Thinking about the direction of Beehaw
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.
Sounds like you want forums, basically :D
I'm pretty nostalgic for forums myself but while they are great for smaller communities centered around a specific topic, they were really difficult to navigate when it comes to larger general communities IMHO. Fediverse with its reddit-like structure has an advantage here, and I personally like the idea of AP and multiple smaller communities interacting. We just need better tech and UI.
Not really. I prefer the Reddit like format, like you, and see it as a superior substitute for flatter forums.
A private community operating alongside public communities is what I’m talking about and I think that’s a different breast.
Is this not a forum? I'm confused on whatever definition you're going for where private conversations make something a forum. What is this then?
I dunno whats the official definition, I just remember the old (phpbb) forums having a complex roles structure and privileges so a subset of community would often have access to subforums or threads that other people can't see. You'd have a public face of the forum and then private categories within it that wouldn't be visible from outside.
This is more of a reddit-like news bulletin where everything is public and open by default - in the case of fediverse even more so since everything automatically gets pushed to other servers that you have no control over.