Why lemmy.world should not defederate from beehaw.org.
What defederating would mean:
We won't see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.
Pros:
There is less confusion, you can't respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.
Cons:
We won't be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won't see any of our content.
Summary
Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our 'front page').
beehaw.org users already can't see our posts/comments anywhere so it's not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn't really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.
Now im sitting here wondering if I offended anyone over there lol. It's hard to imagine, but since I've seen no bad actors myself, I'm starting to think that it's possible I did, unknowingly, with zero intent to do so, and they just have a really strict thing going on. I doubt it's the case, or I hope not at least.
The first problem was actual trolls using were using lemmy.world's open and automated registration (beehaw makes you write why you want to join and manually approves registrations based on that) to troll Beehaw.
The second problem was that the moderation tools aren't mature enough yet to deal with problem one with anything between manually banning every troll (which will immediately come back by creating another lemmy.world account) and total defederation from the instances most of those trolls are coming from.
Because Beehaw's mission statement is to be a safe space, it was decided to go with the defederation option.
However, the defederation isn't planned to be permanent. Improvements in mod tools and/or maturing of communities are said to be reasons to refederate again.
Doubtful you offended anyone. I think beehaw was seeing serious things like child porn and anti-LGBT posts, and traced them back to lemmy.world or the other one.
OK thanks for reassuring me, I know people are pretty sensitive anymore, and I'm out of the loop ftmp on PC culture, and while I'm extremely progressive in every facet of my life, I still worry...but I think that's just a me problem tbh.
I didn't suggest you were being impolite. I said you didn't back up your stance so we can't judge whether it's incorrect or not. It's literally just an assertion you made without any attempt to back it up.
The obvious potential error in your stance-- again, which you have not even attempted to support-- is that this was to prevent "disagreements". Can you support that? Do you make a distinction between a disagreement and trolling and harassment, or are all of those lumped together for you?
C'mon man; you cared enough to make the assertion, support it.
It's been explicitly clear that beehaw's very few moderators would protect their users from bigots spreading hate online. It sucks that better defederation options don't exist yet within the platform but to boil down to softy liberals is so lazy and part of the problem.
The problem is the bigots are so stupid and deluded that they don't perceive their actions as hate, but rather justified politically motivated actions. Then they turn around and misconstrue their hate as protected speech or political protest. They're too dumb or willfully ignorant to even comprehend the difference between hate and healthy discourse.
It isn't stupidity or ignorance. It's a deliberate tactic used in bad faith. It's the tactic of "I'm not racist but..." before spewing racist garbage. They know their arguments are bigoted and hateful, but they also believe it doesn't matter because their targets are subhuman and not worthy of protection of any kind.
What I meant was that they are stupid for falling into such ignorant beliefs, and delusional in their justification for their actions. Yes, they know they're racist. But they believe they are somehow morally justified (and some morally compelled!) to harrass others.
I was being tongue-in-cheek, but I agree with you and that's what I was trying to allude to.
There are definitely people who don't think what they are saying is bigoted due to ignorance or failure to understand why what they say is hurtful or wrong - i've met a fair few.
There are also people who know that its bigoted, and refuse to care because believe their bigotry is justified, despite the harm that it causes. - i've also met some people like that.
Nobody has even shown any evidence of what posts are so disruptive and you're completely ready to boil it down to 'they believe their targets are subhuman'.
They were struggling with moderation, and a disproportionate number of people they were addressing were coming from those two instances, which happen to have open registration.
One of the benefits of federation is the ability to choose your sources. If one doesn’t fit your moderation style you remove it. It’s a feature, not a minus. Expect more of this until the mod tools mature and trolls make homes among the open servers.
When you have a group that don’t respect the rules and you don’t want to lower yourself to their level of discussion, you cut them out. Why would they be tolerated? And who is at fault here? The people wanting civility or the trolls causing issues? Why are you blaming the people defending themselves?
Beehaw is aiming for zero trolls, I don't think they care whether the trolls come with some good people too. They're currently in a position to have zero trolls and I think it's a good goal to strive for
Lemmy currently has several hundred instances, and Beehaw defederated from two of them. They said in their post that they were spending a lot of time dealing with problem posts, and almost all came from those two instances.
And what's the problem? I personally think trying to make a troll -free place on the Internet is doomed to failure unless they close the whole world out, but it's their goal and I certainly support them giving it a shot.
This is all a big experiment, and it's wonderful that different approaches are being tried. We should support that, not piss on it.
I've seen people make analogies between Lemmy instances and email servers, but I don't think it's a great comparison. I think a better one would be ports on a trade route in the old sailing ship days. People are from different port cities, but they get on a ship and go to other ports and trade/interact with the people there.
So with that analogy, the port city of Beehaw is one with more restrictive laws about behavior: if you aren't generally respectful of others, they toss you out. There was a sudden influx at Beehaw of crowded ships from the ports of Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works, both ports with less restrictive, more wild west attitudes. They found that their sheriffs were spending all their time tossing people who came from ships with one of those two flags, so they decided not to let those ships dock at their port anymore, or let their ships dock at those ports, for now.