To put it another way, would you want to join an instance that isn't trying (or is failing to) contain harassment and other forms of bad actors? That's the challenge the de-fed is addressing: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Edit:
Now having read their "What is Beehaw" Post [1], I can clearly see I was correct and would NEVER want to be a part of that oppressive community, That post is fill with political ideology, plainly false statements, and mental contractions... wow. just wow
> Our goal is to create a platform in which nice people will want to stick around so that the experience is less toxic than other websites and because of such it needs to resemble an offline community - the rules must be more open to interpretation and the way the rules are interpreted needs to be a community effort.
> We want this to be a community - this means that discussions about behavior should organically arise. When someone violates a rule they aren’t banned immediately, but rather reminded that they need to behave appropriately. In the offline world, this might resemble a friend asking you about how you treated their friend, a pastor pulling you aside and talking to you about how you’ve seemed on edge lately, or security asking you not to vape inside their establishment.
Beehaw is a Community: https://beehaw.org/post/140733
They state they are a platform 16 times on the link I provided including directly saying ". Beehaw is a social media platform. "
Beehaw: On this platform I attempted to address this emerging problem of rationalism
The first step to being a true rationalist is to realize you’re as vulnerable to cognitive biases and emotion driven thinking as everyone else, and focus on your own thought processes first and foremost.
Being a rationalist isn’t about lording over other people, it’s about trying to make your own thought as clear and rational as possible, and that requires challenging your own deeply held beliefs and opinions constantly.
Most people I see who call themselves rationalists aren’t that.
But I’m really glad it exists. I’m glad they have a space for themselves. Glad I can (hopefully) find a space for myself, and that we are no forced into co-existing. I might even recommend Beehaw to some extended acquaintances… but it’s fairly anti-me.
Anyone recommend something like Something Awful from it’s glory days? I don’t mind trolls and saltiness and edginess, just don’t want spam.
But what a complete farce this whole fediverse is. Any instance with any traction is going to attract people that you, I, or even the majority are not going to wish to interact with. Hell there's plenty on this site. And beehaw sounds like a community I have no interest in associating with.
> and that we are no forced into co-existing.
Not sure how simply federating servers forces coexistence.
Defederating is such a ludicrously blunt and ultimately ineffective moderation tool.
Harassment is such a vague term and has been stretched out to cover such a huge swathe that it can basically used to police almost anything.
After requested clarification, it was explained that this was done because it is a contentious topic that has high likelihood of getting heated, but moderation was completely blind to how allowing only one visible perspective on an issue completely distorts how a community’s stance at large on that issue is perceived.
HN is more of a case of “least worst” rather than “best”, for me.
And this is why the idea of the fediverse (outside of a content blind common carrier type scenario) is DOA. Once you get outside spam and widely illegal shit, defining the "terms the same way you do" has nearly as many possibilities as users, and the overlap of that Venn diagram does not exist - so the natural evolution is just a bunch of tiny instances none of which want to federate with another.
The only purpose these new fediverse systems seem to have is for disjoint communities to increase availability - in one of the clumsiest ways possible and at the wrong level of abstraction.