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well, i think in order to answer this question we need to first define what is meant by "echo chamber", because that's a somewhat loaded term with no standard or commonly agreed upon definition.
Good point. By echo chamber I mean to say I hope this community doesn't become a place where liberals get mad at conservatives, (or vice versa) those sentiments are agreed with by others, and it just becomes a big place for hating on conservatives. That also raises the question of how we bring different viewpoints into this community without causing it to become one big cesspool of hate. How do we have civil discussions among different viewpoints.
~I hope this makes sense, I didn't proofread~
Getting mad at each other is not nice behavior. There are times in which anger is warranted and times in which you can still be nice but hostile (we have a zero tolerance policy for intolerance, if you tell a Nazi to fuck off we aren't about to step in and tone police and tell you to be nice), but we would encourage you to instead report any comments like this so we can keep intolerant individuals off our platform.
How do we have civil discussions among different viewpoints.
The key here is mostly being nice. Assume good faith. If the person is acting in bad faith, do your best not to engage and just report the person. Past that point it's all a matter of how good your communication skills are, and this might be a good place to practice them while keeping things nice.
What is your definition of being "nice", actually? This question is hard to answer, i know. What i mean is, demanding from someone who is upset and therefore gets emotional, to switch to "non-violent speech", is a form of tyranny. My stance on voices that get emotional because of dissatisfaction is that they are in need to get heared more than those who are satisfied anyway. Conflicts are actually a valuable part in my work, as they are so revealing about people, and they provide a lot of energy that can get transformed for the better. People might be in a state where it's just impossible for them to be "nice", and demanding it from them would result in them getting yet more aggressive. In that sense, a demand for being "nice" is a demand for masking dissatisfaction, thus becoming a hindrance to resolution.
I can very well be nice and slap someone in the face with a sarcastic irony, without people even realising it. Just don't want my account to be trapped in a space that tends to consequently give PC tyrants an upper hand. I'm not from USA btw so those typical masking standards are not so much part of my culture. I'm all for being civilised and i think that i am :-) but i'm also understanding of people getting angry because i might understand some of the psychology behind it -- and some people might be nice and all but they are still fundamentally being idiots.
The two philosophy posts in the sidebar touch on a lot of this. Have you had a chance to review them?
I sympathize with the need to escalate both speech and action when changes need to happen but are being ignored. This kind of behavior is what lead to the creation of this website as the platform we fled was becoming a centrist and rationalist echo chamber where discussions were growing increasingly hostile towards specific minority groups (mostly women and transgender folks).
Yep i read the first part. That was part in my decision making for sighing up on this server. Now i'm getting around to reading the second part. Thanks for explaining your take on what you call "rationalism" because else that would have left me questioning. Am i right in taking the term "centrist" as political? Would have to educate myself on that.
Don't focus too much on the labels themselves. I'm using them as shorthand notation to describe a specific kind of mindset. The issues that were happening were essentially people of a privileged group starting discussions about a marginalized group to just ask questions or otherwise create a hostile space towards these minority groups but within the bounds of the rules.
Imagine being a woman, confronted with sexism every day, posting an article about a study which proved this sexism, for the thread to be immediately dominated by men all talking about how that's definitely not how they act. While it may be true (generous interpretation), it's rather exhausting for the women who already experience being dismissed like this regularly in their lives and it's also emotionally draining and doesn't set up a very nice space for the women.
Ooh ... excuse my slight neurodiversity. I guess i'm just not a part anymore of a sickening society. Went to other places on that other platform the short periods i spent there.
Appreciate you taking your time to be so verbose. :-)
No need to apologize, I'm neurodiverse too 🙂 I can't promise I'll always have the time to be verbose or respond to everything, but I shall try my best. Please feel free to ask clarifying questions if you ever have them, and I'll do my best to explain.
I just worry that there will come a point when beehaw has too many users for that to work. If we had 1/8 of reddit's users there's still a good chance it would turn into a violent place. Would beehaw limit growth at a certain point?
No idea! But we don't want to turn into a violent place. Our only rule is to be(e) nice, and that's something none of the owners are willing to budge on. If we start running into serious issues with this, we're open to whatever measures are needed to get this back under control.
That's the magic of federation: I hope beehaw would consider closing registration when getting to a certain size that makes moderation harder, allowing for another server to be "the new beehaw" and so on to have a galaxy of easily moderated instances that federate together.
Can we call them "hives" to match the bee setting?
This is actually genius imo
Mods here seem to have some good experience, so my guess is hateful discussions will be removed and the offending users will eventually migrate to other instances more tolerant to their viewpoints, but debates will be left alone. Seen a few good debates with opposing viewpoints so far that have gone well
Yes. I do fear that by putting too much trust in mods it may not end well eventually. I don't mean to say that any of these mods would do anything wrong but what about in 15 years? We should put systems into place early that keep this platform from redditing (look at me, creating my own verbs!).
What do you propose?
I'm not sure that I have anything in particular in mind, but I do think that it should be something we all think about. If we deem a solution necessary, we could totally come up with something.
One broad idea could be to encourage people with different viewpoints who still discuss them civilly. Help them set a good example.
You can always make a new server with a federated system and convince users to switch.
I actually did seriously consider doing that but I decided against it. Beehaw has almost everything that a social platform needs and I'd rather help it grow than try to create something new.
Beehaw has almost everything that a social platform needs
What do you think is missing?
Measures to keep it from becoming another reddit far down the road. I'd love if this could be my forever home here. 15 years ago when reddit was started it had a similar vibe to here and I'm sure few people thought it would turn into the cesspool it is today. If we could put preempive measures in place to avoid that early on this could be something beautiful.
I think the desire of the admins of Beehaw to not make this a part or full time job will go a long way. But the federated nature of Lemmy can be problematic in a way that I'm not sure has any good answers.