Alt text:
A three panel meme of someone riding a bike.
- First panel: Someone riding on a bike. “Reddit is imploding, quick let’s get on Lemmy”
- Second panel: The bike starts to tip over on its own. “Oh shit there’s too many of us, we’re being defederated?”
- Third panel: They’ve fallen on the ground by the bike, holding their knee in pain. “Fucking Beehaw”
The Beehaw admins have just been doing exactly what they said they would in their signup page and community guidelines, yet a large number of people seem to have gotten surprised that they kept their word.
We’ve had users from other instances complain about it, not even recognizing that they are doing so on our thread, to our users, on our instance. Every single one of these users is not following our rules - they’re extremely emotionally charged and telling us that we’re terrible people (bad faith, not nice).
I understand that the fediverse can be difficult to understand and that the user interface is not the most user friendly, but also why are they so upset about what’s happening somewhere else that they have no control over? The strength of the emotions they are feeling over such an abstract idea (an instance they are not on defederating from another instance that they are also not on) that doesn’t even effect them, is just bizarre to me.
I can’t speak for everyone on BeeHaw but the reason they do stuff like this is a feature rather than a bug for me, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but the good thing about the fediverse is that the only parade we can really piss on is our own and there’s a diversity of instances to choose from which is a good thing. One ‘master instance’ would defeat the point of federation pretty catastrophically.
I think past 10 years social media has been “grooming” the average internet user into becoming enraged at the slightest deviation from status quo and that’s what we’re seeing here. Rage means clicks means revenue for companies. People now become oddly obsessed with the silliest of things - well MY instance is superior, well MY video game is superior, well MY phone is superior. You get the idea. We all need to take a deep breath and chill the fuck out.
Yeah this is 100% why I signed up for beehaw. This is the sort of administration I was hoping for, not some betrayal.
Yes. This.
Maybe it’s because I have experience in the fediverse but I specifically searched for an instance like beehaw, joined knowing what they were about and what kind of behaviour they allowed and which they didn’t allow, and expected them to follow through and respect their own rules and guideline.
I’m not disappointed nor I’m surprised. This is what I signed for and how I expected the admins to conduce themselves and the instance.
I choose the fediverse over centralised social media owned by corporations and billionaires because instances with administrations like Beehaw’s, that do not accept nor promote shitty behaviour) exist here. Because here it’s easier to avoid people who only want to troll or cause controversy than it is in sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc that facilitate that kind of negative interaction.
