I saw this discussion brought up on a different thread and I though I’d get some more opinions on the matter.
The Beehaw community guidelines describe a place that’s meant to be safe, friendly and encourages people to discuss their ideas in good faith. For the most part I feel like this community lives up to that; users of this instance are generally thoughtful with their responses. However, I don’t feel like that level of quality extends to the users who post from other instances. Responses from those users are more likely to pendantic, overly argumentative, and unhelpful.
Now I may just be an elitist fuck so I’d like to hear your opinions on this. Does Beehaw benefit from federation? Do the community guidelines even matter if they don’t apply to many of the people who engage with this instance? Am I just looking for a reason to complain?
EDIT: This post isn’t a request for Beehaw to defederate btw. I just wanted to discuss the negatives of federation and what we can do to alleviate them :)
I think the problem is that there is less often something to be said if you agree. Every now and then you might have something to add that fleshes out the idea or adds additional context, but generally if I totally agree with a comment I just upvote it.
On the other hand, when you disagree with something your response will, by logical necessity, be different from the parent comment.
So if you want to prioritize “adding something novel” there’s a logical bias towards comments that disagree since only some percentage of agreement will tick that box.
Otherwise you end up with a bunch of comments that literally or figuratively add up to “this”.
Don’t worry so much about being novel, then. Even a mere sentence of agreement or encouragement is nice for people to see - as long as it’s more thoughtful than just responding with “this”.