Periodic official communication, just to clarify a few things.
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@macmenco thank you
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@p with respect, I'm certain that something has been horribly misunderstood.
Edit: revisiting some of this thread in a private browsing window, I see some of what was posted by people who I block. Hmm.
I'll share with you, privately, a recent post that heaps praise upon bsd.cafe.
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My (pedantic) 2 cents: tolerance cannot be applied uniformly. It is context-dependent.
Someone drinking Coke can fairly be excluded from a community whose mission is to fight multinationals. In that context, they are "bad apples" who don't share the community's values. They are simply out of place and will undermine its morale and commitment.
At the other extreme, a democratic nation must be extremely tolerant, except toward those who seek to abolish tolerance itself (this is justified self-defence).
The Fediverse is a large, neutral platform, so it must be extremely tolerant. If someone is annoying, there are platform-level tools to deal with it, like muting, temporary bans, etc.
Specific Fediverse instances can be less tolerant if they are communities built around specific shared values. They can also defederate from other instances if they know the majority of their users will be in conflict and they will create problems.
It's a delicate balance: if you are too intolerant, you lose diversity and richness; if you are too tolerant, you create friction between users and destroy the community.
So the appropriate level of tolerance depends on the type of community.
That said, I don't see many cases where excluding people simply for having an X account is a justified level of intolerance.
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Periodic official communication, just to clarify a few things.
The BSD Cafe is an open, inclusive and friendly community. A community of people who try to be *“pro, not against”* and *“supporters, not haters”*: enthusiasts, friends, people who come here to share, to learn, to discuss. Not to hate each other.
This does not mean that we all have to think in the same way. Quite the opposite: it means that we can have different opinions, discuss them, defend them strongly, and question each other’s ideas.
What it does not mean is that it is acceptable to insult, threaten, attack people, or pretend that there can only be one morally acceptable position on every possible subject.
Calling the BSD Cafe a "Nazi Bar" from the outside simply because we do not automatically censor people who have an opinion different from yours is offensive towards the hundreds of people who are part of this community.
People are, of course, free to criticise what happens here. But expecting us to attack, ban or silence someone because you believe they deserve it, and then accusing the whole Cafe because we do not, is something different.
And I have seen something even worse lately: actual calls for hate. The equivalent of *“hey, everyone, go and attack this person”*, simply because that person does not share your position.
No. This is not acceptable.
And, dear friends, declaring yourself anti-Nazi while organising a crowd against somebody, intimidating them and treating them as an enemy who deserves to be attacked means using exactly the kind of methods you claim to oppose.
I do not say this lightly. I come from a family, and from a country, with a very real history of fascism and of the antifascism that immediately followed it. These are not just abstract words to me.
Hate is not tolerated, at any level, inside or outside the Cafe. The same is true for threats, intimidation and aggression. Believing that our cause is right does not make those behaviours more acceptable.
You disagree with someone? Say it. Explain why. Argue against their ideas. Support yours with all the conviction you want. But do not aggressively attack. This is not tolerated.
And expecting everyone else to attack that person too, or considering them somehow complicit because they do not, is something different. And it is not what I want for this community.
On any subject.
Even pineapple on pizza (!!!).
The Fediverse is a non-place, but it is made of real people. Wonderful people, very often. Let’s not turn it into version 2.0 of traditional social media, where every discussion becomes a war and anyone who does not think exactly like us automatically becomes the enemy.
In the last few weeks I have seen people stepping away exactly because of this. On different subjects, people accused of the worst things not because of something they had done, but because they had not said what someone expected them to say. Some of them, for their own wellbeing, simply decided to take a step back.
We all lost something because of that. Nobody gained anything.
So let’s keep supporting what we believe in. Let’s do it with conviction, and with firmness when needed. But let’s discuss ideas without turning people into targets.
From experience, I have learnt that real change also requires discussion, organisation, patience and concrete actions. We can disagree deeply without stopping considering each other as people.
This is the kind of place I want the BSD Cafe to continue to be.
@stefano 🤗
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@khm
Just trying to understand here, because this might be a cultural dividing point.[Someone says "hey block this asshole," and people block the asshole, that's an orchestrated response.]
The action of inciting others to block a given user, based on the orchestrator's individual interaction with that user, is IMHO ethically questionable.
The orchestrator's intention is obviously to isolate and hurt that user. And escalation to crime is a possible outcome to consider.
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@lw @rakoo Thank you for the question. Bringing up concrete examples will likely give me the opportunity to clarify things better. I'll take two specific examples, one from a while ago and one from recent days.
A user asked for information about Xlibre, stating they would install it because they didn't want to switch to Wayland. I allowed the exchange (which was civil and polite) to progress naturally until the person received several insights regarding the development team's political views. The user took note, understood, and opted for other solutions since they weren't fully aware of the situation and, upon learning this, didn't share Xlibre's team vision. In my view, this was a community success: members informing another member about something they didn't know, reasoning together, and finding an ethically valid solution - meaning that, as they didn't share that vision, they opted to change their OS and X platform. The person was grateful.
The mere fact that Xlibre was brought up sparked a lot of controversy about my lack of moderation, how I hadn't nipped the discussion in the bud, and references to the "nazi bar" because people were discussing "nazi projects" - even though the outcome was a clear and conscious realization.In recent days, I praised NetBSD for various reasons, and I was asked what NetBSD's stance on AI was. I replied - matching their official stance - that they consider AI-generated code to be tainted and therefore do not accept it. A few people, including a couple of prominent figures, started asking me privately if I would now exclude FreeBSD from the community and from my setups because it doesn't entirely reject AI by policy. I replied that I am observing the situation with keen interest, but for the moment, things remain as they are. I prefer not to go into detail, but it wasn't pleasant.
There is also another story from recent days, which I mentioned in another comment on this post, but it isn't directly tied to BSD Cafe.
The goal of BSD Cafe is to foster a serene environment where we can share the passions we have in common. Intolerant people are shown the door and are not welcome. Blocking and defederating at the first sign of dangerous behavior is right and healthy.
However, turning aggressive simply because a sensitive topic comes up is, in my opinion, wrong, just like in the first example I mentioned here.My goal with my post was simply to try and calm things down a bit, encouraging people to be active in tangibly supporting their views. Evidently, it turned into something else, and I'm sorry about that.
> A user asked for information about Xlibre, stating they would install it because they didn't want to switch to Wayland. I allowed the exchange (which was civil and polite)
Ahahah, I participated in this conversation and posted a link to my small note about how to install XLibre to FreeBSD
I thought that someone may feel a butthurt, since there are dissidents, who didn't follow something looking like the USSR's Party's general line, still exists. And fediblock not so successfull in pursuing these "dissidents" as KGB. But I definitely didn't expected such outcome…
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Periodic official communication, just to clarify a few things.
The BSD Cafe is an open, inclusive and friendly community. A community of people who try to be *“pro, not against”* and *“supporters, not haters”*: enthusiasts, friends, people who come here to share, to learn, to discuss. Not to hate each other.
This does not mean that we all have to think in the same way. Quite the opposite: it means that we can have different opinions, discuss them, defend them strongly, and question each other’s ideas.
What it does not mean is that it is acceptable to insult, threaten, attack people, or pretend that there can only be one morally acceptable position on every possible subject.
Calling the BSD Cafe a "Nazi Bar" from the outside simply because we do not automatically censor people who have an opinion different from yours is offensive towards the hundreds of people who are part of this community.
People are, of course, free to criticise what happens here. But expecting us to attack, ban or silence someone because you believe they deserve it, and then accusing the whole Cafe because we do not, is something different.
And I have seen something even worse lately: actual calls for hate. The equivalent of *“hey, everyone, go and attack this person”*, simply because that person does not share your position.
No. This is not acceptable.
And, dear friends, declaring yourself anti-Nazi while organising a crowd against somebody, intimidating them and treating them as an enemy who deserves to be attacked means using exactly the kind of methods you claim to oppose.
I do not say this lightly. I come from a family, and from a country, with a very real history of fascism and of the antifascism that immediately followed it. These are not just abstract words to me.
Hate is not tolerated, at any level, inside or outside the Cafe. The same is true for threats, intimidation and aggression. Believing that our cause is right does not make those behaviours more acceptable.
You disagree with someone? Say it. Explain why. Argue against their ideas. Support yours with all the conviction you want. But do not aggressively attack. This is not tolerated.
And expecting everyone else to attack that person too, or considering them somehow complicit because they do not, is something different. And it is not what I want for this community.
On any subject.
Even pineapple on pizza (!!!).
The Fediverse is a non-place, but it is made of real people. Wonderful people, very often. Let’s not turn it into version 2.0 of traditional social media, where every discussion becomes a war and anyone who does not think exactly like us automatically becomes the enemy.
In the last few weeks I have seen people stepping away exactly because of this. On different subjects, people accused of the worst things not because of something they had done, but because they had not said what someone expected them to say. Some of them, for their own wellbeing, simply decided to take a step back.
We all lost something because of that. Nobody gained anything.
So let’s keep supporting what we believe in. Let’s do it with conviction, and with firmness when needed. But let’s discuss ideas without turning people into targets.
From experience, I have learnt that real change also requires discussion, organisation, patience and concrete actions. We can disagree deeply without stopping considering each other as people.
This is the kind of place I want the BSD Cafe to continue to be.
@stefano Thanks for your common sense and weighted position!
As a great-grandson of soldier, who fought a real Nazis during WWII, I think my ancestor is rotating in his grave as fast as possible, looking to the modern clowning, when the words "nazi" and a "faschist" became a common slurs and completely lost its initial meanings.
The level of cringe, which I feel when I hear about "faschist software" and accusations in "faschism" is so big, that I started to completely ignore such accusations — looks like nowadays it is possible to become a "faschist" for common things (e.g. I suppose it is easy to find some opinions, asserting that only "faschists" write programs in C, etc
), which are recognized by some small but loud group of radicals as "bad" and they are able to gather an angry mob to make some attacks. Or have some power, so the "doorman syndrome" (синдром вахтёра) (it is a Russian idiom: when the someone without a power, got some power and then exploiting it just to feel the power over people) is manifesting. So, I considered that it is better to form my own opinion about some subject, remembering that I'm not from USA/Western Europe and I'm not a radical in any way Anyway, an impossibility to discuss the opinions, not to silence the opponent by loudly shouting the words with lost meaning (like "nazi") is a lost art nowadays — as I think. As a guy, living in the most sanctioned country in the world, I see this in the lot of levels — from conversations in the Fediverse, to international diplomacy. I thought that the next one iteration of "left-wing<=>right-wing parties" cycle around the globe will teach people that discussions and centered/weighted decisions are better then radicalization and de-humanisation of the opponents. But looks like learning is also a lost art nowdays
As I heard from one political analyst from my country (it is not her own words, just quote): "the old world is dying, the new world is struggling to born, and nowadays is the time for monsters" (translated from Russian, so it is not an exact quote).
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Periodic official communication, just to clarify a few things.
The BSD Cafe is an open, inclusive and friendly community. A community of people who try to be *“pro, not against”* and *“supporters, not haters”*: enthusiasts, friends, people who come here to share, to learn, to discuss. Not to hate each other.
This does not mean that we all have to think in the same way. Quite the opposite: it means that we can have different opinions, discuss them, defend them strongly, and question each other’s ideas.
What it does not mean is that it is acceptable to insult, threaten, attack people, or pretend that there can only be one morally acceptable position on every possible subject.
Calling the BSD Cafe a "Nazi Bar" from the outside simply because we do not automatically censor people who have an opinion different from yours is offensive towards the hundreds of people who are part of this community.
People are, of course, free to criticise what happens here. But expecting us to attack, ban or silence someone because you believe they deserve it, and then accusing the whole Cafe because we do not, is something different.
And I have seen something even worse lately: actual calls for hate. The equivalent of *“hey, everyone, go and attack this person”*, simply because that person does not share your position.
No. This is not acceptable.
And, dear friends, declaring yourself anti-Nazi while organising a crowd against somebody, intimidating them and treating them as an enemy who deserves to be attacked means using exactly the kind of methods you claim to oppose.
I do not say this lightly. I come from a family, and from a country, with a very real history of fascism and of the antifascism that immediately followed it. These are not just abstract words to me.
Hate is not tolerated, at any level, inside or outside the Cafe. The same is true for threats, intimidation and aggression. Believing that our cause is right does not make those behaviours more acceptable.
You disagree with someone? Say it. Explain why. Argue against their ideas. Support yours with all the conviction you want. But do not aggressively attack. This is not tolerated.
And expecting everyone else to attack that person too, or considering them somehow complicit because they do not, is something different. And it is not what I want for this community.
On any subject.
Even pineapple on pizza (!!!).
The Fediverse is a non-place, but it is made of real people. Wonderful people, very often. Let’s not turn it into version 2.0 of traditional social media, where every discussion becomes a war and anyone who does not think exactly like us automatically becomes the enemy.
In the last few weeks I have seen people stepping away exactly because of this. On different subjects, people accused of the worst things not because of something they had done, but because they had not said what someone expected them to say. Some of them, for their own wellbeing, simply decided to take a step back.
We all lost something because of that. Nobody gained anything.
So let’s keep supporting what we believe in. Let’s do it with conviction, and with firmness when needed. But let’s discuss ideas without turning people into targets.
From experience, I have learnt that real change also requires discussion, organisation, patience and concrete actions. We can disagree deeply without stopping considering each other as people.
This is the kind of place I want the BSD Cafe to continue to be.
You created a very fine place. You should be proud instead of explaining yourself.
Both of my grandfathers fought in WWII. My country was almost completely swept off this planet. So yes, I do understand what fascism was.
Honestly when I hear all these shitstorms about "fascism" - it makes me angry.
Being a person that respects your work I will not write more. Even though many more words come to my mind.
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Periodic official communication, just to clarify a few things.
The BSD Cafe is an open, inclusive and friendly community. A community of people who try to be *“pro, not against”* and *“supporters, not haters”*: enthusiasts, friends, people who come here to share, to learn, to discuss. Not to hate each other.
This does not mean that we all have to think in the same way. Quite the opposite: it means that we can have different opinions, discuss them, defend them strongly, and question each other’s ideas.
What it does not mean is that it is acceptable to insult, threaten, attack people, or pretend that there can only be one morally acceptable position on every possible subject.
Calling the BSD Cafe a "Nazi Bar" from the outside simply because we do not automatically censor people who have an opinion different from yours is offensive towards the hundreds of people who are part of this community.
People are, of course, free to criticise what happens here. But expecting us to attack, ban or silence someone because you believe they deserve it, and then accusing the whole Cafe because we do not, is something different.
And I have seen something even worse lately: actual calls for hate. The equivalent of *“hey, everyone, go and attack this person”*, simply because that person does not share your position.
No. This is not acceptable.
And, dear friends, declaring yourself anti-Nazi while organising a crowd against somebody, intimidating them and treating them as an enemy who deserves to be attacked means using exactly the kind of methods you claim to oppose.
I do not say this lightly. I come from a family, and from a country, with a very real history of fascism and of the antifascism that immediately followed it. These are not just abstract words to me.
Hate is not tolerated, at any level, inside or outside the Cafe. The same is true for threats, intimidation and aggression. Believing that our cause is right does not make those behaviours more acceptable.
You disagree with someone? Say it. Explain why. Argue against their ideas. Support yours with all the conviction you want. But do not aggressively attack. This is not tolerated.
And expecting everyone else to attack that person too, or considering them somehow complicit because they do not, is something different. And it is not what I want for this community.
On any subject.
Even pineapple on pizza (!!!).
The Fediverse is a non-place, but it is made of real people. Wonderful people, very often. Let’s not turn it into version 2.0 of traditional social media, where every discussion becomes a war and anyone who does not think exactly like us automatically becomes the enemy.
In the last few weeks I have seen people stepping away exactly because of this. On different subjects, people accused of the worst things not because of something they had done, but because they had not said what someone expected them to say. Some of them, for their own wellbeing, simply decided to take a step back.
We all lost something because of that. Nobody gained anything.
So let’s keep supporting what we believe in. Let’s do it with conviction, and with firmness when needed. But let’s discuss ideas without turning people into targets.
From experience, I have learnt that real change also requires discussion, organisation, patience and concrete actions. We can disagree deeply without stopping considering each other as people.
This is the kind of place I want the BSD Cafe to continue to be.
When you can be branded a nazi for wanting to assume good faith (until proven otherwise), or give people a second chance, or just believing that dialogue across political differences is a healthy thing, for those who want to engage, things have gotten a bit out of whack.
I think you're giving too much credence to that attitude, but I also understand why you want to make a clear statement.
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Periodic official communication, just to clarify a few things.
The BSD Cafe is an open, inclusive and friendly community. A community of people who try to be *“pro, not against”* and *“supporters, not haters”*: enthusiasts, friends, people who come here to share, to learn, to discuss. Not to hate each other.
This does not mean that we all have to think in the same way. Quite the opposite: it means that we can have different opinions, discuss them, defend them strongly, and question each other’s ideas.
What it does not mean is that it is acceptable to insult, threaten, attack people, or pretend that there can only be one morally acceptable position on every possible subject.
Calling the BSD Cafe a "Nazi Bar" from the outside simply because we do not automatically censor people who have an opinion different from yours is offensive towards the hundreds of people who are part of this community.
People are, of course, free to criticise what happens here. But expecting us to attack, ban or silence someone because you believe they deserve it, and then accusing the whole Cafe because we do not, is something different.
And I have seen something even worse lately: actual calls for hate. The equivalent of *“hey, everyone, go and attack this person”*, simply because that person does not share your position.
No. This is not acceptable.
And, dear friends, declaring yourself anti-Nazi while organising a crowd against somebody, intimidating them and treating them as an enemy who deserves to be attacked means using exactly the kind of methods you claim to oppose.
I do not say this lightly. I come from a family, and from a country, with a very real history of fascism and of the antifascism that immediately followed it. These are not just abstract words to me.
Hate is not tolerated, at any level, inside or outside the Cafe. The same is true for threats, intimidation and aggression. Believing that our cause is right does not make those behaviours more acceptable.
You disagree with someone? Say it. Explain why. Argue against their ideas. Support yours with all the conviction you want. But do not aggressively attack. This is not tolerated.
And expecting everyone else to attack that person too, or considering them somehow complicit because they do not, is something different. And it is not what I want for this community.
On any subject.
Even pineapple on pizza (!!!).
The Fediverse is a non-place, but it is made of real people. Wonderful people, very often. Let’s not turn it into version 2.0 of traditional social media, where every discussion becomes a war and anyone who does not think exactly like us automatically becomes the enemy.
In the last few weeks I have seen people stepping away exactly because of this. On different subjects, people accused of the worst things not because of something they had done, but because they had not said what someone expected them to say. Some of them, for their own wellbeing, simply decided to take a step back.
We all lost something because of that. Nobody gained anything.
So let’s keep supporting what we believe in. Let’s do it with conviction, and with firmness when needed. But let’s discuss ideas without turning people into targets.
From experience, I have learnt that real change also requires discussion, organisation, patience and concrete actions. We can disagree deeply without stopping considering each other as people.
This is the kind of place I want the BSD Cafe to continue to be.
@stefano hopefully for fedi's sake, median server population will continue to decrease by the addition of many more smaller nodes, and the english-language Canceldon Imperial Core will continue losing relevance as it has been doing, too slowly, for a while now.
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