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 :)
Hello from kbin, I was having this discussion with someone on another post about users views of the Reddit alternatives. I made a comment that I slightly prefer Raddle to the rest of the Fediverse because it is a closed community, largely for anarchists and queer folks. I’ve definitely noticed a creeping toxicity since I opened my account with kbin after moving from Reddit when everyone else did and, to prove my point, was reduced (down voted) by a conservative reactionary, judging by their posts.
Federation is a interesting and I wonder how things would be here if politics was less reactionary and more about discussion and consensus. Any instance benefits from federation through an increased user base but that necessarily comes with the impact of not being able to manage who is in that user base.