TLDR: some don’t like the moderation here, which is done by a single mod, and have gone and made their own community over on lemmy.world.
If this drama was real and the instance admins knew about it, I think I’d be happy to conclude that the instance admins did a bad job here given their status as a star trek instance. If there was a split amongst Risa people and its mod, then create another community (with TenForward being a great name for it) with a different moderator and let them co-exist as part of the same federation.
Now there’s probably some unnecessary fracturing (which is fine, that’s what the fediverse is all about in the end) … and I can’t help but wonder if the admins here are maybe a tad too much used to a reddit culture of allowing mods and admins get away with things … which is of course me being rather quick to judge, I can only speculate here clearly, but still … kinda funny to see.
I feel like lots of thinking like this or adjacent to this is going on around the fediverse, and part of the problem we’re all encountering is that many or even most of us don’t really understand this “design space” of homely/kind/safe/wholesome/fulfilling online placed particularly well. And so we’re either reaching for established models (reddit/twitter etc) or expecting too much of new technologies (decentralisation and federation).
In the case of holiday meals and beehaw, while reading your post, my immediate thought was how it’s simultaneously a fantastic metaphor and an inapplicable one for social media. A holiday meal, I’d say, is defined by its rarity and specificity. Once a year, family members and close friends gather together for the purpose of being together. I don’t see that mapping onto online social media … like at all … however desirable that demeanor and vibe is desirable.
And while being kind and open etc is obviously a good aim for a social media space, so long as it is social media, which means open ended discussions/topics, (relatively) open membership, relative anonymity, constant activity, and, let’s be honest, some expectation of providing some form entertainment to lurkers … the personal bonds and purpose of a holiday meal just can’t exist. Which is a problem, IMO, that goes beyond ActivityPub, because the moment you make a social media space more closed or exclusive while trying to still be a form of social media, it will become quieter, duller and less compelling to users (for better or worse) and eventually fall into relative disuse and so seem to fail at social media.
If you then want to recast social media, you then, IMO, need to think a lot about formats, UIs, media types and framing and how people are presented and interact … like to a large extent … because this whole “sending text messages to each other in a public space” can only go so far (which is a big problem I personally have with the fediverse).
I say this not to dismiss your and Beehaw’s goals … but really just to say … “that’s great, but underestimating how hard this stuff can be would not serve you or beehaw well IMO”.
Hope it goes well though and will be curious to see what happens to beehaw!
From the little I saw (and zero Rust, or Tokio (I think they use that) knowledge) … federation workers weren’t persisting correctly whenever it would hit certain errors or problems.
well, I won’t share any details out of respect for their deletion.
Suffice it to say that they had problems with the moderation of Risa and evidently wanted to create a community with the kind of moderation they want. As TenForward has multiple moderators, Stamets was clearly not alone in this.
I think if you were to read the comments in the linked welcome message for TenForward, as well as the welcome message itself, you’ll get the picture.
Sorry for linking to a comment of yours. It’s always tricky territory whether it’s polite or impolite to do so, especially if it’s clearly a heated situation/topic. I tagged you because that’s the only etiquette I’ve picked up about this sort of thing.
I was always under the impression that he sucked and was lucky to have had M Piller and J Taylor to find the soul of TNG era trek (ENT is what happened when they both left).
I’ve said it a few times in similar conversations before … the big-corp mega social media era (~2008-2023, Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Instagram) has had huge cultural effects on the internet that go way beyond whether you’re on one of the platforms or not and which will ripple into the future for a long while.
We’d all do well to consider what parts of that culture we carry in our expectations and behaviours … and the whole doom-scrolling through an all-encompassing feed as a form of entertainment expectation is a big one. Social media always needs to be a big place … is another one.
These aren’t all necessarily evil … but as universal expectations they certainly aren’t good either, IMO.
there are and have been conversations around the fediverse about this very same concept or need. See, eg, a cousin comment in this thread on the same idea: lemmy.ml/comment/7026804
And the short answer is no … the fediverse basically sucks at providing such a thing … so enamoured is it with federation that localised communities are obviously a bit of an afterthought. Thing is people actually want and need more private or local spaces as well as the big public spaces. Its why all the old school forums are still kicking.
And the worst part is that federation offers a great opportunity to provide both in a really useful and seamless manner on a single platform. But neither lemmy nor mastodon have a feature for it (with mastodon lead dev actively opposing the idea it seems).
I have to believe it would be easy for lemmy to implement.
As a contrast, misskey and its forks such as firefish, catodon, iceshrimp etc (and yea, these names are a choice, in a good way I think), actually provide local only groups and people like them.
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.
Exactly … and the lesson then wouldn’t be to ditch lemmy/kbin/fediverse and declare “we only need reddit now”. The lesson would be that you need countermeasures to keep the corps honest and you should never let up on such pressures.