It would appear I'm hitting some kind of character limit.... here's the rest of the post

Moderation

It's likely that in the future I'll need to create another philosophy post dedicated specifically to this topic. I think in the long term moderation is likely the most important aspect of this instance and key to ensuring this community stays a nice place. Moderation is a tricky subject and something that I don't think any platform on the internet has managed to figure out.

Rather than try to summarize about our current philosophy on moderation I'd like to focus on some issues we've seen (some of which we may not have an answer to yet). To provide some background on the kind of stuff I've moderated, I'll provide some examples- besides this website I'm currently a moderator for several discords running the gamut from small personal groups of real life friends, to internet communities from other websites, to communities focused around specific high profile musicians (and moderating their twitch channels). Years ago I used to actively moderate large and small subreddits, including some default subs. In general as my life has gotten busier and I've grown disenchanted with moderating in favor of simply participating in communities which are nice, and because of such I've slowly withdrawn from most of these responsibilities.

As many of you new folks are refugees from Reddit, some of the problems I'm about to outline are likely problems you've seen with moderation. Reddit has an issue with a certain type of individual being drawn towards moderation and a subset of them really 'succeeding' in the accumulation of moderator power. Some people like to refer to some of the most prolific individuals who moderate on the website as part of 'the cabal'. Some of these individuals are deeply emotionally invested in the platform in unhealthy ways or are seeking validation through their wielding of power and some of these individuals misuse it due to these factors. Some are also simply fairly regular humans who were around at the right time and place or otherwise social in the right way and ended up in their position. I've seen more drama than I really care to remember or waste mental bandwidth on. What's important here, however, is that there's a social component to this. These 'cabals' form because groups naturally occur and synthesize around power. This is true with nearly any community of a certain size, be it your local chapter of an international institution, your government, a meetup group, a convention you like to attend, or any other large gathering of individuals. Checks and balances of various sorts can and should be wielded to help prevent the slow corruption of power but I don't think this is a problem we've managed to universally solve or that any solution doesn't consist of both pros and cons that the community needs to decide are appropriate for it.

Most communities self-police in some manor based on seniority. People who've been in a community for a long time are often seen as wise, as sages, or elevated to places of power. Our elders often know a community extremely well and can help provide context for the various factions within a community, the diverse opinions it represents, and can offer measured responses on the most likely outcomes or best solutions. However these elders are not infallible and any community needs to adapt to the changes building in said community from its amorphous organization- people join and leave throughout a communities existence. Fresh ideas and new viewpoints can carry a community to new heights and bring important changes. New blood breeds needed innovation and helps to center oppressed or unrepresented voices. There needs to be a balance between the old and the new to keep both sides in appropriate check. If you focus the too much on the opinion of elders, you end up with issues of seniority and cliquey behavior. If you focus too much on the new voices, you risk the community splintering or imploding on itself from a lack of stability or trying to cater to too many conflicting voices at once.

Solutions to ensure fair moderation often center the voices of the individuals in each community and give them the authority to govern themselves. As an anarchist at heart I deeply want this community to be able to govern itself at multiple levels. However self-governance is difficult. Often people like to point to elections as a way to self-govern. Without even naming some of the issues with elections I'm sure most of you can look at existing elected governmental officials in nearly any country and easily identify at least one person who highlights issues with this process. By its very nature, election often becomes a popularity contest, rife for abuse in a plethora of ways that humans which are good at social skills often use to their advantage. Ideas like sortition may offset some of these problems but also have their pros and cons and perhaps most importantly I don't want to burden anyone who's not interested in moderating with that responsibility. I think people would be well served to examine the social groups which exist in their lives which aren't governed via direct democracy and to spend a bit of time considering what model is most appropriate in each sphere of their life. I certainly don't want to receive medical care from an individual which was elected by the vote of non-medical professionals. The same would be true of legal advice. Big thinkers in activism often find themselves at the center of movements precisely because they are experts on the topic, not because they're great at marketing themselves. I personally would like my moderators to be educated and skilled in moderating, and elections don’t always center these values. Ultimately we haven't decided on a sustainable long-term solution to moderating, and have been choosing active members in communities which seem to embody or align with our ethos to elevate to a moderating position. As it is, we have not had a ton of need of moderating content, but we understand that this need will grow in step with the size of our community.

New users, and maintaining our promise

I want to draw attention back to our ethos, our core value - to be(e) nice. We've seen our little website rapidly expand, quadrupling in size in less than 72 hours. We want to support this growth because we think it is useful to keeping interesting people around and populating the website with content that we're all interested in. However, the most recent flock of individuals was primarily driven off of Reddit due to API changes. Up until this point, people who had found our community were directed towards it because they were upset with the way social media on large platforms was playing out. While I suspect that many of you, and perhaps most of you also reviewed our ethos and philosophy, some individuals probably found their way here simply from the list of Lemmy communities or because someone happened to drop them a link. Luckily, so far we have not run into a lot of bad behavior, but we need to balance growth against the support of our ethos because we are an explicitly nice and safe space. This means that while we are doing our best to accommodate all of the new growth, we need to be mindful of whether the communities are appropriately monitored and whether we have enough individuals paying attention to and starting conversations when questionable behavior arises. We've already updated our registration process to reflect this and have started more aggressively denying applications which do not signal that they are in line with our ethos.

Ultimately, we are a bunch of hobbyists volunteering our time to create a community that we wish to see on the internet. This is not our job and we do not wish to make it our job. We don't have unlimited resources and we don't want to look to capitalism to solve that. We may push back against suggestions or not make changes simply because they are not sustainable with our current level of involvement. We're doing our best to honor others who wish to volunteer and to listen to the community’s voice, but every time more people are added we're also necessarily adding complexity to managing the website. We ask for your trust, your patience, and a little leeway in order to balance what we're trying to do here with our capacity.

How you can help

As a final note, if there are things you'd like to see in this community we very much appreciate your input. However, this community has grown so large that I am already finding myself unable to reply to everyone and address everyone's concerns and I'm sure other admins feel similarly. Please consider whether your questions are better directed elsewhere - consider using the search functionality to see if others have answered the question; consider joining the matrix or discord to field questions to community members, or create a thread asking for help from your fellow users before reaching out to an administrator or a moderator.

If you feel strongly about contributing to Beehaw specifically or helping out with tuning or running the hardware, please join the Matrix or Discord and get involved in the relevant channels or discussions. If you want to contribute to Lemmy development, we would encourage you to dip your toes in, get involved, and get more familiar with the platform. Follow the Github and report bugs when you encounter them, or see what you can contribue to existing open issues. If you see technical issues arise with development, bring it to our attention so that we can act as mediators because we have collective power.

If you feel strongly about a longer term or larger project like creating a team to create documentation or helping us to legally become a nonprofit entity I also want to assure you that we love the enthusiasm, but unless you are coming to us with a formal pitch please spend your efforts self-organizing around this so that you can come to us with that pitch. Assume we know nothing about the field of expertise needed to accomplish any of these larger tasks and assume that we are extremely busy and unable to field or solicit advice without an executive summary and at least a draft plan of what the steps might look like, who would be responsible for those steps, anticipated concerns and plans for addressing them, and a timeline and estimation of resources needed.

We are explicitly anti free speech. This is also explicitly a safe space. Using the word minority does not constitute a political agenda. If you disagree with any of those statements you should move along as this is not a space for you.

There is unfortunately a culture of entitlement and harassment that is absolutely pervasive on the internet. There's a special kind of tech harassment and entitlement which emerged on the internet from stackflow, github and other major websites which put up with people grandstanding their ideals and shitting on other people who don't have enough experience or are asking simple questions or demanding changes or hijacking reports to share one's own ideals which lead to nice people like OP simply leaving these spaces.

Please think twice before demanding something of a developer, and admin, a moderator. Think about what you're putting out into the world. There's another human behind that screen, extend them a little faith. Ask yourself what you can do to help, before demanding something of others.

Yes, I am absolutely biased. I prefer uplifting and wholesome content. I love positivity. I want humans to unite instead of divide. I am not worried about my biases or of being biased because I know the benefits it brings to the world.

Can we try not to unnecessarily sexualize this? Too much of this and we'll end up a reddit/twitter clone where people are just aiming for quick/easy zingers

? why are you pinging me

I think we're approving around half, but I'm not sure if that's kept up today. To share my thoughts on the matter I'm extremely concerned about the possibility of this place moving the direction of echo chambers for a variety of reasons. I'll probably make another philosophy post in the next week or so, but I've been very overextended between this, work, current healthcare issues (I've had 2 surgeries in the last two weeks 😩), stuff for pride month (I'm a leader at my work's pride ERG, moderated a speaker today, speaking for a group next week, gotta help with SF pride, etc), and in general being busy in my social life as well so I haven't really had a ton of time to contribute all my thoughts or put them on paper as I'd like to.

Said this in a private chat, but I'll repeat it here for transparency

While we can't guarantee anything with regards to donations, I will always vote to pay artists even if it meant we had to go begging for donos to help run the site later

Yes, a distinct theme will help remind people from other instances to beehave when they participate on ours 😄

As is stated elsewhere, we are explicitly intolerant of the intolerant. Hate speech in response to hate speech is perfectly acceptable and encouraged - calling Nazis out is cool and correct.

I want to provide a bit more of a nuanced answer here, because I suspect there are users for which a wee bit more clarity would be helpful. A quick google on hate speech reveals that the UN has a pretty simple page and info-graphic capturing what hate speech entails. As alyaza mentioned, we're not interested in rules lawyering about this, if enough people are concerned about speech that's present, we encourage the entire community to step in - this means members can remind you keep it nice, moderators might, or admins. We aren't looking to ban people permanently over a single comment that isn't extremely obvious and explicit hate speech such as "we should kill all ". But we also aren't tolerant to implicit hate speech, and we will step in if you make an argument such as "we should use phrenology".

As a general rule (again, not interested in rules lawyering here), if you are trying to advocate for a stance and members of the affected community are pushing back strongly against that stance, it's probably not something we're going to let you say around here because we are explicitly a safe space. Your stance on gender-affirming healthcare, for example, could make people who pursue this healthcare who exist in our space very upset and is something that you shouldn't be attempting to proselytize here. We're asking you to be considerate of the thoughts and feelings and well-being of our members. There's a lot of other reasons why you should probably change your stance on this, including that even if you disagree this group of individuals has an extremely high suicide rate and thus preventing access to medical care is indirectly arguing for violence, but that's outside the scope of this comment and not an educational burden I'm particularly interested in giving to a stranger on the internet who's asking me questions which raise an eyebrow. I'm trying to treat you with good faith, but even I have limits.

One final note, we are explicitly intolerant of intolerance. Thus if someone using hate speech enters in here, we are not moderating people being hateful in response. They brought that on themselves by being hateful.

We will be keeping an eye on moderator behavior. If you ever see a concerning pattern please let us know. To be absolutely clear, criticizing government is general well regarded as a cool thing to do 😎

Okay you specifically have carte blanche to ping me to tell me how awesome I am. But please try to keep it to less than maybe 30 pings a month

Yes this is referring to the questions asked when signing up. Because we've grown a lot in the last few days we're now being more selective on who we approve to ensure people are in tune with our ethos. This means we revised the questions and are looking more closely at how people are responding.

Yep, assuming good faith is explicitly nice behavior.

As for the last point, thank you for calling that out. I've tried to do my best to explicitly use the words "tone policing" and other language to highlight important parts of the philosophy of intersectionality. These are the kinds of conversations and behavior where moderating becomes quite tricky and assuming good faith is particularly useful. My barometer of what is acceptable and nice behavior really moves around a lot, depending on the circumstances of who's involved, the entirety of the conversation, the emotional states of everyone, and how they engage with mediation.

yes to be absolutely clear good faith needs to go in all directions, my default assumption is that everyone is a human and probably made a mistake and wants to be nice and cooperative but might just need a little help getting there 💜

which is a long way of saying anytime there's a problem, usually the best way to solve it is a discussion so everyone can understand each other better

We are not Reddit nor do we intend to be.

No worries and thank you for apologizing! You also deserve a right to vent against Boris, and I also happen to agree that he's worthy of spite 😎

Fascism was merely an example of politics that explicitly endorses hate speech, because that's the criteria we're using to defed. We are not anti communist, we are perfectly fine with communists that don't harass users or spread hate speech.