this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Beehaw Support

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Support and meta community for Beehaw. Ask your questions about the community, technical issues, and other such things here.

A brief FAQ for lurkers and new users can be found here.

Our June 2023 financial update is here.

For a refresher on our philosophy, see also What is Beehaw?, The spirit of the rules, and Beehaw is a Community


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That’s a very sensible approach IMHO and resonates in unison with my own opinions on the matter, so I couldn’t be happier about this post!

I have to say that I was a bit worried after the creation of /c/socialism, not because of the ideology itself (which, to be fair, is probably one of the political groups I feel the closest to, but that’s not the issue), but because I was worried that it was an “official endorsement” and political affiliation of Beehaw, and would create drama, discourse or echo chambers.

This post proves that it was not the case or even the intention, and that’s really reassuring. It might still cause issues as people from other political sides (rightly) ask for other communities to be created, which is not a problem in itself, but might still create conflict and discontent in either side.

The explanation in this post makes me quite confident that you’ll be able to handle these challenges in a smart and sensible way, though. Thank you for that, admins! I’m glad that I picked the instance I did.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

From my perspective, I would say that Beehaw has somewhat of a leftward inclination, but overall, the only real official stance Beehaw has is to focus on being nice and cultivating a welcoming community that is also safe for minorities, which is really the moderation standard applied to everyone regardless of affiliation.

For me, it's fair enough if people have conflicting views and/or express their views in ways one might consider abrasive. I have no interest in policing people's tone. When they violate the main intention of this community and harm others, on the other hand, then it becomes important to do something about it, and I think Beehaw does a good job of applying that standard.

The biggest thing though is that the users play a pivotal role in how this culture and community manifest, and it's really to their credit if others find this place a welcoming place to be(e). It's just made better if admins are people we can trust to support that.

In any case, I hope you enjoy your time here. 🐝

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I think socialism is a very broad subject and most people agree that some sort of group care is important in both politics and personal community life. Though, I agree with you that this subject, like many other political labels, often gets overrun by extremists. Maybe we just need a bigger dictionary to prevent inherit bias or enforce a more apolitical and centrist point of view for online discussions.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I think its interesting that most regular people even who describe themselves as socially or fiscally conservative, when it comes to very specific situations/policies, favour more "progressive" actions and outcomes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

apoliticalism and centrism inherently supports and reinforces the status quo. There is no thing as such, which is why I am a bit worried when it comes to this community and the stance of beehaw, as a new person. I as a queer person am sorta kinda allowed to be protected of hate-speech here but at the same time people are allowed to promote capitalism/liberalism/conervatism etc which directly impacts my human rights, health and safety in real-life? I'm confused

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If someone is advocating for anything which directly impacts your human rights, health, or safety in real-life they are by definition speaking hate. However, there are levels of hate speech and there's a lot to be said about the intent of the person speaking it. Someone may have internalized a deeply problematic viewpoint but not understand why it is problematic. If they go onto this website and try to proselytize it and refuse to listen to people from the affected community who raise concerns and help to explain why it is problematic policy, they are simply not welcome here. We also aren't going to punish people for being intolerant of people entering and proselytizing their uninformed viewpoints nor are we going to saddle any of you with the educational burden to do so.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

[...]directly impacts your human rights, health, or safety in real-life they are by definition speaking hate<

but these human rights aren't something dictated by the universe like physics, but concepts created by humans and its these that are constantly getting challenged for better or worse depending on your political stance. And by saying you are apolitical or centrist means that there should be no change. Which directly contradicts your decision to protect minorities from hate-speech which would not be needed if the status-quo already includes this in the way you as admins or members of the community understand and define these concepts. So you are already taking a side

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I want to point out that apolitical and centrist are different concepts, but I don't want to get caught up in specific nomenclature. I tried to do my best to outline what nice behavior is, how we're an explicitly safe space, and what criteria we're looking for when we talk about hate speech in the posts linked in the sidebar. If what's outlined isn't good enough for you to understand our goals, I'd suggest sitting back and observing our culture before deciding if its the right space for you.

You're right that we are explicitly taking a side, being a safe space for minorities is explicitly taking the side of minorities. But this is widely compatible with every political stance that doesn't center or promote hate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think i'll follow your suggestion and I appreciate the replies! I can only imagine how busy you all must be these days

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And yet extremism just divides people and distracts them from real problems pitting all of the peasants about non issues.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Is that so? To me it seems quite the contrary, advocating for incremental change of superficial problems without tackling the root all inside the boundaries of the status-quo system all the while the 0,1% are profiting off of the whole process. And in the worst case the change comes too late(climate change) or just resurfaces in another form later on(homophobia->transphobia). Not to mention the damage/suffering that constantly occurs in the meantime. Labeling a certain ideology or system of values as extreme as a means to disregard or devalue it is frankly textbook reactonary, meant to scare people into reinforcing the status-quo. As an example, abolitionists were considered extremists back then. At some point the same could be said about feminists fighting for equal rights. In both of these examples it wasn't incremential change(treat your slaves better) or peaceful demonstration that led to the abolition or gave women the rights to vote. It was done by contemporary "extremists" having to literally fight for it