Over the years I’ve been trying to encapsulate, as simply as possible, what Beehaw interactions would look like ideally.
I kept coming back to all of my personal memories having holiday meals (Thanksgiving and Christmas for example) with very close family and friends.
Thinking back through decades of these meetings, I cannot remember anything but everyone being kind and charitable in action as well as speech.
Many pages of very thoughtful and reasonable philosophic explanations have been written, on our sidebar, about the behavioral expectations of Beehaw.
Let’s go back to the holiday meals for a moment and imagine having an open invitation for anyone to join. What do you think the outcomes would be?
This is the problem that our endeavor is experiencing. The open nature of ActivityPub (allowing anyone to join our table) is defeating our purpose.
The administrators, moderators and community members have been thinking about this for several months.
I, personally, believe that we all will come to a comfortable consensus moving forward.
Is it possible to have some communities be exclusive to Beehaw users? I’m not advocating for cutting off the existing communities, rather adding in a few walled gardens? That would filter out anyone who doesn’t want to bother explaining why they value what Beehaw is and include anyone curious enough to create a Beehaw profile to see what the less active but more Beehaw communities are like. Something like “The safest space” which is going to respectively attract and deter the people you would want.
As for having to deal with what y’all deal with at all, which the above would do nothing to diminish, I have thought for a while that y’all need more help. You guys are doing a ton of work and in my opinion a little too much work each. I don’t want y’all to get burned out and not be able to continue at all. Maybe an appeal to the community that y’all can’t continue like this without more help would encourage those with the ability to lighten the load?
I’m, fairly, certain the answer is no.
In response to your second paragraph, we are better than holding our heads above water. We have been planning/discussing solutions for months…we will come up with a way out of this predicament…it’s only temporary.