lightly adapted from a cohost post i recently made:
Beehaw is a community i helped co-found and have been moderating for, at this point, almost a full one and a half years. from the beginning we had a whole plan for what the site is going to be, how it’s going to work, what its future is, and how we can avoid the pitfalls of other communities. we spent months thinking about that stuff, putting it down on paper and reworking it, and then when we were finally satisfied we made the site. it was a big undertaking and it’s cost us a lot of time and a fair amount of money to do. we had a false start of making our own go at it, which bluntly did not work and would not have worked if we’d stuck to it. we scrapped that. then we went to Lemmy, and we’ve been here ever since.
but for probably the first half year if not more it was literally about 10-15 of us. everything was being paid for out of pocket and we had very little idea what we were doing other than what we wanted to do. i’m sure this is quite obvious, but: it is hard to support a community of the same 10-15 people when you aggregate links. a good post got maybe five comments–most got literally zero. for like four months i burned out and basically didn’t use the site, just popping in to catch up and moderate or approve users. it all felt nice but pretty pointless, honestly.
but then things started slowly picking up. we got new users (mostly through federation), and the users who churned out were eventually replaced at equal pace. one day, we started actively growing–not by a lot, maybe a few users a day if we were lucky, but something. we got made the top-featured instance on the main Lemmy website at some point, i guess because Lemmygrad was a bit too intimidating and we were not. people on Lemmy started adopting our instance as their instance and not just another nebulous, faceless Part Of The Federation.
but it was really in March of this year that things kicked off. we started really getting donations, and didn’t have to pay for everything ourselves anymore, just most of the stuff. network effects started kicking in as people recommended the instance to their friends. in April, we got our biggest boost to that point when Reddit spooked people about its API–that added probably a dozen or more substantial contributors, a lot of whom are around and regulars. we briefly suffered a setback when we lost a week of content to a crash, but by this point the ball was rolling enough that this wasn’t a setback.
and then, of course, last week Reddit dropped the nuke and many of its third-party app users are scrambling for something new. nonstop for the past week days i’ve been front-and-center in handling all of the new users, and we’ve had literally no problems with them. we have hundreds of new posts, everyone is meshing well, a lot of people love our vision–and critically, they’re giving us money now!!! we have hundreds of dollars!!! we’re actually self sufficient with their help!!! for the first time it feels like the thousands of hours and hundreds of dollars we’ve put in have gone somewhere and to something. it feels like there is an actual community, not just a hypothetical one that exists in cryptpad documents.
and what could be better than that, really?
When I first started looking into Lemmy after the Reddit API changes were, I had no idea what Beehaw was and joined the main lemmy.ml instance; I now find myself posting and commenting a lot on the Beehaw communities, and there’s so much friendly and productive discourse. I think it’s a testament to the work the Beehaw moderators have put in, and hope it continues that way as new users continue to join.
This is wonderful, I’m so glad the reddit api fuckup pushed me to find this place, its exactly the kind of online community I’ve been looking for.
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I’ve practically been here from the beginning of Beehaw and now I can’t believe how much this and every other community has grown since! It’s truly amazing and I’m really proud and thankful of your, and everyone else’s, hard work in building this amazing community of the lemmyverse of which I’m glad to call my virtual home. Keep it up!
I’m really glad to have found Beehaw, it’s extremely close to what I really enjoy in a community. As someone who isn’t really a tech person in any respect, I’m happy to find something using Lemmy that isn’t either strictly tech focused or politics focused. Everything looks really cool and I’ve been enjoying posting here :)
As someone who just set up small instance for just a couple friends, thank you so much for all your work! It is really nice to be able to point people to a growing, well moderated community from the jump. Beehaw (and hopefully soon more instances like it) really give me hope that this whole federation thing will work and continue grow in the long term.
Thank you for all the amazing things that you and the other founders have done!!
I only ever lurked on reddit, but here I feel welcome and relaxed enough to actually comment. Heck, I might actually post something somewhere! 😁
When the reddit bombshell dropped, I was sad and resigned to losing something. Beehaw has turned that completely around.
Now, I’m excited to be part of this blossoming community and eagerly look forward to something much better than reddit ever was. You and the others who at the groundwork are fantastic people!
Keep up the great work! I plan to be a part of this amazing thing, doing what I can from my little corner to help out.
I’m not sure how much of it is pure culture, per beehaw’s join-lemmy description, or how much is the absence of the ad-driven algorithms, or how much is the absence of downvotes (thank goodness for that), but I like it so far. It does feel chill.
I keep expecting angry commenters to attack at any moment (and habitually, from reddit, ignoring my inbox), but it hasn’t happened yet.
I think breaks down to:
- small community of people who want a healthy online community
- a forum by the people and for the people
- insufficient numbers of users to attract entities or individuals who might want to make trouble
Sadly, more success might start undermining what’s making this a nice place. Hopefully it doesn’t, but… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Thank you for your persistence, from one of the new Reddit refugees!
Beehaw was the instance I started in (now working out of lemmy.ml) but I have subbed to beehaw as much as I can. Learning how things mesh in the fediverse is absolutely fascinating!!!
I’m very happy for you! It is kind of like an egg you spent months incubating that finally is taking its first hops and flight.
It’s also a stroke of luck to have Twitter and Reddit kneecapped one after the other, lighting the beacon for users of mainstream services to find alternatives.
Glad its working out so far. Thanks for the read. It’s interesting to know your story as well. Hopefully the site continues to grow organically and not too fast so you guys are able to handle it all in stride.
@alyaza Congrats on the growth! I have been trying to find a space that was not a centralized site for years now… Pretty much since COVID started. Rather than needing a community, I needed a method that I could contact people from 1 source, no matter what service they used. Now I get both! I can have people message me as long as they are on the fediverse in some way or another and, like you, am thankful all these companies are dropping nukes on themselves so I can convince people to join these other sites and message me there.
I hope things keep heading this way and more and more people start to understand the depth of the fediverse and more and more success stories can emerge like yours!
Very happy to have found this community and to be a part of its growth. Hope it’s able to reach its full potential without compromising your vision for it!
