I am one of the admins of Beehaw and I’m trying to get some feedback on our potential move.
Let’s start out with a little Beehaw history before judgements are passed, please.
A handful of us were beta testing Tildes when we decided to have discussions on a Discord server.
We decided that our ‘Northern Star’ or guiding principle would culminate as ‘Be Nice’ with purposefully vague/flexible interpretations. Our overall goal is to provide a safe space to disenfranchised persons.
We talked for a little over a year and some of our members became impatient. Then someone stepped in to suggest a couple of platforms that we could consider getting started with.
One of those platforms was Lemmy. None of us knew, at that time, anything about ActivityPub.
During the Reddit exodus (surrounding the API outcry and blackout), our instance exploded. We were, initially, crippled by the mass amounts of users seeking refuge.
Thankfully, someone stepped in and volunteered hundreds of hours of work to stabilize our instance and refine it further.
After many hours of talks, it became clear to us that our overall goal could be achieved outside of Lemmy/ActivityPub.
Right now, we feel that Lemmy and ActivityPub have downsides that are limiting us from achieving that goal.
Here’s some feedback:
Ban all your users, delete your website then delete your accounts.
You’re all rot on the vine and the best thing you can do is prune yourselves and everyone around you.
Someone should do the same with hexbear. Bunch of fascist loving trolls
You children love your imagination lands
they should also keep a list of users personal info and send it to the Party after the revolution so they can be sent to reeducation promptly.
Leave already
You didn’t say why. Bit pointless having a discussion about nothing
Defederating Beehaw would not only weaken it as an instance, but remove its positive influence from the wider fediverse. The big platforms wield so much power and influence and money, the smaller upstarts need to connect as much as possible to stand a chance at relevance as a credible alternative. We’re all better together. I really hope you reconsider.
You’ve already defederated lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, so I don’t care
Came to say much of the same. If “be nice” is a guiding principal, defederation with a bogus reason then never refederating is a thing I’d like to see gone from the fediverse.
So don’t let the door hit ya on the way out
Walled gardens rarely survive long enough for it to matter, so do what to wish.
That’s not even remotely true. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of old-school forums out there, some from the earlier days of the Internet, that still exist. And they’re not all huge. Tildes, the platform OP mentioned, only does limited invitations, and isn’t particularly large, yet is vibrant (reddit post-API certainly helped). You can see here that Tildes has about 25k registered users; I imagine the vast majority aren’t active or only lurk. The same goes for tons of small communities on Discord.
I would agree if Beehaw was just starting off as just another forum out on the web. That’s certainly a hard task to start on from literally nothing. But Beehaw isn’t starting from nothing. As one of the larger Lemmy instances, a userbase has already been established. Of course, not everyone will come over to a standalone site or stick around for very long if they do migrate, but it is entirely possible for a smaller community to exist in a standalone configuration over time. As long as community members find value in it, and as long as admins/mods are willing to help grow the community, even it if is slow, people will stick around.
Not everywhere needs to be reddit, and not everyone wants that anyway.
I rest my case.
I think beehaw was always designed as a standalone community, it just happened to be federated. Then the migration happened and a bunch of people went there because they had content. I’m sure many who care about federation have left as they locked it down more and more.
In some ways they are similar to hexbear, which is years old and was a standalone community that federated much later. In the case of hexbear many outsiders don’t like their culture, in the case of beehaw they don’t like much of the culture outside.
Tildes? You mean the site where 90% of the comments are long inane essays that could all be summed up in a single sentence meanwhile having no real meaningful content? The site where literally anything new dies down within a week because there’s not enough users to hold a normal unpretentious conversation? The site where most of the posts are weekly bot posts that no one posts into?
Lol. Lmao even.
While I would understand your reasoning for doing so, I would be disappointed to see it happen. There’s decent discussions on Beehaw that I enjoy taking part in, however if you guys decided to defederate or switch to a different platform entirely, I doubt that I would make another account somewhere else to follow. I like Beehaw’s content, but I have enough accounts to keep track of these days after everything split from Reddit, so it would ultimately be a loss for me.
I’m not sure if this is a commonly-held opinion for those of us outside of Beehaw, though.
Totally agree. It’s such a shame the issues with lemmy can’t be fixed to Beehaw’s satisfaction.
Y’all defederated my instance a while ago, and while there were a couple solid communities on Beehaw, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything significant, and I’d basically forgotten about you until just now. Lemmy is fine without you. And we’ll always have Blahaj.
After many hours of talks, it became clear that our overall goal could be achieved outside of Lemmy/ActivityPub.
Right now, we feel that Lemmy and ActivityPub have downsides that are limiting us from achieving that goal.
I have two questions.
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What are your long-term goals for your platform?
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What are the downsides to Lemmy/ActivityPub stopping you from reaching those goals?
Also to answer the main question I’d like for it to stay but at the same time, the last time I checked Beehaw had around 700-ish Monthly active users. That means there probably wouldn’t be that much of an impact on the general discourse of Lemmy more broadly.
That seems like enough to sustain a pretty big community on a private server even if about half of you left. So if you guys do decide to leave I wish you the best.
700ish active members is a lot for the fediverse currently
We currently have 40872 monthly active users.
700/40872 ~ 1.7% of all monthly active users.
What ratio is that to contributing users? Active users is nice and all, but without content there’s nothing to be active for.
Beehaw’s long term goal is a curated safe space for neurotypical white people
I’d be curious about the downsides as well
Lemmy is missing some moderation tools still and that will take time to implement. Communities with stronger moderation may also attract trolls, which Lemmy might not be able to handle.
Not sure about activitypub though, especially if the alternative is a centralized platform
Mod tools are the obvious answer, but it’s a platform in development. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to trade off the pain of migration/adaptation to another growing platform also in development because one part of it is supposedly a bit further along right now. The vagueness and incongruence between the action and reasoning suggests they aren’t genuinely offering their true reasoning. It also seems like they’re trying to say that federation was never appealing to them, which seems ridiculous to me. Rather they will cast it to the wind now, following immature decisions they made about federation that didn’t turn out very well.
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Lemmy is even more left wing than reddit. Going full isolation would turn yall into hexbear, probably.
Are you okay with that risk?
Username checks out
Sh.itholefor.nazis user once again proving that hexbear could burn down an orphanage and they’d still only be hated for being left of hitler.
I hate Hexbear for being conservative, reactionary, and right wing. Can you explain why you think Hexbear is left?
They are a different ideological bent than hexbear. They are in no risk of turning into hexbear.
I don’t really see an ideological difference between the two. I only see cosmetic differences. They both seem to have a “safe space for white liberals” vibe going on
I don’t think you have spent time on hexbear. Like, at all.
I spent about a week on Hexbear. They banned me for saying gender neutral pronouns exist, and whiteness is a social construct. They said these beliefs are “reactionary”. Like I said, safe space for white liberals. Liberals who call any left wing belief “reactionary” because they think TERF bullshit is as far left as the political spectrum goes.
I spent about a week on Hexbear. They banned me for saying gender neutral pronouns exist, and whiteness is a social construct. They said these beliefs are "reactionary”
Wait what? That does not sound like hexbear AT ALL.
They are a bunch of grade A assholes, but like half of them display they/them pronouns on their profile (pronouns are mandatory on hexbear profiles). They are at least as trans friendly as we are at blahaj, with exception of the fact that they aren’t really friendly to anyone at all, ever. In fact, our main falling out with them was the mods at 196 not cracking down on purported transphobia hard enough.
As much as I hate to stick up for the hexbears, there is something more to this story you aren’t telling us.
Hexbear banned me for saying gender neutral pronouns exist: https://lemm.ee/post/12809875
A hexbear user also said that telling her not to use ableist slurs is a TERF plot: https://lemm.ee/post/13213726
Hexbear users “corrected” each other on my pronouns, while disregarding and dismissing my views on my own pronouns that were the topic of discussion: https://lemm.ee/post/12582694?scrollToComments=true
A hexbear user spouted ableist cliches about my disability: https://lemm.ee/post/12582396?scrollToComments=true
A hexbear user who complained when I told them not to use slurs said they were “vindicated” when I was banned: https://lemm.ee/comment/5243474
Hexbear mods remove a post that says nonbinary people deserve equal rights: https://lemm.ee/post/12581620?scrollToComments=true
A hexbear user says people with my disability tend to be abusive: https://lemm.ee/post/12581187?scrollToComments=true
A hexbear user called me insane, which is a loaded mental health term often pointed at neurodivergent people like me: https://lemm.ee/post/12442003?scrollToComments=true
A hexbear user found my removed post saying gender neutral pronouns exist and took it as evidence I nongender people on purpose: https://lemm.ee/comment/5182171
A hexbear user erases my asexuality by accusing me of wanting to see naked people: https://lemm.ee/post/12441146?scrollToComments=true
This particular user said so much ableist shit about NPD that you’re only going to see it all if you click the post: https://lemm.ee/post/12418815?scrollToComments=true
The fact you have this ready to go is super sketchy.
Lol. Lmao even.
What’s a Beehaw?
Reddit but even more insufferable
I found this but I’m not sure.
I’ma yell ‘Beehaw!’ when I see a bee fancyin’ itself some o’ that then there pollen from now on, ya hear?
Well my small instance is still federated, but the other NZ instance defederated after an ‘instance’
I think in the last 2 or so months, the interaction between Beehaw and the main (other) lemmy instances has been less abrasive than it was during the big exodus.
I feel that you leaving now may limit the further growth of the fediverse, but if it is the right thing to do for your users than that is up to you and your users
I’m subbed to some communities on Beehaw and I would miss them. But not enough to make an account on Beehaw to get them back.
Beehaw as an instance doesn’t have nearly enough content to justify defederation. It wouldn’t be missed if they moved somewhere else.
That being said, I do enjoy the discussions and would personally be disappointed to see it move or be closed off, but not enough to move with it.
I’m not a Beehawizen but I’ve only had positive interactions. I’d check in if you moved the community off of lemmy, but I think the fediverse would be the poorer for it.
