Where is this stemming from? Who are you quoting? As you can see on their front page, they explicitly have rules against even things as simple as being unfriendly. Which is suitable to their goal as a community, which isn’t being some free speech haven like wolfballs.com attempts to be. They never claimed to value free speech, that contradicts their site purpose.

I get that, but it feels bad because you’re just participating within the rules of another, entirely different space. You can’t know you’re breaking the rules of their space (if you’ve never been there). And suddenly you’re banned from there for activity that was performed in an entirely different space.

The activity I was banned from there for was me posting in a thread on lemmy.ml. Apparently Beehaw users replied to me and didn’t like the way I replied back annoyed and somewhat aggressively. Thus banned.

From my perspective that didn’t occur on Beehaw, it occurred on Lemmy.ml, where all of my activity occurred. This is the user experience end of it that feels “bad”. And you don’t even get any knowledge that this banning occurred. You just get silenced by an instance forever and that’s that. I responded to multiple threads expecting Beehaw users to be getting my comments after that ban with no knowledge I was wasting my time shouting into the void and that only lemmy.ml users or other parts of the federation would see those comments. It feels like shadowbanning but in a particularly unfair way for rules on federations that you might upset that you don’t even know exist and certainly don’t know the rules of before they get annoyed with your comment. This is the user-end problem, a user can not know what people far and wide they might upset with their comment, they can not know that their comment is appearing in a place where their comment might be subject to an entirely different set of rules. I mean, they can if they understand federation in the way that I do now, but the average person this is like talking in some extra-dimensional shit, it’s going to bend people’s minds entirely. Most people are going to be like “buhhh I only posted on here though why can I no longer reply to them?”.

Serious people don’t flood the joker with complaints or get annoyed, the comedy site get to enjoy their posts. It allows different sites to collaboratively use a community despite having different values and different moderation policies.

Yeah which sounds great if you’re a member of the existing hegemony. Whether that’s liberalism or white, male, cis, straight, beneficiary of the patriarchy, able bodied, neurotypical and so on and so forth. If you are outside of the existing cultural, political and social hegemonies however what that represents to you as a person that will be considered an agitator by the hegemonies is… Suppression.

I think I understand and recognize your point about how blocking you for what you said in a different context (a site with different rules and people!) is unfair, because that blocks you from Beehaw communities where you would have acted in line with their rules, because it’s on their site and not the other less strict site. And I agree.

Yes that’s exactly what occurred. Banned from Beehaw before ever actually participating in a Beehaw thread. The issue is that when your respond to any given thread from a user perspective it feels like you’re posting within the jurisdiction of lemmy.ml, and then when you get slapped by somewhere completely different for your activity that you definitely didn’t feel like you were posting there… It feels quite bad, and it feels very confusing if you don’t particularly understand it, and it’s hidden so you may end up wasting your time participating in threads at a later time that you don’t even know you can’t participate in. Again, not particularly whinging about that. I’m raising the point that it feels bad because it’s a significant part of the user experience that is going to be how a very very large number of people end up learning how federation works. There may be ways to mitigate and improve on that user experience, particularly the issues with it feeling like shadowbanning, lack of visual communication, etc.

When hexbear federates this thread is going to happen again and someone else is going to end up asking the same questions and saying many of the same things I’m saying too. I’m also a little worried that how those threads and questions play out may have a significant impact on whether some people abandon the project entirely, I hope the devs can uhhh, be a bit more understanding about how their responses will cause people to judge the project itself. I don’t want people leaving Hexbear because they decide they don’t like a Lemmy dev or w/e and I don’t want to see Hexbear’s userbase fall prey to smart wreckers that realise any grumpy comments from the devs are an opportunity to rile up hundreds of community members into a drama frenzy aimed at causing issues. Most of my thinking is about getting ahead of potential problems.