DarbyDear

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.

If you and your partner enjoy RPG’s, I highly recommend Divinity: Original Sin (and Divinity: Original Sin 2, though we haven’t finished that one yet). Very story-driven, the tactical combat is a blast when you get into strategizing and collaborating, and there are all sorts of non-combat shenanigans you can get up to as well (the second even more so than the first).

Count me in the “support” column. Beehaw has always been very open about what it is and isn’t, and all of the people who are bringing up how freedom of speech is more important than anything can find some level of explanation in Gaywallet’s post/essay “Beehaw is a community”. Beehaw admins/mods don’t have the tools to moderate more even-handedly, so the decision to defederate for now and re-assess when more resources are available makes perfect sense to me. I’m also in the camp of “smaller and higher quality is more important than growth at any cost.” This is how you can have a community where dissenting voices are allowed, such as how I’ve seen opinions I personally disagree with allowed to be discussed in more detail than they probably would be elsewhere. I also saw a post by someone that I believe was from one of these instances (it was either deleted or isn’t viewable due to the defederation), and it was pretty clear that they were purely operating in bad faith - essentially saying that the users here are silenced and oppressed by heavy-handed moderation. For context, they also made a post elsewhere that shared information that essentially boiled down to “North Korea actually isn’t bad, it’s all imperialist propaganda!”

In the end, the federated nature of Lemmy means I can just create another account elsewhere if I feel the need to interact with the defederated instances. Jerboa (my main way of using Lemmy) makes it pretty quick and easy to add multiple accounts, so it really wouldn’t be much of a hassle.