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.

M500,

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.

s3rvant,
@s3rvant@kbin.social avatar

This was the case for me as well

loops,

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.

newtraditionalists,

Me too. I struggle to see why so many don’t want to use this option.

whoisearth,

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.

gaytswiftfan,

Wherever it leads I’ll follow !

DataDecay,
@DataDecay@beehaw.org avatar

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.

Gaywallet,
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

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.

BitOneZero,
@BitOneZero@beehaw.org avatar

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.

Rentlar,

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.

loops,

I’m not sure what it is really, but postmill exists. Another of my favourite post-reddit sites uses it; raddle.me.

negativenull,

Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think moderation grows exponentially with numbers of instances. A single comment may need moderation on each distinct instance. The more instances, the more moderation needs for that comment.

That seems unsustainable. I understand the conundrum.

jarfil, (edited )

Comments/posts get moderated at the community level, any instance subscribing to it, will also receive the moderation notification to update its cache, so it doesn’t need to be moderated again. In theory, an instance “could” ignore moderation actions for a community it’s subscribed to, but that makes little sense.

A problem comes when a community decides not to remove a comment/post, then it gets spread to all instances that subscribe to that community. Only in that case federated instances need to apply additional moderation.

Federated instances subscribed to a community would have the option to either block the user, the comment, the post, the community, or the whole instance (defederate). Fine grained options like blocking a single user’s every comment on a post, or on a community, or on an instance… or blocking every post by any user from an instance that they send to a community, or… etc. would be additional options… but Lemmy is lacking most of them.

So moderation isn’t inhrently an exponential problem, but right now is limited to a blunt tool that mostly relies on the good faith of everyone for things to work… and it’s been shown over and over that there are people acting in bad faith.

negativenull,

Thank you for that thorough explanation!

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.

Fizz,
@Fizz@lemmy.nz avatar

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.

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?

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!

PaddleMaster,

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.

mattomattic,

Possibly something like LemmyBB could be an answer. Stay on Fediverse and get to isolate ( I think).

Ategon,
@Ategon@programming.dev avatar

LemmyBB is just an alternate frontend. It is possible to not federate with any other instances though by turning federation off in the instance settings

mattomattic,

Cool, I’m quite fond of the old school format.

WtfEvenIsExistence,

Wait what? Noooo please don’t leave us 😥

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