Over the years I’ve been trying to encapsulate, as simply as possible, what Beehaw interactions would look like ideally.
I kept coming back to all of my personal memories having holiday meals (Thanksgiving and Christmas for example) with very close family and friends.
Thinking back through decades of these meetings, I cannot remember anything but everyone being kind and charitable in action as well as speech.
Many pages of very thoughtful and reasonable philosophic explanations have been written, on our sidebar, about the behavioral expectations of Beehaw.
Let’s go back to the holiday meals for a moment and imagine having an open invitation for anyone to join. What do you think the outcomes would be?
This is the problem that our endeavor is experiencing. The open nature of ActivityPub (allowing anyone to join our table) is defeating our purpose.
The administrators, moderators and community members have been thinking about this for several months.
I, personally, believe that we all will come to a comfortable consensus moving forward.
Thanks for elaborating. It’s tough to decide where is ‘too far’ and when someone is behaving in a way that if left unchecked results in a slow decline into a space where nice people no longer want to participate. We tend to err on the side of caution because we’ve seen how evaporative cooling can ruin a nice place, but with strong checks/balances to try and reduce/minimize inappropriately stepping in, as well as inappropriate deletions and bans. We’re human though, we make mistakes, and ultimately it’s important to us that we create a space we haven’t been able to find elsewhere and sometimes there just aren’t enough people with enough emotional bandwidth to do the messy work of differentiating between someone who’s just stubborn and misinformed, and someone who’s being malicious (let alone issues that crop up with neurodivergence and not understanding what nice behavior is).
I truly do wish we had enough bandwidth to provide more cordiality and grace to everyone. Speaking of which, if you or anyone else who does have emotional bandwidth, extra time, and passion for seeing places like this exist on the internet and wishes to step in and help us stick to our principles, we’d love the help 💜
I should acknowledge how easy it is for me to commentate from my position as spectator! You and the rest of the team have very clearly put a lot of research and thought into cultivating Beehaw and it shows. I’m very lucky that this was my gateway to the fediverse during last summer’s exodus.
I wish I could volunteer to help but I’m rather flaky and inconsistent with my online time, as it’s necessarily well down my list of priorities. If that still sounds like a situation I could contribute through, let me know.