There is a lot of discussion happening in the background of our project here. We could not anticipate all of the challenges that we were going to face a few years ago. One of the reasons for this was because we had no idea what our choice of a platform would bring.
Specifically, we chose Lemmy as the software that we would use to launch our endeavor to attempt a safe space for marginalized persons online.
In the first year or so, this choice was completely successful for a very small number of users. And then we all experienced an enormous influx of users when Reddit announced/implemented their shutting down of third party apps.
Since then there has been a huge number of people that have joined the Beehaw project. This tsunami of users initiated technical problems, and otherwise, that we could not foresee.
Thankfully and fortunately, we have had a couple of incredibly knowledgeable persons that have swooped in to ’save the day’ and keep this site running.
Unfortunately, these persons will NOT be able to continue to support the Beehaw project much further. They have life commitments and other factors, including careers and family life, that will prevent them from contributing to our project in an ongoing fashion.
All that being said, Lemmy (the software that Beehaw runs on) development is incredibly slow and is riddled with problems that makes administration/moderation very painful.
Therefore, we are left with some options that may feel uncomfortable to us. For example, we may want to consider leaving the Fediverse for another software platform that does NOT include ActivityPub. To explain, Fediverse/ActivityPub are very positive concepts on the foundational level. However, the Beehaw project is struggling to include this because most of our moderation/content/ethos is being jeopardized from OTHER federated instances (i.e. it, mostly, is NOT coming from within our own Beehaw registered user base).
The aforementioned persons, that have ’swooped in to save the day’, have been discussing/working with us to come up with the best solutions that would enable the Beehaw project to continue while NOT needing incredibly experienced/technically adept persons around.
Right now, we are testing alternative software platforms and evaluating them based on everything that we want Beehaw to become in the future.
Thank you all for your continued support of the Beehaw project and entrusting us to make this happen.
Thanks for the heads up. Short answer for me is that I joined for a civil place on the Threadiverse not a walled garden. So if you guys leave the Threadiverse I will have to find a new home.
So I think you all will need to decide where to take this community. I will understand whatever you all decide. Just please communicate it clearly when the time comes.
Thanks for all of the hard work you all have done and are doing.
Short answer for me is that I joined for a civil place on the Threadiverse not a walled garden. So if you guys leave the Threadiverse I will have to find a new home.
It hurts to admit, but my initial reaction is similar. A completely defederated Beehaw is much less appealing.
I feel the same way. I understand that beehaw follows its own path and goals and it’s genuinely what I like about this instance. I love the moderation and the fact that you all dont put up with BS from users trying to bait you into semantic wars or drama about free speech. I like that the main rule is just be(e) nice and that as a major instance on lemmy it does help set a tone.
That said I dont know if I’d follow beehaw off the fediverse.
Specifically, we chose Lemmy as the software that we would use to launch our endeavor to attempt a safe space for marginalized persons online.
As a relatively non-marginalized person, I think it’s important to focus on this. Beehaw has grown beyond the marginalized group. If Beehaw were to leave Lemmy, the non-marginalized would be fine and can switch to different instances. The marginalized would follow Beehaw for that safe space.
It comes down to the purpose of a safe space. There’s the group of people that want to avoid bigots, and there’s the group that want to be a light unto the world, to effect change.
An example of a little bit of positive Beehaw has had outside of their community would be the influence it has had on me. I’ve read posts from the LGBT+ community that enlightened me to things I’ve never thought about. But I’m also not a bigot, just naive.
The negative is what has prompted these discussions: the bigoted trolls. It’s just not sustainable for the small Beehaw team to moderate everything.
My view is that it’s of utmost importance to maintain the safe space for the marginalized. Of those marginalized who want to connect outside the safe space, they are free to engage in Lemmy/Reddit and spread their light.
What would I do? I would find a new instance and continue to be receptive to LBGT+ discussions that come up on Lemmy. I don’t feel right asking Beehaw to stay on Lemmy at the cost of keeping marginalized people safe from bigots. They deserve to be able to talk about things without having bigots come at them; to be able to laugh and cry and vent and have others understand—especially with the US Right becoming more brazen in their persecution of this community.
Just my 2 cents.
Another non-marginalized person here.
Restricted spaces are necessarily smaller than non-restricted. Less content. Less interaction. Less everything. If hateful content is really rampant, then that can be a valid tradeoff, but separate systems are never equal, and it is always the minority/marginalized system that suffers. You’ve described exactly why: “I would find a new instance and continue to be receptive to LBGT+ discussions that come up on Lemmy.”
As I look elsewhere in this thread, the comments I see people reference as “against Beehaw goals” are just people being rude assholes, not misogynist, racist, or homo-/trans-phobic. Creating a space where everyone is polite and universally friendly seems a very different objective than creating a space where marginalized people feel safe. If that - universal friendship - is the real goal, then Beehaw very definitely needs to close off interactions with non-vetted, pseudonymous users, and accept that it will look like a virtual ghost town. In that case, it doesn’t matter whether it stays with defederated-by-default lemmy or moves to some other forum platform.
The middle ground, where you accept that some people are just rude, but still provide a forum where marginalized people feel they can share their experiences without threats or repercussions, needs strong, active, focussed moderation. Have to be able to block users and communities from other instances, delete posts/comments that originate from other instances, and do local moderation of communities hosted on other instances. Have to have enough moderators to respond quickly to user reports, and probably an automod-like system to catch serious issues before users do. It sounds like that is not within the current capabilities of lemmy. So, I can see why the admins think that the lemmy framework is incompatible with their objectives. Probably, a lot of the people who joined post-Reddit are incompatible and uninterested in those objectives.
I can see where the lemmy framework worked when no one used it, and I can see why it would immediately fail in the face of hundreds of thousands of new users. If millions are coming, it will only get worse. No doubt, the admins are aware that they’ll lose 80, maybe 90% of their userbase if they leave Lemmy, but it’s not so long ago that their userbase was only 10-20% of what it is today.
If I lose this little window into cultures I would not otherwise see, I will be a lesser person for it, but I can accept that it was not meant for me in the first place.
Thanks, you put into clear words a lot of my jumbled thoughts and expanded on it. It’s a tough choice for the Beehaw admins with pros and cons either way; a tug-of-war on whether the community is strong enough / has what they need to handle this far from perfect world. It would be a loss from the wider Lemmy community, but based on a few outspoken comments we can see there are also people with a “good riddance” stance.
I think Beehaw needs to do what’s best for them first, as an administrative team and for their core community. When they’re stronger, I’m sure we’ll feel and see their presence on the wider stage. After all, time is intrinsic to progress.
Take my 2 cents too. Well put.
Online gathering spaces not hostile to trans and gnc folks seem to be evaporating. It’s concerning with KOSA in the works in the US.
You make a very, very good point. I’m glad you posted.
Also,
But I’m also not a bigot, just naive.
is so much me it’s ridiculous.
I would just like to throw my voice out there as a mod on the instance.
I truly love beehaw, and will likely stay if this move happened. Beehaw was an amazing place to find after everything happened with reddit. And I love participating here and really like the community I’ve found here
All that being said. I would be extremely saddened and disappointed if beehaw decided to leave the fediverse. I am fully aware of how some off instance users can behave. It is definitely a problem, especially in some more vulnerable communities. However I also feel like the ability to federate has brought some life to the platform that would be sorely missed.
I would very much hope a white list would be considered before leaving the fediverse entirely.
Ultimately, I know this is not my project. And I have no decision making powers, but I think lemmy would be a much worse place without beehaw. I hope this decision does not come to pass, personally
So is the real issue not technical? More of a social/moderation issue? The post makes it sound like there are technical reasons that only experienced technical persons can solve. I’m not much of a sysadmin, but I’d be curious what the underlying technical difficulties were.
Hey all,
Apologies if this scares anyone, or feels like a cold/calculated move, or one in which your feedback isn’t being taken into consideration. That was not the intent. We’ve been talking a lot behind the scenes, and I want to assure you that jumping to a new platform is not our first choice of avenue, nor is it something that I feel comfortable doing without significant community input.
I’ve been swamped with a lot of real life stuff lately and so I haven’t gotten a chance to write up what’s been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while now, which is the start to a conversation about some of the issues we’ve been struggling with. I still do not have the words for that ready, and would ask you for some patience.
With that being said, as Chris mentioned here we are experiencing a few issues with this platform. More information about these issues will be forthcoming soon. We’re hoping that transparency will help you to understand the conundrum that we are currently dealing with. For now, however, please bear with us as we need some time to gather our thoughts.
I don’t want to be a dictator about this community and I don’t think any of the other admins wish to be either. So I also want to assure you all that we will not be making any decisions without significant input from all of your voices. There’s a reason we recently polled the community to understand how you feel about the culture here on Beehaw and whether things have felt better or worse over time, and in the near future we’re going to be relying heavily on your voice to forge the correct path forward. Beehaw is a community, and we greatly value your voices.
Beehaw has been online for over 18 months, it was well established when there were only 30 Lemmy servers and then Reddit API change came along in May… the sign-up page and application process couldn’t even cope with hundreds of users per day.
Then 1000 new instance servers went online in just a couple months where your 18-month established presence was suddenly getting all kinds of server to server action.
You have been on the front-line of a lot of people motivated by hate of Reddit. Not love of Beehaw.
I’ll admit the wording of the post made me react as if these potential changes were imminent. I will respect any decision the admin team makes, and I encourage you to continue to stick to the core ideas of Beehaw to which you’ve written extensively about, while being able to balance your own lives and mental health.
The idea I’ll throw in the ring is to introduce one of the Automod programs (example), which can help keep the designated safe-space communities more tightly moderated, and address some of the issues of moderation granularity. For example, a user/instance whitelist could be instated as to who can post to the protected communities, with all other comments removed. An application process can be instituted to add to the whitelist.
I think isolating is not a good move. I think many people on Lemmy are here to get away from centralization.
I stopped using beehaw about a month ago as too many servers were defederated.
I know beehaw has a great community, but being closed off is not appealing to me and I imagine it’s not appealing to many others as well.
I have two accounts. One for another instance that’s mainly local, and one for Beehaw when I don’t want to deal with bullshit; which is most of the time.
Me too. I struggle to see why so many don’t want to use this option.
Agree it’s not a good move. Disagree many are here to get away from centralization.
I prefer centralization. I believe many are ambivalent to centralization. What we are all here for is the community and anything to limit or shrink that community is a bad thing.
Sorry to say I won’t be following if you leave the Fediverse
Wait what? Noooo please don’t leave us 😥
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As a Reddit App-ocalypse refugee, I’m not going back to a centralized forum, much less without an app. Even Lemmy’s level of "hub-"alization is somewhat unnerving, but Beehaw has been a good compromise between moderation, federation, and app accessibility.
I would rather you could work out the kinks of the platform, instead of switching to another. I think Beehaw is highly positive for the Lemmy space, and that it would be best for everyone if the platform could be adapted to include meeting Beehaw’s needs.
If the goal of beehaw is that the user base remain ever small, then by all means jump ship and move on, I can respect that and I wish you all the best. However unless your good faith “rockstars” are planning on building you a platform, you will likely find out that the grass is not always greener on the other side, and that migrations bring additional tensions and work.
Losing Beehaw would definitely hurt Lemmy. This was not my first home on Lemmy, but I quickly saw that all of the good communities seemed to belong to this place.
However, I would probably never have found this place if you weren’t federated. I would naively assume others are in the same boat as me.
I did initially come to Lemmy only as an alternative to reddit, but I’ve stayed because of the ActivityPub protocol. I’d probably not stay active on Beehaw on another protocol, and I’d definitely still keep a Lemmy account on another instance.
I do understand your concerns, and what you wish to achieve. Personally I would have just hoped you tried to achieve it here for longer. Though I do get the struggles with moderation.
Whatever you decide I wish the best for this community in the long term! I hope that regardless of it staying here, or moving elsewhere, it thrives and keeps the content and discussions that its members would like to have.
Selfishly, I would like to see beehaw remain on the fediverse. I enjoy the community, the curation, and desire for strong moderation. It is a great window to the broader fediverse link aggregator community. Beehaw’s ideals and structure clearly appealed to many Redditors and the like. The concept of federated communities seemed appealing, and beehaw is an important voice in the evolution of the moderation of a federated network.
However, the sacrifice that the admins have had to put into making the platform survive while the software finds its uncertain way through a mountain of growing pains seems unsustainable (just my pov through the last 3 months) - not just on the technical side. There’s that saying - when you find yourself in a hole, quit digging. It’s hard to see how moving from Lemmy to something more sustainable, if it exists, would be the wrong move.
Painful decisions rarely come with a flashing light that scream “now’s the time” - but the loss of your major technical contributors sounds stunningly close.
Edit> fixed a typo or two
I think everything laid out here is perfectly reasonable. Lemmy hasn’t made it easy and easy doesnt seem to be on the horizon for that development team.
My personal thoughts is that I don’t think that the currrent implementation of lemmy is going to reach a point where the capabilities of the platform is going to meet the requirements of the beehaw project. Definitely not in the near term, and low probability in the scale of years.
If the worse comes about ill probably follow along to where ever beehaw ends up and ill just set up an lemmy acc elsewhere.
I don’t envy the situation
// the commenter gives yet another unsolicited solution
I think it would be interesting if yall and other like minded instance admins were to start a federation pact/ code of conduct which would layout the requirements for federation. In my opinion, fostering the kind of online community that beehaw strives to be (as I see it anyways), requires acting outside of the capabilities of the lemmy the platform. Granted, this would require a critical mass of instances willing to sign to such a pact but this may ease the workload from a moderation point of view.
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If there’s not going to be federation via activitypub I will not continue to use beehaw at all, so, this was very unfortunate to read.
I don’t have much of a stake in this but isolation is probably not the way forward.
I completely agree, I had a beehaw account and it was my main server until they defederated with Lemmy.ml
Too many communities were blocked, so I just switched to make my alt my main account.
I’m on lemmy.ml, looks to still be federated?
Yup, or at least re-federated.
Another .ml user here, and yeah it looks like it
It’d honestly suck to lose beehaw again, it’s such a standout server with a really lovely community
But if the devs and the technology just can’t keep up, then I guess there isn’t much that we can do
We still can’t even block instances yet, as far as I’m aware
They may have refederated already. But I noticed I was missing a lot of communities that I followed and then saw that they stopped federating.
It seems each week there is another community they dropped, and for the most part it didn’t affect the communities I followed, but when it did o decided to drop it.
??? Beehaw is still federated with lemmy.ml
Are you talking about Lemmy.world?
Same here, I started out in Beehaw but left to a smaller instance because of all the defedersting. This way I have a feed with all the instances I like mixed together.
