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 :)
An increasing percentage of what I read is from federated instances. If Beehaw isolated itself I’d probably make an account elsewhere and hook into the fediverse from elsewhere, leaving Beehaw behind. Beehaw is great, but it’s not enough of a community by itself.
I agree, we are already defederated from big instance like LW. If beehaw isolates itself it would just be a forum with a few thousands more or less inactive people and would die.
i don’t think being a small forum is necessarily a bad thing. smaller places are easier to moderate, and they tend to be more chill. i’ve run another forum for about 10 years, and it’s still going strong with only a few hundred active users at any given time. we very rarely have issues with people upsetting the flow. we’ve always managed to recover when that does happen.