I think that if we defederated, Lemmy would be much worse off for it. I think we’d also be a lot slower, and I’d be checking it a lot less.
Beehaw brings something to Lemmy that Lemmy really needs. It’s leftist, but it’s also very compassion-focused, and we kind of lack that elsewhere. The rest of the otherwise kind of similar communities largely lack the spirit of getting along in good faith that I see here.
Like, what other community do you ever see people responding to hostility by reminding people where they are and it actually mattering? People seem to largely respect the space. Not to say it doesn’t ever have a need for moderation, it clearly does and y’all do a great job, but with that moderation it manages to be an exemplary space.
It would be a shame for Lemmy to lose that positive influence and that good example. And it would leave the more lefty-leaning options kind of… meh.
But it also really helps to bulk out the experience of using Beehaw. We don’t get that many posts, so it’s nice to be able to go to subscribed or all instead of just local. It’d definitely be a bummer to lose that.
Anyway, I think you’re much closer to your goal than you might see while you’re on the moderating and administrating end. You see all the nasty stuff up close, but we get to see the result. And compared to the rest of the internet, it’s an oasis.
I’d prefer if you guys stayed in the fedi, but this is probably the 10th time you guys have asked this same question on if you should stay. If you have to keep asking, I think you know the answer. No need to ask an 11th time.
I think it’s simply an ongoing thought process. Just like the threads debate. Personally I think these are today’s questions to shape future society. Asking it over and over is just an impulse to try and resolve it.
Its an on going discussion and not a take our ball and go home situation. I think its important to gather support and insight with a big decision and not play dictator. Also, now the hectic holiday season is mostly over in the states, others opinions may differ from before.
This is more of an internal conversation, so I can totally see why this topic coming up yet again is a bit much for the rest of the fediverse. I have to admit, reading your comment made laugh though, thanks for that.
Shut your whore mouth! On occasion, a post might just slip by the assholes. Make another blanket statement like that and I’ll swat your grandma live on 8chan.
If Beehaw chooses to leave the fediverse and defederate everyone, I wish them all the best, but I know I personally will not be joining.
I’ve had enough of walled gardens and private spaces, I chose the fediverse because Reddit started forcing decisions I didn’t like, like which apps I could use or how I interact with the communities I enjoy. The fediverse allows me the choice to choose what communities I want to subscribe to on my own terms, and that isn’t something I want to let go of easily.
There are downsides, there is noise, but that’s the role of hosting social media. It’s inevitable that as a community grows with more people who enjoy it, that there will also be people who want to tear it down. To me, that’s just a fact of the internet.
I’ll be disappointed, Beehaw is what inspired me to set up my instance and my communities and nurture my tiny instance - but I still believe in the fediverse. Welcoming differing opinions - not shutting them out.
This. I like Beehaw and I respect it’s nature. I even maintain an account here just to separate my more boisterous posting personality from the one that I feel safer in expressing on Beehaw. While I do external-post from my other account; that’s usually to respond to either Beehaw users not behaving in a way I feel is consistent with Beehaw values or to address others from external instances.
But I don’t want to see Beehaw closing it’s doors to the fediverse. If your staff team is getting swamped, you’re getting overwhelmed as admins, etc…then find more staff. You literally have the hugest pool of nice people right here on Beehaw, and I’m sure everyone who regularly posts here would likely be highly skilled at moderating somewhere on Beehaw if needed. Most of the time, Beehaw does not attract nasty people, and the hard work of the moderation done here shows.
Spread the load. Don’t defederate or give up on Fediverse. Invest in mental health buffs for your moderation team as needed if necessary!
A big general problem I have with the fediverse (as do others I’ve spoken to) is that it affords not real capacity to foster both private and public spaces with good and convenient means of moving and connecting with people between them. From the lack of truly private DMs, to no private group chats or local only spaces … the whole idea of private spaces for when people want them seems to be absent from the fediverse creators and it’s a significant gap IMO.
In the case of lemmy, I can imagine private communities being rather useful and pleasant. That is, communities visible only by people who are members or who have subscribed, with membership being optionally open or closed to being invite only or requiring approval or something similar. Having both federated and local-only versions of these would also probably be nice.
The useful part would be that you could meet people/accounts in private spaces and then see the same person/account in public too, which should only foster community creation through personal connections and discovery.
Then, whenever people need a quieter and more private space for a particular conversation or topic, they can take discussion out from the public and shield it in private. While you might argue that this would stifle discussion (and I see your point), I think there’s a relatively natural equilibrium between our needs for public and noisy engagement and quiet/safe/private interactions. I think people would naturally move between these spaces as they need.
I’m pretty nostalgic for forums myself but while they are great for smaller communities centered around a specific topic, they were really difficult to navigate when it comes to larger general communities IMHO. Fediverse with its reddit-like structure has an advantage here, and I personally like the idea of AP and multiple smaller communities interacting. We just need better tech and UI.
I dunno whats the official definition, I just remember the old (phpbb) forums having a complex roles structure and privileges so a subset of community would often have access to subforums or threads that other people can’t see. You’d have a public face of the forum and then private categories within it that wouldn’t be visible from outside.
This is more of a reddit-like news bulletin where everything is public and open by default - in the case of fediverse even more so since everything automatically gets pushed to other servers that you have no control over.
I think that’s a great description, in part it’s what drew me here with the idea that the discussions and topics are always from a kind and informational perspective, without the common “sneer tone” that can so often overtake conversations on the internet.
Personally my experience with users on Beehaw has been entirely kind, thoughtful, and full of knowledgeable people, whatever the topic may be. The few poor experiences I have had here were from outside instances, it’s true, and I can’t imagine just how much of that you all must have to deal with. But I have also had just as many incredibly thoughtful interactions from some federated instances as well, generally the (seemingly) smaller instances. I feel like maybe every 1 in 10 comments through the posts I go to read in All might have be negative or purposeful troll, but all the rest are at least coming from a perspective that I can understand even if I may not agree - but it’s always worth engaging because it drives good thoughtful conversation.
I have an account on slrpnk that is federated with lemmy.world and it can be unbearable to use sometimes - the slrpnk community itself is wonderful, but lemmy.world dominates the All feed, and lemmy.world comments… it’s a mix of dismissive and instigative. I feel like every 1 in 10 comments might be coming from a kind and thoughtful perspective. Comments are immediately downvoted, often times there’s comments no more than a sentence long through a whole thread. Except for moderators, but there’s just a tone that I can’t quite place among reading the interactions that feels… maybe not entirely welcoming? However I also understand they have a lot going on there, and certainly some history I’m missing.
Anyway, that’s a long way of saying I really, really value both the Beehaw community & mods and our set of instances, even if there may be a few that still have problems that I don’t get to see as a regular user. But I do know that I value all of your comments enough to see what you have to say and get to know my internet friends - Chris, your determination for community is inspiring and you’ve got some cool hobbies! And the few times I have seen moderator intervention and extended discussion, I’ve yet to come across an example where I think any of you handled it poorly. (All of you) Your contributions here are more than mod team leaders when you need to be, you feel like community members through and through - which unfortunately feels rare for a mod team!
Regarding federation and instances - maybe the family analogy is something that can be adapted? Here on local we are the immediate family but the instances that I appreciate the most I still feel are cousins. I think many of them appreciate us as well. Unfortunately, I think the negative users overall will not be prevented from their bad habit by a sidebar and our philosophy. With that in mind I think federation with servers that focus on sharing knowledge is the most important.
From the recent post made on I think lemmy.ml regarding Beehaw’s federation - the reception was terrible. It felt terrible to read. But looking through the comments, I would say over 80% of them at least had to be lemmy.world users who have never even interacted here - or if they did were soon defederated from and clearly salty about it, all of those getting ~30-50 upvotes. It was a literal circlejerk about our instance coming from a flawed or probably just intentionally wrong perspective. Information like a game of telephone. If it weren’t so inflammatory it would have been funny, given my actual experiences here.
However, the rest of the comments though were from a wide, wide array of instances saying they would miss our presence, with it being about a 50/50 split from lemmy.ml itself. And each instance I happened to see that felt positively about us, I likewise had only ever had good interactions from members of those instances as well.
Luckily, I had already seen just how awful lemmy.world can really be, as I mentioned I’d created my slrpnk account just a few weeks ago which is actually where I saw that post, maybe just last week or so? Suffice to say, the reception from them was not surprising in the least because to me it seems clear the intent is to tear down, not lift up. You cannot share knowledge in a tear down community because no matter what, somehow your knowledge is wrong.
Users here just have a completely different intention and way of using and interacting with the internet. Users on other smaller instances feel like that intention is there too. We share knowledge with the intent of further gaining and growing our ideas and abilities and because it helps another member of our community. That is becoming more and more rare on the web and I really value our presence in the fediverse and I believe that there are others that do too.
Whatever the future may hold for our instance, I’ll likely migrate with and keep it as part of my sites, but I do worry about the continued level of engagement over time. On the other hand, I realize I don’t like the wider fediverse as much as I thought I did after my last month or so looking around on other accounts. (I definitely need to curate better, though). Anyway, I saw this post 14 minutes in and I only got distracted once so… Happy new year to all and I look forward to our next interaction!
Just stopping in to say this is a really well thought out response and you’ve more or less nailed all the salient points. We greatly appreciate thoughtful feedback like this, thank you for being a part of our community 💜
I came to Beehaw wanting a replacement for orangesite™. However, I’ve since decided that I care a lot less about having a massive network and more about just having a positive community of strangers to talk to about my life and interests. In that respect I’d totally be open to a smaller platform. Whether that’d be Beehaw or somewhere else, I don’t know. But Beehaw leaving the Fediverse wouldn’t be the dealbreaker for me that I once though it would.
All that said, I’d definitely prefer Beehaw to stay in the Fediverse. While there are a lot of dorks out there in the wild, there are some communities that I’d really miss.
I just joined a couple of days ago, but your comment nails my perspective. Beehaw’s focus on building a small but positive community is what attracted me to it, especially after all the toxic behavior just assumed to be standard and acceptable on Reddit.
These movies aren’t just any wish fulfillment, they’re meant to be a panacea that assures the viewer that she made the right choice in being a stay-at-home mom, and that she would have regretted pursuing her career.
I want a Hallmark movie where a high-powered executive comes back to his hometown, helps save the Christmas tree lighting ceremony, and decides to leave his career to be with his shortstack tomboy wife and be her himbo kept husband on her ranch.
I refuse to use the Brave browser, and I was prepared to abandon Firefox, over then-CEO Brendan Eich’s $1000 donation in support of California’s proposition 8 (banning same-sex marriage). I will never forgive the supporters of that proposition. I will not knowingly support their businesses.
I’ve lost all respect for Scott Adams (of the Dilbert comic strip) and Kelsey Grammar (Frasier actor). Their continued support for Donald Trump is damning.
I used to love reddit. Especially because it was so diverse. So many communities living side by side generally pretty well (except the well-known toxic communities of course that we all knew to stay away from). And the everything-goes attitude, like people discussing religion on the same site as people exhibiting their sex lives :P I used to love seeing that kind of diversity (ok and the exhibitionism too, I admit 🤭, I’m just into that.). I just loved the everything-goes feeling about it.
But two things went wrong as I see it. One was that US society got more and more polarised and toxic due to Trump and most of reddit’s users are from the US. Even the people who used to be pretty nice are so triggered by anything you say “wrong”, they always think you’re trying to pull them into an argument for the “other side”. It’s like they have PTSD from being constantly attacked by the other side and it causes that knee-jerk reaction on anything that doesn’t fall 100% into their narrative. I got so sick and tired of that hostility especially because I was not used to it locally. That thing you mention, where you say something and someone always claims you’re making it up to make a point or karma or whatever is so familiar and tiring.
And the other thing was of course that idiot spez. Trying to clean up reddit for his precious investors by removing (or locking away) anything not above the belt, killing third-party apps, etc. I still go there once in a while to gather some information but I stay away from discussions and I rotate my accounts every couple of months. So I don’t give a crap about karma because I kill my accounts anyway. In fact even when I did have a long-term account I used to “shreddit” it every couple of months so karma was not something I ever cared about.
The sad thing is that this Trump toxicity has now even blown over to my country (Holland). They elected a total fascist 2 months ago and the same thing is happening there now, there are lots of people claiming they were never heard and now their hero is going to drain the swamp and kick out all the refugees and all that same old blahblah. Several of my “friends” were caught up in this BS and I’ve had to break off all contact with them. 😡
Even Lemmy is not free from this, I joined lemmy.ml for a while but I found it pretty toxic too. Lemmy.world looked similar. This is why I came here and it’s been great so far.
Reddit’s always had a toxicity problem (see: Ellen Pao), but there was definitely a shift in 2015. It lines up with the political divide, but I think it was just a symptom of a larger problem. Because of a certain subreddit, a lot of new people were introduced to reddit. When they finally released an official app (lol, or rather they stole it and rebranded it as their own), there was a massive influx of users.
I’m not all “reddit was better when there were fewer users” because it wasn’t. But there was a cultural shift when it became much more widely promoted by app stores and all. It got users from all kinds of backgrounds, but it also got… I don’t know. Different. Maybe oversaturated, which kind of made it difficult to find more quality content.
The only good thing about reddit toward the end of my original time with it (I’ve been browsing lately, but not much because the app fucking sucks*) was niche communities, some funny content creators, and some NSFW subs (some of which have been absolutely gutted, if not banned entirely, since the incident).
A lot of those subs are irreplaceable. There’s just too much previous content and a mass of users that won’t ever migrate to something like Lemmy. Niche communities can still be kind of successful here due to inherently less users, but it still lacks diversity because those niche subs still had a really healthy dose of active users, which often exceeded the amount of users subscribed to some popular Lemmy communities.
A lot of them started turning to shit earlier, but they were manageable with filters and what have you. Plus the good mods were really good. Some left, some stayed, but the divide kind of fucked a lot of subs.
Technically, there are other apps you can still use on Android without needing a paid subscription (eg. RedReader, Stealth, patching with Revanced), but they can be a bit finicky sometimes. Although, so can the official one, so it doesn’t make much of a difference.
I don’t believe this is a US problem. Dates do match with all the Trump nonsense but it happened pretty much worldwide. Look at UK, Australia, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico. All of them had the same divide in society with politics at the center. I think it’s social media and the attention-hungry algorithms that do not care about the side effects. That is what is pulling people apart. Spending hours a day in an indoctrination environment just because ‘clicks and ads and $$’. Laws to prevent this are waaaay too late. Damage is done. And what horrible damage these things did… What horrible damage these people did… And are still doing unchecked.
Honestly, there is so much art and so many services and tools out there, that I try to avoid sending money towards ones made by shitty people.
I loved HP as a kid, but I’m not going to support JKR’s dullard takes on trans people. It’s clear she knows literally nothing beyond what her transphobic friend and their wine club “LGB Alliance” of straight white women tell her, but she still feels the need to parrot it online in front of millions of people. And guess what? There are other books about magic out there.
In terms of my judgement criteria, it’s not some fixed system, but my 2 main considerations are:
How much does a bad person benefit financially from the product?
How much are bad people responsible for the creation of the product?
Generally-speaking, if either of those can be answered with “A lot”, I avoid it.
So for instance, in the case of Hogwarts: Legacy, while JKR wasn’t responsible for making the product almost at all, she publicly indicated that she was making a lot of money from it, so I did not purchase it.
Ditto for AWS; once I was able to afford a cheap refurb server, I shut down my AWS accounts and been self-hosting everything.
This, I think, may explain a lot of that mentality too. People tend to hyper-focus on things that stand out, and negative things stand out. Spending enough time steeping in that feeling definitely seems to be connected to rising levels of meaningless cynicism and jackassery.
I do think there’s also something to be said for people who spend their whole lives glued to social media generally having pretty boring experiences when they’re not being spoon-fed dopamine. If you don’t go out and have your own adventures, the adventures you see in fiction are the only ones you’ll be familiar with. It’s hardly surprising that they’re so incredulous of the stories of people who are getting out there and living life.
Doesn’t take much bad to spoil the good, to me at least and OP it seems. Only so much letting go I can do and it’s mostly focused on the state of the world rn
I noticed the same a couple months ago. After the API shutdown stuff happened, I largely left reddit. I would only go there for things I needed, like information and news related to my field.
But in October, I started going back more, and even commenting. And almost immediately, I got the “well ackshually…” comments and just so much unneeded aggression. People just looking to be right by ignoring 99% of the correct information in a comment and focusing on that 1% that’s weak or, sure, wrong. And it was over dumb stuff, too.
After being on reddit for 13yrs straight, I guess I learned to be blind to it all. Like I knew it was happening, I saw it all the time, and I’m sure I know I even did it myself here and there. Hell, I was/am still a mod on a reddit; I saw it everyday. I did start getting tired of reddit and redditors about a year ago, but I just kinda brushed it aside.
Anyway, it wasn’t until leaving and going to Beehaw and Tildes for a few months, and then going back, that I realized how bad it actually was on reddit. It’s so glaring to me in threads all over the place. And that there was no desire to improve or change things. That that’s just reddit’s culture and that’s how redditors like it.
As such, I’ve still kinda kept some distance from reddit. I’m still there, but I don’t think I’ll ever go back to how I was using the site pre-APIgate.
Further, I actually get angry when I see people on Lemmy engage in that redditesque way of just looking for confrontation and being smartasses. We left reddit; why are we bringing that mentality with us? If I saw someone on a Beehaw community acting that way, I call it out.
That’s one of the reasons I support Beehaw potentially leaving Lemmy to do its own thing. I see Tildes and see how a standalone forum and community can exist and function well and productively, without all the “gotchas” and just unnecessary aggression. That’s not to say Beehaw (or Tildes) is perfect. That behavior can be found everywhere. But at least there’s a desire to try to stamp that out.
If I saw someone on a Beehaw community acting that way, I call it out.
That’s one of the reasons I support Beehaw potentially leaving Lemmy to do its own thing.
I’d rather Beehaw didn’t leave Lemmy, and instead “calling that kind of behavior out” got more popular on Lemmy instances… at least on the ones federated with Beehaw. But we’ll see.
Not to veer too far from your original post, but I feel the same way about torture in Disney Pixar movies.
Every single one has a torture scene- torture defined as “I’ll hurt you in some way if you don’t give me information or do XYZ for me”
Toy story - “where are your rebel friends now?”
Toy story 2 - " you can go to Japan together or in pieces. If he fixed you once he can fix you again , now get in the Box!!!"
Toy story 3 " not the nehru jacket from The Groovy formal collection" (Ken as he is tied up and being tortured by barbie) " where’s that manual!?!?"
I could go on forever, pick a kids movie from those publishers, there is a torture scene in it, for some reason.
I think Trends and patterns like what you describe are worth exploring because they give us warped senses of reality. There’s a large swath of the population right now that believes torture works to produce good information or cooperative captives, that does not actually match up with reality. Much like what you describe, I imagine there are a lot of unhappy women out there because they watch these Hallmark movies
You know, now you mention it, torture scenes of some kind do seem to be very common in kids films, and not just the Disney Pixar ones. The non-Pixar Disney ones often do as well, as do the Dreamworks ones. Not always, but a lot of the time.
One big question comes to mind: are there any kids animated films that were written by women, and do they feature torture scenes?
(I’d be willing to bet a lot of the Hallmark films are written by men, too.)
I just look at these movies now and I can’t help but get this weird incel vibe from them? I dunno. The only other torture scene I can think of from a Disney movie is the Incredibles, but that was more for Syndrome to gloat at Bob.
They strap Mike Wazowski to the machine and try to suck his face off or the screams out of him so that he tells Randall where the kid is in Monsters Inc
They literally torture a car to death in Cars 2. They want to know where the information is and he reveals that Mater has it. And at the end of the torture session his charred remains can be seen in a reflection.
In Finding Nemo, near the end when they’re looking for Marlin again, they come across the two crabs that have seen him leave and the crabs say I’m not going to tell you where he went and there’s nothing you could do to make me. Dory then holds him above the water and he starts screaming at the site of the seagulls that are eyeballing him " I’ll talk I’ll talk!!!"
Its literally every movie, someone gets tortured.
Think about how often you see someone get tortured in everyday life. PRACTICALLY NEVER. In the movies it’s like quicksand, it’s just one of those things that people seem to run into all the goddamn time for inexplicable reasons.
The problem is, it gives people an excuse to actually torture people. In fact, people are cooperative and offer information when they are cooperated with when they’re promised protection, when they’re treated with respect, when good things are done for them. When people are tortured they become more oppositional and more uncooperative. So in reality, torture doesn’t work at all. People still torture people, because they think it works. It either produces bad information or no information. But they still do it because well they saw it in that movie where it worked, literally every children’s movie they’ve ever seen. They saw in that one.
The sad thing is that torture didn’t used to be a staple of kids films. I watched a lot of animated films in the last few months (research component of an animation module at university), and the torture scenes only really start appearing in the last 30 years or so - and seems to be more of a thing in the 3D animated films than in the traditionally animated ones during the brief time period where the two mediums overlapped.
There’s violence in pretty much all of the older ones, for sure, but that feels different to torturing someone for information, I think, because there tends to be two contexts for the violence: a hero is using it as a last resort to deal with an enemy (eg Jungle Book, where Mowgli initially goes “well I’ll just talk to Shere Khan so he understands I’m not a threat”, and only engages in violence against the tiger when Shere Khan is literally trying to murder everybody) or it’s used to demonstrate how cruel and petty a villain is (eg Lion King, where the hyenas shove Zazu into a geyser - they’re not torturing him for information, they’re doing it because they find it funny). In both cases, there’s no ambiguity about whether the violence is justified or not - it is justified when the hero is doing it in self-defence or defence of others, and it’s not when the villains are doing it for the giggles.
Even in, say, Pinocchio, where Stromboli uses the threat of violence against Pinocchio, it’s in a situation where it’s undeniably evil. He had been using cooperation and persuasion up until that point, very successfully, but when Pinocchio basically goes “okay, I’ve had a nice day, but I’m going home to my father now, I’ll be back tomorrow”, Stromboli cannot find anything that would persuade Pinocchio not to go home. So violence and the threat of violence are the only options remaining, but there’s no question that using threats to prevent a child from going home to their family is in any way justified. And a key part of this is that when Stromboli does this, Pinocchio has absolutely no interest in helping him anymore.
I think the most troubling element of torture in animation films of the last 30 years is how often it’s used by the heroes. There is, perhaps, some leeway when the villains do it, because if a villain does an evil thing, then it creates no grey area about whether torture is acceptable. (And it’s probably an easier way of having a good character reveal information that they shouldn’t, than have them do it voluntarily, which would have audiences going “WTF Mike Wazowski just betrayed his best friend! What a shit guy!”) But torture does seem to be increasingly used by the protagonists, when what they should be doing is trying cooperative methods - why does Dory opt for threatening the crabs after taking “there’s nothing you can do to make me give you the information” at face value, instead of at least trying cooperation first?
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