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.
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.
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.
Right now, we feel that Lemmy and ActivityPub have downsides that are limiting us from achieving that goal.
Could you expand on this? How exactly does these things prevent you from Being Nice, if that’s the goal of your community?
Not OP but my guess would be moderation tools.
Wouldn’t the nice thing to do be to contribute to the moderation tools instead of splintering
I very much agree. Instead of complaining and isolating themselves and their users, they could be helping improve the moderation tools which benefits all of us, but instead they choose to self isolate, which hurts their users while the biggest servers that they defederated forget they even existed.
Yeah, I was thinking this as well, it would be nice to know the reasons
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.
I don’t think you guys cared when you defederated from the rest of the fediverse and turned up your nose at everyone else. I’m not sure why you care now. You guys go and do your thing, but I don’t think you’re very relevant to the fediverse.
You speak very vaguely, and I don’t think you’re being fully honest with your reasoning, but by this point, I don’t think it really matters.
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
That’s where I’m at. They left the fediverse when they took the approach of aggressive defederation with everyone else. Them fully leaving is insignificant now
I feel like I’ve given my answer to this question regarding Beehaw once before…
But as I see it, the main driving force and overall source of value for services like Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc., is federation. That is to say, federation among a wide variety of different users and servers across the fediverse using protocols like ActivityPub is what sets this entire thing apart from legacy centralized and corporate social media, like Reddit or “X”.
I was initially on Beehaw myself and I liked the mature and kind atmosphere, but I ended up splitting for Kbin due to issues with defederation (on top of being curious and interested in Kbin as an alternative software to lemmy). But whether we’re talking about “Beehaw.org” or “Kbin.social”, in my view the federation is a huge part of the appeal, and I wouldn’t see myself continuing to use a server if it cut itself off from the rest of the network, regardless of whether they did it for “good reasons” or not.
Like, if Beehaw wants to be just a significantly smaller and more highly moderated centralized alternative to Reddit, that feels like a pretty weak pitch which, at best, might end up with a community roughly the size of a classic forum. I’m not really interested in that. I want the Fediverse to succeed as a decentralized, open, scalable, and community-moderated alternative to legacy social media. Frankly, my interest in Beehaw as a community hinges completely on it being a part of that movement or not.
I can understand how federation may have posed significant challenges towards your goal of detailed moderation and creating a safe and friendly space, but only in the sense that you were possibly not fully prepared for the level of exposure to a large number of federated users. But even so, if Beehaw is ever to grow into something bigger (which, to be honest, is not a given, especially if you set out on your own as just another disconnected and insular social media website), you will eventually have to deal with the harsh reality that the kind of moderation that you’re interested in doing is going to be a significant challenge as your community scales, federated or not. (For example, you may be prepared to moderate content in English, but are you prepared to moderate content in other languages? How will you know when someone starts spreading disinformation and hate speech in Burmese?)
Finally, I think you might want to consider the general movement towards federated social media. Between ActivityPub and the Fediverse, Meta’s interest in federating Threads, BlueSky being developed around federation to some extent, federation support in things like WordPress, and a number of other social media platforms tip-toeing their way into the idea, I personally feel that there is a pretty interesting paradigm shift happening right now. Some of that has to do with moderation, responsibility and government pressure on big tech, I think.
But nevertheless, social media is gradually moving towards federation, and I think that’s a good thing for the internet as a whole. You nice people at Beehaw will really have to search yourselves to determine whether you see the value in federation (both in terms of connecting people, but also in terms of allowing various communities to self-moderate to some extent) or not.
I do hope you’ll stay, even though it means facing the growing pains of moderation challenges sooner rather than later, because the fediverse is better with us all connected and communicating together. I’ll be sticking with the fediverse with or without Beehaw, but I do wish you all luck in your goals should you decide to set out on your own.
It’s over for beehaw already. Once they decided to ban everyone from the largest lemmy instance, it was over. They aren’t important to the fediverse, period, and never will be with their current leadership who have no idea what they actually want it to be, apart from their personal internet fiefdom.
The short amount of time I was there, it felt like a community built for the moderators and admins, not the users themselves. Frankly the fediverse is better off without them, so I hope they do leave.
Why do you care what other instances think about it? I’m honestly asking and expecting an answer here. This isn’t a sassy question.
You built a wall and now you’re asking people outside of that wall what it feels for you to leave. Well, I’d care if I could see what’s inside the wall, but I can’t. I tried subscribing and it was impossible.
So why do you care what people outside of your wall think? Again, I expect an answer here.
To be honest, I probably wouldn’t notice. I don’t think I follow anything on Beehaw and I don’t see much content from there. I tried to join a while ago when I first joined Lemmy, but was never approved. I kind of thought it was already a pretty closed off community, so it wouldn’t really change my opinion much. It would be sad for your users who will probably not receive benefit they otherwise would, but if that’s what they want, then either you’ll provide it or someone else will.
Edit: Apparently I don’t see anything from you because my instance was already defederated by you. I guess that explains it.
As a lemmy.world user, I’m already essentially banned from there, so I wouldn’t notice either.
In the earlier days of lemmy.world, I really enjoyed participating in many of the Beehaw communities. It soured my taste from them when they banned us all without warning when 99% of us didn’t even do anything.
I don’t know that Lemmy is necessarily suitable for what Beehaw is trying to achieve with their walked garden.
Look, I get it…making a safe space is admirable and can be tricky. But initially putting Beehaw out as an open instance didn’t end up being the right move. Going to a different platform entirely like Discord or Tildes seems to make more sense for the intent.
Good riddance, Beehaw is terrible. It was maybe the single biggest exporter of concern-trolling about lemmy.ml and to my knowledge still entertains absurdly reactionary comms for no reason (though I haven’t brushed up on my lore in a while). Go make your blue Raddle.
More constructively: Having your “Northern Star” be “intentionally vague” is not a good practice. Having clear rules is a much better way to avoid falling into “what did the mod who reviewed the report feel like doing at the time?” arbitration issues. If you want to serve disenfranchised communities well,* then have that be the foundation and clearly define what that means and why you are doing it.
*My experience with this was that Beehaw was more about first world radlibs patting themselves on the back, but I digress
Go off
I was banned from Beehaw for being “pompous”. I have narcissistic personality disorder, being pompous is one of the symptoms. I was being nice, polite, and complying with everyone’s requests, but I did so pompously, because I’m disabled. You’re 100% right, Beehaw is run be ableist radlibs and their word “nice” is a dogwhistle for “neurotypical”.
why would you delete your comment, then make a new account and use it to post the same comment?
Oh, I didn’t do that. I made a new account and posted the same comment, and THEN I deleted my old comment. I didn’t want to spam the thread with duplicates.
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.
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.
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
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It would be better if the protocol had the capability for stuff like access controls where you could require that external users request permission to join your local communities and to be able to post there (where the moderation queues would show such requests per server). That way you could maintain visibility and protocol compatibility and make it easy to link between discussions, while maintaining quality of communities.
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It’s not new though. There’s endless email lists with open archives and admin controlled posting permissions. That’s also a federated platform. But in that environment is what people expect, part of the tradition, and people know there’s going to be various rules when they post to a bunch of mailing lists, versus here where expectations and tools are wildly different.
So much this. Federation doesn’t necessarily mean that other content has to be treated identically to one’s own; if everything is just a big mix small instances don’t make much sense for the user. Federation was supposed to make small cozy communities possible through freedom of movement, not kill them by drowning them out with generic content.
It sounds like it is time to defederate. We’ll miss the instance but we understand why it must be done
You don’t really explain why activityPub is limiting you. It’s hard to help you here.
Without the loaded malice of some of these comments, sincerely, I forgot beehaw existed. It looked like the place to go during the migration and was constantly getting good word of mouth on all the Reddit move channels. Then the barrier to entry went up with the essay application, which was 100% fine as a decision, but obviously made it a hassle for the masses trying to find a home. Couple that with no open community creation, leaving no landing spot for niche communities and I went elsewhere.
But even after taking a shotgun approach and making accounts on multiple instances when stability and federation was still struggling, beehaw started defederating from everything. Again, 100% your decision. But the reasons were often blatantly showing that beehaw was not willing to engage in the learning process of this new interface with the rest of us.
So, again no malice, I literally forgot beehaw existed till seeing this post. So if your admins and users think you can achieve whatever elsewhere, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.
I think it’s honestly a good way for them to die out. They’re basically a niche of a niche of a niche at this point, and that’s unfortunately probably not the most sustainable thing long-term.
With that said, maybe they are fine with that.
I mean, the very fact that you’re asking this on a different instance is kinda your answer.
Beehaw isn’t relevant to the fediverse as a whole. I don’t see there being any downside (to the fediverse) to y’all staying federated, to y’all staying with lemmy as your forum but defederating totally, increasing the instances you’re defederated from, or abandoning the software for anything else.
Don’t take that wrong, I’m glad someone is willing to try the experiment y’all are doing, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s just that beehaw has never been relevant to the rest of lemmy. That was never the goal (as you said). I have an account there that I rarely use because it isn’t really part of the fediverse at all. Beehaw is its own thing that might as well not be connected.
I dunno that it’s a good use of resources to try a new forum solution, when lemmy is viable for that currently, but that’s a different subject than what you’re asking.
And, since your goals don’t include being a kind of example, nor existing as a beacon on the fediverse for people of like mind to find, I would say just defederate totally.
