Personal Reflections
Over the past few weeks I've found myself engaged with Beehaw in a fundamentally different way. The explosive growth necessitated shifted timelines, had me prioritizing replies and moderator actions in a different way and in general greatly shifted what parts of the website I spent most of my time on.
This shift changed my perception of the website. I didn't have as much time to spend reading the awesome interactions which resolved themselves, where people were nice to each other and to check out the cool discussions going on. I spent a lot of my time answering questions, devoting a bunch of attention to the neediest, the loudest, or simply whomever was just in my inbox. I ended up stepping into a lot of conversations to help try and defuse or deal with difficult people and directing efforts on helping (collaboratively!) to establish a strong moderation ethos. I recently found myself reflecting on this and realizing I was missing out on the very environment we came here to establish and that I need to set better boundaries for myself.
In order to prioritize my own mental health I'm going to establish the following boundaries for myself:
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I am going to spend more of my time on the site browsing and commenting and less moderating and responding to every question that comes my way. If you ping me to ask a question that other people have already asked or can be answered elsewhere I'm probably not going to answer it anymore.
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As much as I want to treat all of you with the respect and kindness you deserve when intervening as a mod or admin, it's not sustainable at this scale because it quickly becomes all of the time I spend on this site, so I've put together a code of conduct below to help guide expectations of how interactions with myself and other moderators might look.
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I really don't have the time or energy to take suggestions phrased like demands or to entertain anyone talking shit about this place. Instead of suggestions phrased like demands, I'd ask that they are phrased as requests or even better as a plan of action (how are you going to help us accomplish something better, together?). Instead of talking shit, you're free to highlight the flaws you see (ideally in Beehaw support), so long as you're also providing suggestions on how to fix things. Venting about this platform just to vent that it doesn't fit your ideal situation doesn't do the community any good on this platform. Or any platform we're federated with, frankly. If you ever feel the need to vent about this platform then do so to your friends, in DMs, on email, by punching a pillow, or by whispering sweet nothings to the wind on top of your roof- venting here just makes the place depressing and toxic and I don't want to participate in that environment. I want an uplifting, positive space where we enable each other and treat each other with respect.
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It's upsetting to see how certain individuals react to moderators and admins stepping in to try and keep this place safe for minorities or to ensure that there's peace. This is tiring to everyone involved and not sustainable. As much as I like the idea of helping each other become better, some people need a lot more help than we can offer and I think some of us don't have strong enough boundaries on how to engage with that in a healthy manner (I know I've got issues with being taken advantage of because I love pleasing others). To that end, we've drawn up a draft code of conduct to help people understand some healthy boundaries that need to be specified.
Purpose of the Code of Conduct
The purpose of this code of conduct is not to establish new rules (our only rule is to be nice), but to frame what nice behavior looks like so that stronger boundaries can be both respectful and enforced. I've spent a lot of mental and emotional energy educating and diffusing situations on Beehaw in the last few weeks and this is a structure we're providing to show you how to be respectful of the time of the moderators and admins and how to get the best results out of an interaction with us. If we tell you to disengage and you imply that I'm being a fascist for doing so, we're no longer going to bother continuing to try to defuse the situation as some of us have been, because you simply aren't treating us with good faith. As much as I'd like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and to always assume good faith even when they're angrily replying to me, none of us can do that at the scale we've already reached. I've seen a lot of people treating me and other moderators with bad faith and I don't want any of us becoming cold and calloused to our users as a defense mechanism to deal with the abuse.
In case you didn't notice, this post is also a link to the code of conduct.
Someone on here a few days ago said rules like these are written in blood. I've been around to see what happens when rules like what exist here are not around, and it's not pretty (usually lots of literal Nazis get involved). I know any kind of hostility can sting however absurd it is, but ultimately this criticism can be disregarded as it is made from at best total ignorance. Freedom should extend to the point where it doesn't infringe on the freedom of others and I don't think that's too hard to understand. Some restrictions on negative freedom can enhance positive freedom, and I've really been enjoying freely expressing myself in good faith here without bracing myself for a stupid fight. I've been wanting what this is for many years.
There's also the criticism that I've seen multiple times about "having to write an essay to be allowed in" when 1) I wrote maybe 3 sentences total for all of the questions, 2) it's kind of a bare minimum vibe check to make sure you aren't going to raise hell, and 3) even setting all that aside, anyone from an instance that is federated with Beehaw can interact with us so it's not like they're missing out on anything. It's literally people being upset at nothing if they really are interested in participating in the community in any way. They just resent the smallest of obstacles (which aren't even obstacles since, again, you can still interact as a member of another instance). It just reeks of bad faith arguments that can be discarded out of hand.
I am not really active on any other nodes. I am new in the concept of federated lemmy instances and completely out of touch with mastodon or any other social media based on similar principles (I only check beehaw announcements in situations like yesterday), so I have not witnessed this (or maybe most of what @Gaywallet@beehaw.org refers to in the OP). But I felt conflicted in the opposite direction when I decided to sign up after having read the documents. After a couple of weeks of lurking and watching the application of what is described in the documents I actually wanted to write an essay in the sign up form and I tried quite hard to keep it short ("It will be read by a real person"). After more than 2 decades in various online communities and platforms, there simply are way too many reasons that justify what I was feeling. Which can simply be summarized as "I am really very happy I found this community".
I felt the same when I applied. It's someone's time. Be honest and direct, they will get it and that's the reason you want to join.