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.

  • ratboy@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    My whole experience of moving to lemmy has felt like when people from another state move to a new one and complain about how awful it is and force it to change into where they left. If people are so absplutely offended by the politics of its originators, go create your own social media and stop harassing the poor mods, especially if the mods of this particular instance are trying to make your experience more palatable.

    • CannaVet@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I settled on lemmy.world, but yeah 90% of the lemmy related discussion I see is “Why doesn’t this work like Reddit and when can I expect it to work like Reddit?”

      I’ve tried to do my part in explaining this isn’t meant to be Reddit, but I’m already seeing an increase in hostility directed at devs for the lack of central authority (which is the thing they’re fleeing in the first place but fuck me for pointing that out lol.)

      • SterlingVapor@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Hey server buddy!

        I think it’s a mindset - with a company at the head, if you don’t like the product, you should complain.

        They need to understand this isn’t a product - it’s a project. It’s not mature yet, and it’s trying to solve a very difficult problem - how do you make social media healthier and more resistant to exploitation. The design they’ve settled on is complex and ambitious, and I’m pretty impressed it’s been able to scale up this well

        All that being said, the main complaint I’ve noticed (and I think is valid and it often gets dismissed) - to sign up users are given a choice (which server to join), and to make an informed choice there’s a minimum of a few pages of required reading

        It definitely matters, and the way you’re presented this choice is pretty overwhelming

        I’m working on a Lemmy client, and my thought is this - break up the options. Give users a choice of 3-5 options with a “next” button and a search option.

        Another is the difficulty of finding and subscribing to communities - I’ve noticed a huge improvement with some recent changes, but there’s always more that can be done

        Anything else you’ve noticed? Particularly if it’s something to keep in mind as I write the app

        • renard_roux@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I just migrated from Reddit, and liked what I read about BeeHaw. Signup was a bit confusing, but eventually just sent an email to the team, wrote a bit about myself (education, family, interested, political leanings, probably massively oversharing 😅), and got an invite a few minutes later.

          So far I really like the tone in here, and especially the quality of the comments. Feels like Reddit at its best, nice and helpful people.

          I was on Reddit for 15 years (plus a few years lurking), and it’s been my largest casual time-sink throughout. Leaving sucks. In the end, I couldn’t accept losing my Android client — 10 year anniversary with Relay a few days ago — the thought of having to use the official app made me gag, as probably 95% of my Reddit time is on mobile. So I left for BeeHaw/Lemmy, and now I have to work with something that’s (from a UX standpoint) probably even worse 😅

          It’s the principle, though; they’re fucking over their users so incredibly hard, and I don’t want to be a part of that anymore. Even if that means having to use a platform that isn’t mature yet. Fuck it, I’ve been here before, and I can cope with having to start over again. I hope Lemmy can get to a point where there’s a great experience to be had on mobile (I’m currently on/in Jerboa, btw). Maybe you’re the one to fix it? 😍

          So — a few things that I’m struggling with that might be worth considering for your app:

          • The ability to hide read/upvoted posts! This is my main pain point, by a very wide margin. As a Relay user, I’m used to a fresh screen with fresh new posts every time I open the app. Not so in Jerboa. Open app, and there is (potentially) a very long scroll ahead of me too get past posts I’ve already read and upvoted. I can look for upvotes, but I don’t upvotes everything, so not a perfect indicator. The only functional one seems to be a slightly greyed-out post title (dark theme). My current understanding (very limited, granted) is that this is a Lemmy thing in general, not just Jerboa. Something about lacking the ability to react to a post being previously viewed æ upvoted? Either way, I’d love a setting that would let me hide all posts that I’ve upvoted, or hide all posts that I’ve read (clicked). Also the ability to manually hide a post from the main list view (get rid of something without having to upvoted or click on/into). In combination with a Refresh-button, maybe?

          • Better options for sorting posts (newest / popular / etc.). Probably also a Lemmy thing. Sorry, this seems to be there already, I’d just missed it somehow.

          • Not having to manually scroll this text box up constantly because what I’m typing is disappearing behind the keyboard. Seriously, Jerboa? 😑

          • The ability to hide the downvote button, probably on a per-instance basis, as some allow downvotes, and some don’t.

          • The ability to turn off excerpts on the front page.

          Sorry, have to go to a meeting, will try to come back to this later and add more suggestions 😊

          Good luck with the app! Can’t wait to see it 😃 It’s for Android, right? 😬

      • solstice@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I just want a super easy clean simple interface which is what attracted me to reddit in the first place. I feel like anything more complicated than “simple” is a step in the wrong direction. I’ll withhold judgment for a while until I’ve settled in but like many other new users I’m finding the learning curve challenging.

        • ratboy@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I don’t know that the developers of lemmy intended this to be a space mirroring reddit, nor did they expect a mass exodus of users from reddit jumping on to lemmy.

        • CannaVet@lemmy.world
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          That’s my entire point though - You’re asking for a Reddit clone, and Lemmy isn’t meant to be a Reddit clone. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, but people need to stop demanding the devs shift gears and make it a Reddit clone.

          • solstice@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I disagree that I’m asking for a reddit clone. I’m saying sites like reddit and google were very successful in large part due to their extremely clean minimalist user friendly design. In an era where everything now “just works” it seems like a regression to increase complications.

        • GONADS125@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I would recommend Jerboa for Lemmy if you’re on android/Google play. I’ve got it in list view with the font size customized to my liking and I think that it’s a very streamlined and simple feel, reminding me of the early Alien Blue days on IOS.

          As a transplant from reddit myself, I am loving my experience with Lemmy thru this app. Still taking some getting used to tho.

    • reric88@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I recently moved here and through my minimal interaction so far, I love it. I’m all about positive treatment and inclusion. I have only made two posts (as a somewhat personal experiment to test the waters) which would not have had any attention on Reddit, and people actually talked and congratulated me, which was a very weird but welcome experience.

      And I love that the downvote arrow is removed in order to promote discussion rather than just vote and move on.

      A service can always improve and get better in some ways, but the stance of beehaw is perfect imo

      • ratboy@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I agree with your sentiments! I love the engagement outside of all of these discussions and absolute flood of “how do I do xyz” and “it would be better if…” on like every single community and every post lol.

        I want access to lemmygrad so I created another account, but overall I do like how beehaw is structured and all things considered I’m surprised at how much people are being critical of it, especially with Alyaza and Gaywallets very patient and thoughtful responses.

        More what I’m getting at, though, in terms of trying to change lemmy is changing the culture of it. Regardless of where they are on the spectrum, it seems like most people on lemmy have been some flavor of leftist, and I could be wrong, but holy cow there are a TON of people "both sides"ing and using the example of discussion around gender affirming Healthcare not being a good convo to have here as something infringing on their free speech as if those conversations aren’t dogwhistles for transphobia. People can happily move to other centrist instances, or ones like exploding-heads if they want to engage in that crap. Again, I’m a newb here and I could be off and maybe this has always been a thing, but I was on mastodon years ago which is similar and I wasn’t too far off

        I think in terms of technical development, of course there’s always room for improvement but I also feel that some things are the way they are for a reason, and endless expansion might not be what the developers want, over a more cohesive, personal community. I go both ways on that.

    • Ataraxia@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Like I never even thought about that aspect and honestly I don’t care as long as I’m not funding violence and hatred. And if that were the case I’d leave. It makes no sense to tell someone how to run their instance. It’s theirs.