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 :)
Good addition, and also a good example, because that was so common I didn’t even recognize it as a problem. I’m still unlearning a lot.
If a post/comment is sufficiently stupid, the stupidity is obvious and speaks for itself. I leave it alone. Of course, bigotry and hate speech can’t be tolerated and should be called out (plus reported, because Nazis and bigots can kiss my ass), but otherwise, I just ignore it and move on. In most cases, I think we help quite a bit by setting the tone and not arguing. As people see that negativity isn’t the norm, they’ll gradually change.