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.
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If this is an issue with people spinning up malicious instances. Could you switch to a whitelist of federated instances? Beehaw feels like the heart of lemmy and it would be a shame to see it go.
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.
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
I second whitelisting, with slrpnk.net and Blahaj.zone at least.
I just woke up to two messages from Lemm.ee on BeeHaw, yours and this person:
Rude Message Text
[Image description: What a crappy news article. You can’t even read it without the ads shoving the paragraphs together. Your post is shit, OP]
I’m sure it’s part coincidence, but my experience with Lemm.ee hasn’t been much better than with Lemmy.world.
I have an account on lemm.ee and an account on Beehaw. I use lemm.ee as my main for browsing in general and pop in to beehaw a couple of times a week to see what’s up. Lemm.ee is a general purpose instance and the admin is very against defederation unless absolutely necessary. He’s super cool but sticks to his principles which are not the same as the principles of Beehaw, namely open federation vs a curated safe space. He does deal with issues as they arise but I would caution against viewing that instance as a safe ally because his moral compass so strongly forces him to be tolerant of people he personally finds abhorrent. The paradox of tolerance is strong lol he has personally dealt with issues with hexbear (he is Estonian and they just love Russia for some reason) and ended up staying federated with them. So he’ll deal with problem users and is open to communication with admins of other instances but the user mentioned above wasn’t using hate speech or trolling or doing anything other than generally being rude so that would be allowed on that instance. Just my 2 cents, it’s a good instance but not good in the same ways as Beehaw.
Well, yeah, there are different kinds of people in all places.
I just don’t want to miss out when I’m in the fediverse, and lemm.ee does that pretty well as they don’t defederate from others without a very hefty reason, I follow some Beehaw communities here and if they decide to leave it would impact my Lemmy usage, to a degree, ultimately I hope the best for the Beehaw admins and I will respect whatever outcome they think is the best.
they don’t defederate from others without a very hefty reason
I understand why you might like that, but it speaks to a culture clash between Lemm.ee and BeeHaw - BeeHaw is acting pre-emptively to protect its mods, and Lemm.ee is prioritizing its users’ Fediverse access over other aspects of the user experience.
Seems like a lovely person…
Naw, lemm.ee is more of a blacklist-worthy place. And kbin.social.
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.
I think whitelisting would be the way to do. Over time a set of rule could be established and federation would only be possible with other instances with compatibles rules.
A lot of beehaw users would probably leave but it’s fine, this will take off a bit a pressure and allow the admin to focus on keeping this safe space safe for the users that really needs it.
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.
Take my 2 cents too. Well put.
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.
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.
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.
This was the case for me as well
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
I really hope this doesn’t sound extreme (especially since I’m technically a Kbin.social user) but I’m really only interested in Beehaw as part the larger Fediverse. If Beehaw leaves the Fediverse it’ll just be another tiny Reddit/Lemmy clone, but without the strengths of either platform, and I truly believe that it won’t be long until Beehaw goes the way of the traditional web forum.
I think there is a lot of value (to the community, at least) in Beehaw being a safe and friendly place within the broader Fediverse. The more strictly/seriously you all take that goal, the more moderation is required to achieve it, of course.
In the end, I think that it’s probably a lot of work to “clean up” the Fediverse, so I can understand why it may seem easier to just leave. But I also think that it’s possible that you’ve lost a sense of perspective with regards to the positive aspects of federation that made Beehaw appealing in the first place. At the risk of making a bad/cheesy analogy, we’ve seen examples in history of countries trying to isolate themselves from the rest of the world in order to simplify things or preserve their own ways of living/thinking, and it really doesn’t work or benefit them in the long run.
The internet was founded on the basic premise of connecting people, even though we’ve all seen that doing so brings about various challenges and some potential for conflict. The fediverse brings us back towards a truly open and connected internet, and in my onion that’s where technologies like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., derive a lot of their charm and utility. As someone who has dabbled in this stuff for years, I can say that Lemmy was not very useful to me when it was just a handful of small echo chambers, Beehaw was the first “threadiverse” server I joined because I really felt that it was offering something new, different, and much-needed to the ecosystem, and I’ll be more than a little bit disappointed if you all decide to leave.
If Beehaw leaves the Fediverse it’ll just be another tiny Reddit/Lemmy clone, but without the strengths of either platform
Exactly my thoughts, honestly for me all that ain’t Fediverse is a downgrade… if any I’d like old forums to join Activity Pub somehow lol.
I don’t this is an extreme take. Lots of Lemmy users would be sad to see Beehaw leave even if the reasons for leaving are understandable to them.
For me, the value of Beehaw was that there was a place on the internet where people could converse with mutual understanding and without judgement. I think such a space still exists here, but has faded a little when mixed in the context that Lemmy as a whole has gotten a bit more combative and falling into the same ragebait kind of traps Reddit conversations tended to go.
Through Beehaw I also became more knowledgeable in the LGBTQ+, disability, neurodivergence and feminism spaces, just by reading the posts and only occasionally adding a comment seeking better understanding, to which my questions were answered openly and honestly. I don’t want Beehaw to grow just for the sake of growing, but having Beehaw around I think will help internet users at large be able to learn about and sympathize with these causes simply by being there.
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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.
May I suggest pinning this for more visibility?
Whatever the decision is, it’s important that everyone knows what’s going on. Whatever the outcome, I’ll stay/move to wherever Beehaw resides. I enjoy the space and vibe that’s created here.
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.
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.
Is finding a new sysadmin an impossible task?
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
