spoken to) is that it affords not real capacity to foster both private and public spaces with good and convenient means of moving and connecting with people between them. From the lack of truly private DMs, to no private group chats or local only spaces … the whole idea of private spaces for when people want them seems to be absent from the fediverse creators and it’s a significant gap IMO.
In the case of lemmy, I can imagine private communities being rather useful and pleasant. That is, communities visible only by people who are members or who have subscribed, with membership being optionally open or closed to being invite only or requiring approval or something similar. Having both federated and local-only versions of these would also probably be nice.
The useful part would be that you could meet people/accounts in private spaces and then see the same person/account in public too, which should only foster community creation through personal connections and discovery.
Then, whenever people need a quieter and more private space for a particular conversation or topic, they can take discussion out from the public and shield it in private. While you might argue that this would stifle discussion (and I see your point), I think there’s a relatively natural equilibrium between our needs for public and noisy engagement and quiet/safe/private interactions. I think people would naturally move between these spaces as they need.
Sounds like you want forums, basically :D
I’m pretty nostalgic for forums myself but while they are great for smaller communities centered around a specific topic, they were really difficult to navigate when it comes to larger general communities IMHO. Fediverse with its reddit-like structure has an advantage here, and I personally like the idea of AP and multiple smaller communities interacting. We just need better tech and UI.
Sounds like you want forums, basically :D
Not really. I prefer the Reddit like format, like you, and see it as a superior substitute for flatter forums.
A private community operating alongside public communities is what I’m talking about and I think that’s a different breast.
Is this not a forum? I’m confused on whatever definition you’re going for where private conversations make something a forum. What is this then?
I dunno whats the official definition, I just remember the old (phpbb) forums having a complex roles structure and privileges so a subset of community would often have access to subforums or threads that other people can’t see. You’d have a public face of the forum and then private categories within it that wouldn’t be visible from outside.
This is more of a reddit-like news bulletin where everything is public and open by default - in the case of fediverse even more so since everything automatically gets pushed to other servers that you have no control over.
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!
I came to Beehaw wanting a replacement for orangesite™. However, I’ve since decided that I care a lot less about having a massive network and more about just having a positive community of strangers to talk to about my life and interests. In that respect I’d totally be open to a smaller platform. Whether that’d be Beehaw or somewhere else, I don’t know. But Beehaw leaving the Fediverse wouldn’t be the dealbreaker for me that I once though it would.
All that said, I’d definitely prefer Beehaw to stay in the Fediverse. While there are a lot of dorks out there in the wild, there are some communities that I’d really miss.
I just joined a couple of days ago, but your comment nails my perspective. Beehaw’s focus on building a small but positive community is what attracted me to it, especially after all the toxic behavior just assumed to be standard and acceptable on Reddit.
I think that ‘Star Trek - The Next Generation’ covered this very dilemma with (S2E18) Up The Long Ladder. In one hand you have stagnancy and in the other pure chaos. I don’t envy you for having to tackle issues like this because there is no perfect solution, but I would encourage you to find a balance. Balance is a prerequisite to longevity.
You would not have enjoyed holiday dinners at my house. While my parents were good people, you can’t pick your relatives. We had the infamous Uncle Tom and Aunt Janet, who would swallow anything and everything you had in the bathroom medicine cabinet, even if it landed them in the emergency room later. And Grandma, a devout catholic that spent every Sunday at church learning how to love thy neighbor, who would go on long cuss ridden tirades insulting and slurring on minorities. And then there was Uncle Pete, who was thrown out of Bob Evans on Easter Sunday for announcing to the entire dining room that ‘He could puke better than this sausage gravy’. I do actually miss Uncle Pete. He did have a hell of a way of getting his point across, and that sausage gravy was totally bunk.
While thinking about it all still raises my blood pressure even 40 years later, those moments brought their behaviors from my subconscious to my conscious where I could take notice of it. It did empower me to actively NOT be like that. I saw first-hand several of my future potential selves and chose to take a higher road. I find a bit of comfort in that. I wonder if I wasn’t exposed to those behaviors from a third person perspective, would I have been able to avoid them.
Oh, and sorry about dropping that bomb the other day. I was in a rare mood. I removed it as you rightfully requested of me. In my defense, I used the word appropriately, but I totally understand.
You seem like a decent enough fellow. Best of luck.
I think that ‘Star Trek - The Next Generation’ covered this very dilemma with (S2E18) Up The Long Ladder. …The one where the crew execute the clones that Planet A were making of them to make up for their lack of genetic diversity, and forced them to marry into Planet Ireland instead?
I feel like lots of thinking like this or adjacent to this is going on around the fediverse, and part of the problem we’re all encountering is that many or even most of us don’t really understand this “design space” of homely/kind/safe/wholesome/fulfilling online placed particularly well. And so we’re either reaching for established models (reddit/twitter etc) or expecting too much of new technologies (decentralisation and federation).
In the case of holiday meals and beehaw, while reading your post, my immediate thought was how it’s simultaneously a fantastic metaphor and an inapplicable one for social media. A holiday meal, I’d say, is defined by its rarity and specificity. Once a year, family members and close friends gather together for the purpose of being together. I don’t see that mapping onto online social media … like at all … however desirable that demeanor and vibe is desirable.
And while being kind and open etc is obviously a good aim for a social media space, so long as it is social media, which means open ended discussions/topics, (relatively) open membership, relative anonymity, constant activity, and, let’s be honest, some expectation of providing some form entertainment to lurkers … the personal bonds and purpose of a holiday meal just can’t exist. Which is a problem, IMO, that goes beyond ActivityPub, because the moment you make a social media space more closed or exclusive while trying to still be a form of social media, it will become quieter, duller and less compelling to users (for better or worse) and eventually fall into relative disuse and so seem to fail at social media.
If you then want to recast social media, you then, IMO, need to think a lot about formats, UIs, media types and framing and how people are presented and interact … like to a large extent … because this whole “sending text messages to each other in a public space” can only go so far (which is a big problem I personally have with the fediverse).
I say this not to dismiss your and Beehaw’s goals … but really just to say … “that’s great, but underestimating how hard this stuff can be would not serve you or beehaw well IMO”.
Hope it goes well though and will be curious to see what happens to beehaw!
A holiday meal, I’d say, is defined by its rarity and specificity. Once a year, family members and close friends gather together for the purpose of being together. I don’t see that mapping onto online social media[…]while being kind and open etc is obviously a good aim for a social media space, so long as it is social media, which means open ended discussions/topics, (relatively) open membership, relative anonymity, constant activity, and, let’s be honest, some expectation of providing some form entertainment to lurkers … the personal bonds and purpose of a holiday meal just can’t exist.
Familial relationships are the product of time-tested, intimate bonds. They can’t be manufactured, and attempting to do so is likelier to limit comfort and expression from users in the absence of functional knowledge of others’ boundaries. Social media should, ideally, encourage cordial free expression, dissent, and disagreement, when (1) the focus of those activities are on ideas rather than people (e.g., other users), and (2) those ideas are not harmful to any other person or people. I actually don’t think Beehaw is great at this currently, with the strong caveat that I also believe it is much, much better and more earnest in its endeavor to do so than any other alternative I’m aware of. But I fear further seclusion would be a move in the wrong direction.
the moment you make a social media space more closed or exclusive while trying to still be a form of social media, it will become quieter, duller and less compelling to users (for better or worse) and eventually fall into relative disuse and so seem to fail at social media.
Observing from my own experience here (and the admins would obviously be well-suited to prove otherwise), too much of the contributions to this community are weighted toward the admins and mods rather than general users. Discussions get decent traction, but I notice that many of the posts themselves are coming from the elevated accounts. If this is accurate, it’s a significant point of failure that would conceivably hasten the “fall into relative disuse” in the event that just a few of these power users are unable to contribute as prolifically. Federation helps fill this gap.
All this being said, I want to counter-balance my criticisms by extending my gratitude and admiration for the admins and mods who’ve made this community what it is. I have an account on Kbin as well that can view much more of the fediverse, but I spend roughly 85% of my time here on Beehaw because of the strength of the community (and, admittedly, to a lesser degree because there are no good kbin mobile apps). It’s clear to see the amount of time, effort, and diligence it takes to create this space, and I am extremely grateful for it. For my own sake, I hope that Beehaw remains here (or on another federated service), but whatever direction is chosen I wish the experiment enormous success.
I actually don’t think Beehaw is great at this currently, with the strong caveat that I also believe it is much, much better and more earnest in its endeavor to do so than any other alternative I’m aware of. But I fear further seclusion would be a move in the wrong direction.
I’m curious in what ways you think we could improve? Would you care to expand upon this?
I’ll try, hope this makes sense. As a leftist space, Beehaw is a bit of an echo chamber. On its own, this is kind of a neutral value, maybe even a positive one (we’ve seen with brutal transparency what “free speech” platforms actually are). But echo chambers are vulnerable to the creeping growth of some inhospitable characteristics (being dismissive, derisive, reductive, etc.) toward ideas outside the narrow lane of the chamber. We treat conclusions as foregone and perceived opposition as hostile. And that’s the main thrust: I firmly believe that internet culture, broadly, mistakes and/or conflates things like ignorance, diverging personal experience, or even sufficient inarticulateness as opposition and treats it accordingly.
One of the most frequent examples I see here is the devolution of a minor disagreement (there was a relatively recent example concerning the fairness of a news headline) into a hyperbolic declaration of someone’s overall character (e.g., “because of how you’ve conducted yourself in this conversation, or the ideas you’ve expressed, you probably would have supported the Nazis” as a demonstrative example). At other times, I’ve seen relatively harmless stubbornness responded to with blocks or bans, which felt extreme to me despite the fact that the stubbornness was indeed frustrating and potentially (but not actually, yet) malicious.
I want to be explicit that I don’t think any inclusive community is well-served by being tolerant of harmful ideas. Harmful ideas should be countered, blocked, banned, censored, and burned in a fire. But I’d like to see non-hostile opposition, ignorance, diverging personal experiences, etc. treated with more cordiality and grace up until the point that they are effectively exposed as malicious. I think there are good people with bad ideas (I’ve been one of them and expect to be again) who could learn and grow in a community like this with the right balance.
Thanks for elaborating. It’s tough to decide where is ‘too far’ and when someone is behaving in a way that if left unchecked results in a slow decline into a space where nice people no longer want to participate. We tend to err on the side of caution because we’ve seen how evaporative cooling can ruin a nice place, but with strong checks/balances to try and reduce/minimize inappropriately stepping in, as well as inappropriate deletions and bans. We’re human though, we make mistakes, and ultimately it’s important to us that we create a space we haven’t been able to find elsewhere and sometimes there just aren’t enough people with enough emotional bandwidth to do the messy work of differentiating between someone who’s just stubborn and misinformed, and someone who’s being malicious (let alone issues that crop up with neurodivergence and not understanding what nice behavior is).
I truly do wish we had enough bandwidth to provide more cordiality and grace to everyone. Speaking of which, if you or anyone else who does have emotional bandwidth, extra time, and passion for seeing places like this exist on the internet and wishes to step in and help us stick to our principles, we’d love the help 💜
I should acknowledge how easy it is for me to commentate from my position as spectator! You and the rest of the team have very clearly put a lot of research and thought into cultivating Beehaw and it shows. I’m very lucky that this was my gateway to the fediverse during last summer’s exodus.
I wish I could volunteer to help but I’m rather flaky and inconsistent with my online time, as it’s necessarily well down my list of priorities. If that still sounds like a situation I could contribute through, let me know.
Except no one came here thinking it was thanksgiving, they wanted a community center potluck
I do hope we stay federated, while I get that moderation is a pain for you Admins and better tools need to be developed, I think you all have been doing a very good job. Nearly all my interactions with the wider fedeverse we interact with have been positive or neutral, and I think it would be rather dead and boring here if it was just us. It’s nice to have diverse subscription feed where I can find posts on more than just the few communities here, especially slrpnk, Bajhaj, lemmy.ca, and midwest.social
The behavioral expectations of Beehaw are a lot like those of tildes.net, where I’m also a member. Although I thoroughly enjoy the conversations there, I also long for other types of content, content available in the fediverse. And Beehaw is, for me, the perfect place to access that content. Beehaw has a great community that generates good content and conversations, but it also allows me to browse other stuff from ‘all’ and interact with different people. I enjoy reading what other people think, even if they have a way of communicating that doesn’t jive all that well with the rest of Beehaw.
What I can imagine is that moderating Beehaw within the context of the fediverse is a pain in the ass. The burden on the admin and moderator team must be a lot bigger than if Beehaw was on its own.
I, personally, believe that we all will come to a comfortable consensus moving forward
This is a somewhat uncomfortable ellipsis for me. Can you be more specific about the emerging consensus? Last time I asked this question it went ignored.
Where are these discussions happening? On the beehaw Lemmy or elsewhere?
I only saw one thread alluding to this posted by a beehaw admin on Lemmy.ml.
Where are these discussions happening? On the beehaw Lemmy or elsewhere?
- Beehaw Discord
- Beehaw Matrix including admin only discussion
- Various
Where are these discussions happening?
They’ve happened here a couple of times on Beehaw. I suspect that there will be more of these discussions, here at Beehaw, in the future.
When the idea of beehaw leaving the fediverse comes up I see a few users from outside of beehaw get pretty upset about it. I wonder if this is some kind of FOMO reaction? Just food for thought.
Personally I think Beehaw needs other instances and the Fediverse needs Beehaw
Beehaw needs other instances much more than the fediverse needs Beehaw.
Agreed
I’m new to the fediverse and chose to join Beehaw because the community interactions feel positive like an active private forum that I’m on, but with the structural flexibility of a federated platform.
There is definitely a tone change between local communities and the outside federated feed, but I worry that secession and isolation will lead to community atrophy— it’s already a small instance and without the cross-pollination of outside users and content it may not have enough momentum to succeed
I don’t think the goal of Beehaw is momentum or growth, or at least that’s the way it’s seemed to me
I think the worry is less about growth, and more about dying out. Too much external input can drown out the local conversation, but also too little external input can put too much pressure on the members to generate content, leading to burnout and also killing conversations.
It’s a precarious balance between “so much that it gets out of control” and “so little that there is nothing left out”.
See my other comment on this thread, I think it applies to your comment too
Without substantial growth after being cut off from the activity of the fediverse, Beehaw would not be large enough to stave off serious atrophy. The lemmy/kbin end of the fediverse is already very slow to begin with.
Beehaw was around much before the current “population explosion” of the Fediverse, though, and by all accounts was doing just fine. Naturally it didn’t have as much content as it currently does, but the sort of reddit-esque content flood that some people seem to need really isn’t a requisite for sites to thrive.
I’m on a small lemmy/reddit -like content aggregator / forum that has maybe a few hundred users, and while it’s certainly quiet compared to Lemmy nowadays, it’s got a small active community and nobody feels like it would need more “volume” to be a nice place to be.
Yea for sure …
I’ve said it a few times in similar conversations before … the big-corp mega social media era (~2008-2023, Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Instagram) has had huge cultural effects on the internet that go way beyond whether you’re on one of the platforms or not and which will ripple into the future for a long while.
We’d all do well to consider what parts of that culture we carry in our expectations and behaviours … and the whole doom-scrolling through an all-encompassing feed as a form of entertainment expectation is a big one. Social media always needs to be a big place … is another one.
These aren’t all necessarily evil … but as universal expectations they certainly aren’t good either, IMO.
I have to be careful to not be an arsehole on the internet when I come to beehaw lol
Has anybody had a conversation about implementing non-federated communities or is that even a possibility with activitypub? I would love to have native beehaw communities that are only accessible by logged-in beehaw users, but still retain federation for some of my more niche communities that may not have a large enough audience here.
Although I could very easily just maintain my old account on a fediverse server alongside my beehaw account if beehaw ventures off into an entirely new direction.
When I read about the beehaw vision a few days ago, I fell in love, so I’m here for whatever y’all decide.
This seems ideal to me. Does Lemmy not support this setup?
there are and have been conversations around the fediverse about this very same concept or need. See, eg, a cousin comment in this thread on the same idea: https://lemmy.ml/comment/7026804
And the short answer is no … the fediverse basically sucks at providing such a thing … so enamoured is it with federation that localised communities are obviously a bit of an afterthought. Thing is people actually want and need more private or local spaces as well as the big public spaces. Its why all the old school forums are still kicking.
And the worst part is that federation offers a great opportunity to provide both in a really useful and seamless manner on a single platform. But neither lemmy nor mastodon have a feature for it (with mastodon lead dev actively opposing the idea it seems).
I have to believe it would be easy for lemmy to implement.
As a contrast, misskey and its forks such as firefish, catodon, iceshrimp etc (and yea, these names are a choice, in a good way I think), actually provide local only groups and people like them.
