This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.

Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.

Two months on, I’m wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I’m just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?

  • acastcandream@beehaw.org
    18·
    1 year ago

    Blocking someone because they don’t agree with you telling them they are “absolutely wrong” isn’t civil or rational discourse

    Who says that is the objective of blocking and why should I extend that courtesy to people who are behaving neither civilly nor rationally?

    If I go to a bar and someone next to me keeps chiming in on my conversations with homophobic takes, I’m going to pick up my beer and move away from them (block them). What moral imperative do I have to give them the time of day, and how does letting them constantly shoehorn bigotry into my discussions undermine “civil and rational discourse”? If that person keeps doing this to people, is the bar owner required to allow them to stay, or can they show them the door?

    Calls for civility, free speech arguments, etc. are all cudgels used by people who want to go where they want and say what they want without scrutiny and I for one have no desire to adhere to some arbitrary moral standard imposed on me by people who want to behave that way. If you want to behave like an ass and pursue me, then I’m cutting you out of my life. No one would blame me at a bar, why should they on my favorite gaming forums?

      • PastelDust@beehaw.org
        13·
        1 year ago

        I’m curious why you feel the need to constantly chime in as much as possible to prove that lemmy.world is totally safe and wonderful. It speaks for itself that it is not. Why badger and harass people further to sell this? You made your point, when is enough enough? We deserve to have discourse without this being shoved down our throats. At one point lemmy.world claimed it wanted to be the biggest instance be damned the consequences, which included opening the floodgates and allowing anyone to join freely, and that invites all kinds of people in that aren’t going to act in good faith, trolls, etc…

        Now all of the sudden the message is apparently different and there is a huge problem for you all when people in a separate space so much as try to have a discussion about their experiences. That doesn’t sit right with me. There are so many users on there who regularly attack beehaw for no reason, unprovoked and nothing is done about that either.

        There’s still comments up about the defederation in regards to how lemmy.world users feel about beehaw: “Hopefully beehaw dies off quickly.” “Yeah, the level of entitlement is insane.” “It’s quite literally free-loading off other instances though. Not just in the content sense, but also the actual monetary cost of the image hosting, etc.”

        These are just 3 examples. Glossing over all of these issues and trying to paint everything in a good light is just totally dishonest and absurd.

      • acastcandream@beehaw.org
        11·
        1 year ago

        Glad to hear it. I think too many mods/admins fall into the trappings of free speech arguments and “letting healthy dialogue happen” because it’s an ideal that we’ve all sort of internalized, often to our own detriment because we don’t want to appear “too biased” or like “power tripping jannies.” The reality is it’s a pretty simple equation: if someone is sufficiently disruptive that’s plenty of reason to remove them.