Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Okay. To be clear, I wouldn’t automatically assume anybody who wants to be free from hate speech has bad intentions, but I also think it’s fair to be critical of any effort to stifle dissenting opinion–even uncomfortable opinion–with the justification that the censorship is to a third party’s benefit, and it’s immaterial whether the third party is children, a historically disadvantaged group, or any other class. That is, I don’t say all this to accuse beehaw of ulterior motives–but I also wouldn’t put it past anybody, and skepticism is appropriate (like always). More and more frequently, “safe space” really just means: We want an echo chamber, but it’s okay because we know best. That’s a red flag.
When it comes to racism, sexism, and transphobia, the “dissenting opinions” are things like “you do not exist” and “you are sub human” and “you do not deserve rights.”
You’re fooling yourself if you think that not tolerating hate == stifling dissenting opinion. How should one stand up for human rights? Moderately? Or militantly?
Sounds like you’ve bought the old conservative line of bullshit on all this. “Oh they don’t permit sexism? We should be highly skeptical of this!! What about freedom of speech??”
Le sigh
The problem with defederation is the same problem with the position you’re taking, that it conflates all opinion with whatever worst thing you can imagine, enabling you to insist that because some people are awful, everyone who doesn’t agree with the proposition is (or in beehaw’s case, everyone who doesn’t join their walled garden). This isn’t a case of “they don’t permit sexism.” They didn’t permit sexism when they were still federated. Defederation is an extra step–they want you to use their server or otherwise not participate in their communities at all, and the explanation for why is that the people on lemmy.world are sexist. Maybe they’re authentically overwhelmed, and it’s certainly their prerogative, but one would be wise to examine their stated basis more critically, because heavy handed owners of platform infrastructure is why Lemmy is in this position in the first place.
Now you’re just not reading. Look at this thread. It’s been clearly shown and stated publicly that they are simply overwhelmed by the explosive growth coming at them from instances like lemmy.world that have added millions of members overnight. They have a more intentionally managed community with high standards and hands on moderators and they cannot right now handle the sudden explosive volume. They are trying to scale up and their desire and intention is to refederate. Meanwhile you have spun up all kinds of tales in your head about how they want to control speech or ban it because of their militant identity politics. You’re making all of that up, when the actual explanations are right there in public for you to read. Try gathering more information and forming fewer judgments based on your internal biases.
