Beehaw is a community of individuals and therefore does not have any specific political affiliation. At this point in time, we do not know what the political leanings of most of our users are. I would suspect that many of them would identify as progressive because we are explicitly a safe space for minorities. What we stand for and the space that we’re trying to make is compatible with many forms of politics. Unfortunately some political groups build themselves around and choose to elevate or tolerate hate speech. These are the only political groups that we are incompatible with. If any of it was unclear in any of the other posts, I will restate it all here. Beehaw does not tolerate hate speech. Beehaw is an explicitly safe space. We center and promote kindness because that is what we see and love in the world.

Some of the instances that we have chosen to defederate with have explicit political stances and ideologies. Their political stance and ideology had nothing to do with the choice to defederate. The choice to defederate was based on the amount of hate speech present on the instance and/or explicitly endorsing it. Since hate speech is not controlled on the instances that these users come from, we cannot expect them to change their behavior when participating on our instance. While users may exist on some of these platforms who do not spread hate speech, the choice to defederate is made to reduce the burden on our moderators and admins. Occasionally these instances or users from these instances will point their fingers at Beehaw and make claims about our political leanings or whether certain kinds of politics are banned. To be explicitly clear, the only kind of politics that are banned here are those which enable hate speech such as fascism.

Politics on the internet

Many, if not most discussions of politics on the internet are poisoned by virtue signaling. When they are not poisoned by virtue signaling, discussions are often just ways to vent emotions. I believe the reason for this is the platforms themselves and the incentives to engage online. On the internet I can adjust my level of anonymity. An adjustable level of anonymity allows me to change how I speak to others while simultaneously mitigating or removing any consequences to myself. This of course varies based on the platform and what I’m attempting to accomplish, but in the context of speaking with others on the internet, I can be relatively consequence free to say whatever I want on most major platforms. Particularly negative or hateful behavior might cause me to be banned off of a platform, but through the use of technology or other means, I can simply create another account (or migrate to another platform) and continue the same speech. In malicious terms, I do not have to worry about managing someone else’s emotions or my connection to them.

In real life, on the other hand, it is not as easy to pass myself off as someone else. I must be much more aware of how I speak to others because consequences can be much more dire. When discussing politics with others, I may alienate them or myself and so I may choose to be more open to listen rather than soapboxing. The people I’m interacting with may be a regular part of my life and may be people I have come to respect. Understanding how they think might be vitally important to maintaining or improving our connection.

I am presenting the internet and real life as two ends of a spectrum but it is more complicated than that. There are people who are very visible and tied to their identities on the internet just as there are people in real life who use false identities created to mask their true identity. Interactions vary in level of connection, platform, and who happens to know who we are in other spaces on the internet. There are plenty of people who talk on the internet about politics with the explicit goal of changing the minds of others. Some of these individuals are not using this as an outlet to manage their own emotions. These generalizations are presented in this way because I need to talk about these patterns in the context of the platform Lemmy. I’m asking everyone on this platform to be wary of anyone who focuses on politics but is unable to explain the issues themselves. They are probably trying to deceive you, are virtue signaling, or projecting their own insecurities and you should be skeptical of their approach.

I would encourage all of you to think about incentives when presented with political drama online. It is easy to get engaged because politics has a direct and often scary effect on our lives. In this community, it is not difficult to find individuals who are regularly marginalized by politicians. Especially for these minorities, it is completely valid to get emotionally invested in politics and I would personally encourage doing so on some level, but we need to think carefully about the other parties present in a conversation and whether they are willing to listen or incentivized to do so. For the people who are hiding behind anonymity and posting to vent their emotional frustrations with the system they are likely not invested in the community we are growing here and it may be appropriate and healthy to ignore or disengage with these folks.

Forking

It is in this political context that forking from the main Lemmy development has been presented. People are quick to point to potential upsides of forking, but the upsides are an after thought presented as a means to bolster or justify forking. These justifications are for what is ultimately a moral issue. The question at hand is whether it is moral to use a platform developed by someone who has committed acts which one deems immoral. To anyone posing this question, I would ask them to consider what other technology they use every day and to trace the roots back to each invention along the path to today’s day and age. The world has a colonialist history, rife with violence and immoral behavior. Unless you retreat the woods and recreate technologies yourself from scratch, it’s impossible to live in a modern society without benefiting from technology built on countless dead bodies in history.

We do not have the technical expertise to create a new tool from scratch - all we can do is leverage tools that already exist to create communities like this. At the time we created this instance, the service we decided on was Lemmy. We did so with awareness of discussions around the politics of the main instance and developers. I think we’ve done a decent job outlining what we intend to do with this instance and explicitly made strong stances against hate speech and other behavior we do not agree with, including where we disagree with them. When taken in the context of computing in general, these political leanings are also not unique in their social and political harm as compared to some of the tech giants out there. The same is true in comparison to some of the famous tech inventors and innovators; in comparison to the history of computer technology; in comparison to the exploitation and problematic mining of rare earth minerals used in technology; in comparison to the damages we cause to the earth to create the energy used to power our servers. We can follow this path of thinking back all that we want to, and ultimately it’s just not a particularly fruitful discussion to zero in on whether the political leaning of the main developers and instance are in perfect alignment with what we want to accomplish. We are not explicitly endorsing their viewpoint by using their software and we are not tied to using this software forever.

I cannot stress enough how much bandwidth has been taken up by these discussions in recent days. It been brought up as frequently as every few hours across Discord, Matrix, inbox replies, comment replies, new threads, and other forms of communication. We’re currently dealing with a lot of other issues like keeping the server running, expanding to add more communities, moderating the communities amidst a huge influx of users posting and reply content from other instances, managing expenses, optimizing our server, planning for the future, and so much more. We cannot entertain philosophical discussions on all of the wonderful things we ‘could do’ when we’re struggling to keep up with what we’re already currently doing. We have not yet received a serious proposal for a fork which details operational needs when it comes to the maintenance, support, and resources needed to accomplish and maintain it. Simply put we do not believe a fork is necessary at this time.

    • lemillionsocks@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Yeah lemmygrad will fade in popularity and lemmy.ml has already gotten so big it’s shifted politically. It also seems like the creators are fine with other ideas on their instance too. Maybe it’s just cause they know lemmy wouldnt get adopted otherwise but the only strict moderating against speech I see is against the obvious trolls and alt right fascists so far.

      Then you have beehaw and the other instances outright blocking lemmygrad and things seem just peachy

      • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        This is from an outsider (non US) perspective, so I am sorry in advance if this is offensive to ask but Google doesn’t really help me here.

        I looked up what a “tankie” is and that seems to be an insult who people who live in a communist state. Is communism considered a hate speech or otherwise hateful for people in the USA?

        • lemillionsocks@beehaw.org
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          The common usage of tankie in left spaces is someone who parrots North Korean, Chinese, russian propaganda, someone who supports the use of violence and military action, and someone who will often downplay or deny the atrocities done by one side. For example denying the massacre at tienamen square or supporting Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. On lemmygrad there was actually a non ironic thread about celebrating Stalin’s brithday.

          A tankie is essentially the leftist counterpart to the right wing fascist. They just support a different flavor of centralized military dictatorship.

        • Fearofthefamiliar@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Tankie usually means someone who supports the authoritarianism of communist authoritarian nations. Occasionally it’s also used to describe all communists

          Communism is not considered hate speech, but it is commonly hated

          • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Interestingly, I think this is similar to how “patriotism” is seen in Germany. Patriotism is commonly hated although probably not all patriots are die-hard Nazis. The dislike or even hate towards communism is very foreign to me but it is good to know, thanks for explaining.

            • Sunforged@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Americans are highly propagadized to hate communism.

              My wife is a political organizer, no matter what type of person she engages with people agree with Socialist/Communist policy. However if you start the conversation openly on what ideology that policy is based in people shut down or worse get angry/violent with you. It’s absolutely wild.

      • Laconic@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I didn’t realize lemmygrad was tolerating hate speech over there. That’s fucked up.

        • ratboy@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I think it has more to do with them being Marxist Leninists which is really problematic to a lot of people. You should go check it out and see for yourself what the posts look like.

          • Laconic@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            What specifically about being a Marxist Leninist is so bad that it warrants lumping them in with racists? I’m not an ML and I disagree with them on a number of things, but they’re no Nazis. I looked around I didn’t see anything particularly repugnant.

            • ratboy@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              Honestly I’m pretty much on the same boat as you and I feel like the frenzy is overblown, especially right now with the huge influx of people from a platform that by and large has some pretty lib takes. Some examples that people have given are their unwavering support of China, Russia, North Korea and denial about tianenman Square. I kinda side eye people who don’t have nuanced takes about North Korea or any of those places for that matter. I am also hard pressed to think that people eho specifically identify as ML’s wouldnt do their research, but of course there are all kinds. I am curious what specifically has been done and said that warrants hate speech on there to make it such a big deal. But yeah it’s not like people are screaming “LETS GENOCIDE PEOPLE!!!”. Idk I find it troublesome that people are coming here having no idea about these concepts and are just told “they spew hate speech”. Because most people are probably thinking that they’re over there thinking about how to advance the white race and throwing around the F slur, which is not what’s going on.

              • EthicalAI@beehaw.org
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                I kinda side eye people who don’t have nuanced takes about North Korea

                Genuinely curious, what kind of nuanced take is there around North Korea to be had? My impression is it’s basically a slave state with a God King.

                As a leftist the only positive take I have about most of these states is that A. The ideas were new and they didn’t know better, or B. The situation they came from was so bad they were justified to try something, but then they got power and grew authoritarian as people do. For instance I think Cuba had every reason to revolt. I also think Castro was a repressive dictator.

                • iie
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                  1 year ago

                  the American invasion of Korea killed 20% of the population and leveled 80% of the buildings - over 1.5 million died - and now the nation responsible annually conducts the world’s largest military exercises on the north/south border.

                  also some of the more outrageous stories and defector testimonies about north korea have turned out to be false, like the “all men are required to get haircuts matching kim jong un” story, which turned out to be unsourced claims from radio free asia, and contradicted the equally unsourced bullshit story that men were forbidden to get the kim jong un haircut

                  • EthicalAI@beehaw.org
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                    So as for the first thing, I live by the policy “all assholes are assholes”. Saying NK is an asshole doesn’t mean I deny the USA is an asshole. I think people who defend these authoritarian regimes tend to whatabout USA. USA is shit hands down.

                    I’ll check to see if the claims are unsubstantiated like you say, it’s kinda hard to know facts. So all that would lead one to is agnosticism. I don’t think that most of the claims about NK are lies but that’s just my gut feeling. But we’d need a lot of evidence to say that they are in fact thriving in there, under something other than an authoritarian regime, which seems hard to believe since they basically have a monarch.

                    Edit: one of my baseline tests too is just the freedom to leave. You can run whatever social experiment in government you want short of imprisonment and murder, but you have to give your citizens the freedom to leave. That’s a basic human right above all the others. If you can’t leave a situation you are a slave to that situation, in all cases.

                • Ratboy
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                  (I am the same OP, just using my lemmy.ml account now that the site isn’t down for me) The person who responded to this before I was able gave some pretty general information regarding my thoughts on North Korea here. I used to eat up all of the American propaganda just like everyone else and fancied myself a leftist as well. But as a leftist, we should all know that we should be highly critical of most news media. I’m also living in the US so that’s the perspective I’m bringing here, btw. Anyway, I have done a bit of research and that small amount has changed my mind drastically on how I look at communist countries.

                  I am not here to say that I think there is nothing problematic about the place, but their position was largely foisted upon them by imperialism. I cannot fault them for the extreme stance, whether I agree with it or not. Also, I feel that the hysteria around these countries whipped up by the US serves to distract us from how truly fucked up our country is. 25 percent of people in the US are food insecure, 21 percent are illiterate, there are daily mass shootings and constant acts of terrorism, train derailments poisoning towns all in the name of money, we are more and more becoming a police state…We can’t say for sure that we definitely have it better here just because we can leave, or that we live with the illusion of choice.

                  In your response, you wrote “My impression is it’s basically a slave state with a God King”. I would implore you, when you can, when you have energy, to do a bit of research on things like this when your impression is so extreme. You don’t need to change your stance, you can still feel how you feel, but base that on some semblance of research. If you’re curious I’m happy to try and whip up some articles or youtube videos for you to check out that might be interesting.

                  Outside of that, relating back to comparing the ideology of Marxist Leninists to hate speech: hate speech is defined as “abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds.” I have not seen any of this kind of speech on lemmygrad, or from anyone who identifies as ML. In fact a lot of ML’s are staunchly opposed to racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, etc. and are part of marginalized groups. Marxist Leninists are not pacifists and from what I gather do believe that war and violence are necessary for revolution but I’ve never seen anyone advocate for genocide, so I feel that the connection is heavy handed. That being said, that’s just my opinion, man, and the mods for beehaw can do what they wish

                  Editing to add: I also don’t know everything, and there may be some context with lemmygrad that I’m missing, so feel free to educate me if I’m being reductive over here

                  • EthicalAI@beehaw.org
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                    1 year ago

                    So I’ll do more research on NK but it’s kinda hard under the assumption that most sources will be propaganda. I don’t believe every communist country is like this but I do think that we are more free by being able to travel. Freedom to emigrate is a BIG deal. You are always a slave if you can’t choose to leave. We have lots of slaves in our prisons, and lots of slaves to capitalism, but equally being stuck in a country you can’t leave is slavery. Russia and China don’t restrict travel, and Cuba doesn’t anymore. NK still does. I think the conditions of all of these countries founding is likely in the right, not considering their actions, and yes I think the US both fucked them up and is itself a shit show, but we can leave the US and even emigrate to one of these countries if we want. So I’m not reactionary “communism bad,” especially when it comes to China (I think China is pretty much equally good and shitty as the USA. I think the news way overblows their general news. I think they are genociding, America genocides a LOT, and I think their president for life has no right to give himself a lifetime term, but I think most of the rest of it has a US equivalent). Cuba is also a mixed bag.

                    Can you provide any sources on NK to start with?

                  • EthicalAI@beehaw.org
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                    Lastly I’ll also just say that I don’t think any existing “communist” country still wants to return the means of production to the workers. That’s one of my biggest faults with Leninism, no way in hell will a vanguard party once it takes power follow through with communism, and indeed it never has, or even tried.