I recently made an account on Beehaw because I’ve been having pleasant interactions with the instance from my lemm.ee account. Some good threads, seemed like a progressive space. So I went back to the philosophy documents and read them again, liked most of what I saw (again) and signed up for an account today. Decided to break in my new account by browsing the top posts of the last month. Several of them were threads I recognised and had commented in, and felt like revisiting. Except my comments weren’t there. When I got to a comment I very specifically remember replying to (someone asked what’s up with HBomber and James Somerton), and couldn’t find my comment, I decided to check the modlog.
I’m banned. I’ve been talking into an empty void for 4 months. I was banned for being in bad faith. And one of my comments was removed by an admin, because I told people to assume good faith and apparently that’s not nice.
This doesn’t align at all with the documents I’ve been reading today. The ones about assuming good faith, and about giving people chances to clarify, and about how banning is a last resort only for obvious trolls. When I came to this community 4 months ago to make a post about fediverse drama, I wasn’t interested in active participation in the community, and I didn’t make that post with that in mind. I understand how that might not fit the desires of the community here. But I didn’t make that post in bad faith. I, and whoever wrote those pages on the philosophy of Beehaw, wanted the same thing back then. To create a corner of the internet free of hate speech and full of kindness. Now? I’m jaded and beaten. I don’t want to create a kind community anymore, I want to find one. I’ve given up on that ambition. So that’s why I reread the updated documents with hope. Why I created an account. And why I want to know whether beehaw.org is actually the website I read about in those documents. Because those modlogs say the opposite of what those documents said. If I don’t fit in here, if the ideals I thought I saw aren’t present, I’d like to find out quickly.
Should I still hope?
That sucks, I hope someone sees this post and un-bans you. My whole Mastodon instance got put onto a blocklist for reasons that I still don’t fully understand, (fortunately I think people aren’t using that blocklist as much as they used to).
Try to keep the big picture in mind. Politics is always a little messy, misunderstandings happen. I think you are 100% right to try assume good faith, and I think mods often make mistakes and ban people without good cause or good evidence, but on a whim or on a hunch, or maybe they are just tired and have been dealing with too many trolls or bots lately. Then they just forget about the ban and the damage is never undone. I wish more mods understood that it is not a good idea to ban permanently on the first offense.