The Beehaw project is entering some significant challenges

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.

Segnis,

Beehaw will go back to being a very small platform if you move away from the fediverse

sculd,

If there are moderation issues, wouldn’t it be easier to recruit more moderators?

The current number of moderators is small and I am sure a lot of people might want to step up to help.

Penguincoder,

If there are moderation issues, wouldn’t it be easier to recruit more moderators?

No. The tools needed for successfully moderating Lemmy federated items, is severely lacking. The primary devs do not seem interested in making this area a priority either from their own efforts, or others submitting PRs for such. More moderators won’t help when the ability to moderate isn’t there.

GhostMagician,

Makes me wonder if a fork will happen in the future. Wonder if offerings will be much different a year from now, and if options like kbin will be more polished by then.

ShittyKopper,

Everyone wants a fork. Nobody wants to be the fork.

We need a small group of motivated and skilled developers to get together and decide “we’re doing this”, and actually go beyond announcing an empty Git repo. (i.e. actually have some usable code to show for)

Dealing with a codebase as janky and large as Lemmy is unfortunately beyond my skillset, otherwise I’d love to get involved myself.

Cube6392,
@Cube6392@beehaw.org avatar

All fediverse code is weird. Lemmy is extra weird on account of being written in a systems language

ShittyKopper,

Picking a fedi server software is just picking how much (and what kind of) jank you’re willing to tolerate. The features are always secondary.

BitOneZero,
@BitOneZero@beehaw.org avatar

Everyone wants a fork. Nobody wants to be the fork.

Rust and ORM makes changes incredibly slow and even recent editions like sanitizing for JavaScript exploits have been buggy.

We need a small group of motivated and skilled developers to get together and decide “we’re doing this”, and actually go beyond announcing an empty Git repo.

Lemmy had one major thing that kbin and other apps did not have in 2023… a working API. And that happened to be what Reddit decided to start charging for in May. Kbin is right now adding an API, but it isn’t compatible with Lemmy. Lemmy could also use a streamlined API, there is opportunity right now to make a combined Lemmy and kbin API since federation normalizes a lot of the features between the two. I hope people see this opportunity that is open right now and the one big strength.

ShittyKopper, (edited )

I don’t think an API is the thing that matters here. There are quite a lot of things you can’t hack on with a client alone and actually needs server side support to function (actual moderation tooling is a prime example)

Also most APIs aren’t “designed” per se and just expose the internal representations of the projects they’re of. A “common” API would either be too “wide” enough to be unusable (hello, ActivityPub C2S) or would severely limit experimentation and innovation (good luck on building microblogs in the Lemmy API) without having so many extensions that essentially end up being a third, completely different API.

BitOneZero,
@BitOneZero@beehaw.org avatar

I don’t think an API isn’t the thing that matters here.

because of the negatives in your statement, it isn’t clear what you mean.

I think the API is why June 2023 there was a huge surge of users coming to Beehaw and Lemmy platform. There were tons of forum software out there, and even kbin, but Lemmy took off because it had an API

ShittyKopper,

fixed that part, words are hard

The thing I’m trying to say is that “having an API” does not matter in the long term if the API does not expose the functionality needed to use it properly.

And TBF if someone joined Lemmy only because it had an API and nothing else then they’re gonna be in for a very rude awakening sooner or later as the troubles of federation that previous (mostly microblogging) platforms have encountered and attempted to solve (not to mention novel problems due to the community oriented nature of Lemmy) start to show up.

This is only going to get worse, and throwing “more API” into the fire won’t fix any of the important problems at hand.

BitOneZero,
@BitOneZero@beehaw.org avatar

Your entirely reply seems to dismiss the entire purpose of an API.

An API is a way to allow other developers to work almost entirely independent, and even create compatible servers with wildly different implementation - while still servicing clients.

You seem to be advocating a model that predates API, back in the 1980’s or something. As right now kbin users are having to resort to scraping content off off HTML pages as a form of API.

ReversalHatchery,

I don’t think a fork would be a solution to this problem. The problem is not that the maintainers don’t accept contributions, but that no one is making the necessary contributions.

GoldenCow,

deleted_by_author

    •
    Empricorn,

    Are you 12? I’m not rich and I don’t use Beehaw, but you should understand what an insignificant amount of money $4701.66 in modern times truly is…

    GoldenCow,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    ShellMonkey,
    @ShellMonkey@lemmy.socdojo.com avatar

    And an instance that from what I gather is host to several thousand users would require some significant hardware and support infrastructure which may consume $4,000 in a couple months of operations. Your situation may be unfortunate but to many trying to support a large community it’s a pittance.

    Empricorn,

    Because I live in the US, I’m a “colonialist” and rich? lol You’re misunderstanding. That’s a lot of money to *me" (as a non-rich person), but not to a corporation. Even a non-profit one could probably make that in a weekend with a few phone calls…

    geophysicist,

    Both of you are great examples of why beehaw is thinking about defederating. Please try to be polite, as per the rules of this instance.

    apotheotic,

    I presume they would use the remaining balance to continue to fund the beehaw project in whatever form it takes

    MJBrune,

    That money is to support beehaw the community not beehaw the lemmy instance. The lemmy instance only gets the money because it supports the community. So if the lemmy instance becomes unnecessary for the community then it gets shut down. The community can use the money in another way. Currently that money isn’t earmarked for anything.

    furrowsofar,

    Frankly as far as I am concerned they can do what they want. It is all for services rendered in my mind. I am not sure that many of us can fully understand the effort these people have put in. Very few of us, maybe none of us, are really pulling our full weight in terms of moderation effort and especially market rate man-hour costs. If we were, I am not sure this they would need to be thinking about changes.

    alyaza,
    @alyaza@beehaw.org avatar

    If you leave lemmy what exactly are you planning on doing with the $4,701.66 balance?

    this would just go toward whatever service we use since it’s all just site infrastructure money

    chloyster,

    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

    Five,

    I second whitelisting, with slrpnk.net and Blahaj.zone at least.

    kratoz29,

    And Lemm.ee.

    Five, (edited )

    I just woke up to two messages from Lemm.ee on BeeHaw, yours and this person:

    Rude Message Texthttps://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/b029b351-5db9-48de-9c19-6dda8c98dc6f.webp[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.

    kratoz29,

    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.

    Five, (edited )

    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.

    datavoid,

    Seems like a lovely person…

    lagomorphlecture,

    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.

    YeeHaw,

    Naw, lemm.ee is more of a blacklist-worthy place. And kbin.social.

    BastingChemina,

    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.

    Dumeinst,

    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.

    MJBrune,

    It’d be a huge disappointment to see beehaw defederate everything. I’d be even more disappointed if it moved to common web forums or something else. One thing that’s lost is the ability to let other communities in.

    I don’t know if it’s possible but you could deny federation by default for every other instance until their mod team sets up a communication line to make moderation easier towards both communities.

    That said I suspect this response comes from the recent federation poll where it sounded like a lot of people wanted to federate back into the larger instances again. Beehaw doesn’t have the mod team to really do that and in some ways it’s counter to keeping the space nice since those instances aren’t moderate with being nice as a priority.

    alyaza,
    @alyaza@beehaw.org avatar

    That said I suspect this response comes from the recent federation poll where it sounded like a lot of people wanted to federate back into the larger instances again. Beehaw doesn’t have the mod team to really do that and in some ways it’s counter to keeping the space nice since those instances aren’t moderate with being nice as a priority.

    we’re working on coding the results and i’ll just say that no, this was neither prompted by the survey nor are its results informing what’s being talked about here.

    newtraditionalists,

    Beehaw is wonderful and I will follow wherever it ends up. I have another lemmy account, and accounts on other sites for when I’m looking for memes and nonsense.

    Renacles,

    I don’t have much of a stake in this but isolation is probably not the way forward.

    M500,

    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.

    usrtrv,

    I’m on lemmy.ml, looks to still be federated?

    loops,

    Yup, or at least re-federated.

    XPost3000,

    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

    furrowsofar,

    Might be wrong, but my understanding is that we have never defenerated with Lemmy.ml. I think there may have been or are technical issues. Not tried recently but I am on Behaw since June and lemmy.ml has never accepted any of my subscriptions which is a huge issue.

    M500,

    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.

    Renacles,

    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.

    Cube6392,
    @Cube6392@beehaw.org avatar

    ??? Beehaw is still federated with lemmy.ml

    Are you talking about Lemmy.world?

    BitOneZero,
    @BitOneZero@beehaw.org avatar

    All that being said, Lemmy (the software that Beehaw runs on) development is incredibly slow and is riddled with problems

    The developers of Lemmy have been running it on the Internet for over 4.5 years, but they only had a few thousands posts in 4 years… it lacks moderation (and spam) tools and it drops and alters data silently that shows they really don’t use it or focus on the data.

    kbin is newer, but it is only now starting to have an API - so Lemmy has attracted all the app developers because of API - and kbin also struggles with moderation and spam.

    we may want to consider leaving the Fediverse for another software platform that does NOT include ActivityPub.

    I can entirely understand that. Reinventing the wheel of basic forum features ties up a lot of kbin and lemmy development - and federation is the wild west. People can participate in your forum without having the context or understanding, or worse, to do attacks at an entire server to server level - manipulating votes and having wildly different policies.

    Thank you for sharing your thinking.

    furrowsofar,

    Just a few thoughts.

    • Is there a way to configure lemmy to have some private Beehaw only communities and some public ones too. Maybe this is some code changes, but one would not think that this would be crazy hard. Might need to have some user preference settings too about restricting what us in the site feed too.
    • Would there be a way of running two instances. One federated and one not or the one not only federated with beehaw.
    • How serious is the adim time issue and the skills gap issue. Maybe worth thinking about what your issues are and what would need to happen to fill them. More people, hiring things out, etc.
    • I agree too, you guys have to decide personnally your priorities. Not having clear personal limits can eat you up. So do that as well.
    frog, (edited )

    I’ve seen this suggested a few times throughout this thread, so I’ll just add my support for considering defederating instances that don’t follow similar behavioural expectations to Beehaw. The best thing about Beehaw, and what drew me here rather than any other instance, was the Be(e) nice rules, and the fact that it’s a safe place to be myself.

    While I do think the majority of users from other instances are good people who are fine with following Beehaw’s rules when they’re visiting this space, the fact that Lemmy as a platform doesn’t have adequate moderation tools for dealing with bad actors (as I understand it, the issue is that you can’t block specific users from Beehaw, which means you’re continuously chasing down bad actors’ individual comments?) means it comes down to a question of what’s more important: being federated with other instances, regardless of whether their values align with Beehaw’s; or being more protective of the vibes of this space, even though it means becoming a more isolated space.

    Coming from the perspective of someone who’s part of a marginalised community, I favour the latter. There are lots of big, hostile spaces out there, where bigots can run free and say whatever they like without consequences. There’s a lot fewer spaces that require everyone to treat others with respect. Defederate with the instances that don’t share our values, with a view to being open to re-federating with them at a later date when Lemmy’s moderation tools eventually catch up.

    Edited for typos.

    HelixTitan,

    Maybe I am the weird one, but I always saw this “federation” as weird. It seems like a halfbaked idea. I don’t think much is lost. Only downside is user count might be small

    furrowsofar,

    Regarding Federation … The web, email, Usenet, the internet itself, these are/were all federated platforms. They are also all open and always have issues with bad actors.

    The other side of it, it is all a work in progress especially lemmy. So it is all half baked in that sense. Especially in the case of bad actors, there are known things to address but no solutions. People do not even agree in what a bad actor is until things get extreme.

    d3Xt3r,

    Would be cool if Beehaw switched to old school forums, like Invision or phpBB. Invision have now moved to a hosted forum model, so you don’t need any technical knowledge to set it up.

    toothpicks,

    Forums are cool!

    Cube6392,
    @Cube6392@beehaw.org avatar

    I don’t get the prevailing hatred of old school forums on the threadiverse. Forums are great!

    6daemonbag,

    I’d hate to see y’all go but the growing pains are quite obvious and I would understand the departure. Lemmy has become the only social media platform that I use and I’ll be sticking around here for time being.

    Notnotmike,
    @Notnotmike@beehaw.org avatar

    Agreed. I like the positive vibe of beehaw, but I’m really here for the Reddit alternative and for the fediverse. I don’t want a walled garden, I want to be exposed to other communities, I just want them to be civil is all.

    I already have accounts on other instances, so I’ll likely switch to an alternative instance and be very sad for it. But I respect the admin’s right to do it.

    shortwavesurfer,

    I can understand, but this would not be fun at first. I subscribe to a number of beehaw communities because they are the the biggest in their niche like technology. The beehaw communities are often even bigger than the same communities on instances like lemmy.ml.

    Nia,

    I’ll still be hanging out on Beehaw regardless of what happens or where it ends up, but in case a migration does happen, are there any good instance recommendations for us that want to keep Lemmy accounts as well but want to have a nicer more moderated experience?

    A good bit of the other instances I’ve tried seem to moderate as a last resort or final straw, which just ends being not very effective overall.

    Nimfi,
    @Nimfi@beehaw.org avatar

    blahaj.zone seems nice

    NightOwl,

    I went with lemmy.one because it is run by /r/privacyguides and is federated with lemmy.world and beehaw with it being the two instances I wanted to be able to participate in.

    Cube6392,
    @Cube6392@beehaw.org avatar

    I like slrpnk.net

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