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Does Beehaw benefit from federation? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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 :)

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Responses from those users are more likely to pendantic, overly argumentative, and unhelpful.

I’ve noticed a small uptick in responses like that (which, admittedly, may just be confirmation bias).

I think it might be due to the large influx of reddit refugees (full disclosure: I’m one, too). It takes a while to get used to the fact that the “atmosphere” of fediverse instances is different. It takes time for people to realize that this isn’t a toxic environment that encourages assholes. They’ll just keep on being hyper-defensive, confrontational, and/or deliberate misinterpreters of things while they focus on irrelevant points. After all, that was the norm on reddit for years.

Good users grow out of that. Unfortunately, some users just don’t want to. We have to take the bad with the good, though. Defederating completely would make Beehaw much less interesting and fun. The community just isn’t big enough by itself.

TL;DR: Yes, Beehaw benefits from federation. Federation has its drawbacks, but they are massively outweighed by the advantages.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think there is a very toxic trait that ex-Redditors need to shake off: every response to a comment DOES NOT need to be a rebuttal.

Agreeing is allowed, and I agree with you.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Good addition, and also a good example, because that was so common I didn’t even recognize it as a problem. I’m still unlearning a lot.

If a post/comment is sufficiently stupid, the stupidity is obvious and speaks for itself. I leave it alone. Of course, bigotry and hate speech can’t be tolerated and should be called out (plus reported, because Nazis and bigots can kiss my ass), but otherwise, I just ignore it and move on. In most cases, I think we help quite a bit by setting the tone and not arguing. As people see that negativity isn’t the norm, they’ll gradually change.

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

I think the problem is that there is less often something to be said if you agree. Every now and then you might have something to add that fleshes out the idea or adds additional context, but generally if I totally agree with a comment I just upvote it.

On the other hand, when you disagree with something your response will, by logical necessity, be different from the parent comment.

So if you want to prioritize "adding something novel" there's a logical bias towards comments that disagree since only some percentage of agreement will tick that box.

Otherwise you end up with a bunch of comments that literally or figuratively add up to "this".

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Don’t worry so much about being novel, then. Even a mere sentence of agreement or encouragement is nice for people to see - as long as it’s more thoughtful than just responding with “this”.