Yesterday, you probably saw this informal post by one of our head admins (Chris Remington). This post lamented some of the difficulties we’re running into with the site at this point, and what the future might hold for us. This is a more formal post about those difficulties and the way we currently see things....
I’m very sad to see this. The saddest thing is the state of development I guess and this is just the fallout. I do hope that you will try an allowlist at first (at least before deciding to leave the fediverse altogether) and maybe struggle through until things get better (I do believe they will get better; software development is just inherently not a super fast process).
The problem with forking Lemmy is in starting from all the bad that is inherently there, and trying to make it better. That is way more work than starting fresh with more developers. IE, not using Rust for a web app and UI, better database queries from the start, better logging/functions from the start; not adding on bandaids.
FWIW I actually think Rust is the perfect language for the backend. It’s just that the quality of the code in Lemmys backend isn’t great (from my limited experience). You can write bad code in any language. What you really need are professionals that are good at coding (unfortunately this is rare even among professionals). (Humbly) I am one such person. If you are serious about trying to start a better Lemmy alternative from scratch, I’d love to be involved in the backend discussions.
Perhaps Beehaws issues could be something a new development community could gather around. My perception is that you have a lot of non-technical people who would be great at project management, requirements analysis, UX design and that sort of thing. This is kind of what Lemmy has been lacking from the start.
I am not part of Beehaw, but that’s only since I admin another instance. I could see myself having joined Beehaw if it wasn’t for that. So again, if you are really serious about a potential new development, I’d love to be in on it.
Lemmy started as a passion project and been growing slowly over years and then out of nowhere a small group of developers had to not only adjust to new influx of people, but also a barrage of ideas, suggestions and comments on what they should prioritize. I’m not sure how much experience different people here have with open source development, but the amount of changes in 3 months Lemmy developers managed to do is impressive to say the least. And there will never be open source project that manages to satisfy everyone.
Fundamentally people assume that with open source project all ideas will get implemented either by developers or if someone does the work and makes a pull request. But like with every other project the maintainers are allowed to have their own vision and not implement everything someone asks for or have different priorities or specific structure in mind.
Beehaw always tried to create something where they have complete control over everything. And that worked with federation when they were one of a few “big” instances (some people might not know but Beehaw is 21 months old, opened on 2021-11-12), but once influx of new users came in the existing tools weren’t enough to have the level of control they wanted. So they clsoed the doors on new users and isolated themselves and at the same time angered a big portion of fediverse users for taking advantage of new user influx but the cutting them off from the rest of the fediverse.
I’m not sure if people checked the posts where Beehaw listed features and tools they want and a lot of them are super tailored to Beehaw vision which is not in step with federated Lemmy as a whole.
I don’t think that the Beehaw vision and fediverse can coexist as they have diametrically opposed ideas.
I think you will find this conundrum on any software you switch to. FOSS is hard, and needs a big enough community of motivated people with the right skills to make a project successful. People are largely doing this work as hobbies; it's hard to fund such projects. Doable but hard.
The most obvious alternative to go for is the Reddit code base which was open source and has been forked as Saidit. This is the most likely place to find something mature enough and feature rich enough for what you may need but again whether things will progress is another conundrum as who else is maintaining or using that codebase?
Lemmy and any other project like Kbin will need people and work to get it where you want, not just suggestions and a list of requests. The problem is not a lack of interest in achieving what you want from Lemmy, it is realistically that it is a small project team with a big task on their hands and Beehaw are not it's only users.
Ultimately Lemmy may not be the software now to do what you want for your community. Federation may also not be the right thing for a community of your ethos. Maybe the simplest solution is complete defederation and build the community in an environment you can completely control, even with the limits Lemmy current provides with it's software. Come back to the fediverse when you feel the software matches the ambitions, but in the meantime build the community you want.
Why should Beehaw get a report for something not done on their instance? Instance rules only apply to that instance activities.
You’d still like to know if you users are causing ruckus elsewhere, especially since that may escalate to defederatation in the worst case. Also instance rules can apply to external communities too since they are saved locally. Thus admins are responsible for all content, not just local content.
That is fundamentally anti federation suggestion.
I disagree. The alternative is total defederation. Being able to “soft” defederate in certain ways could be useful as a less extreme version of defederation. Right now it’s very binary. Even Mastodon has more granular controls I believe?
Why should Beehaw get a report for something not done on their instance? Instance rules only apply to that instance activities.
Spammers have been a bit of an issue recently, and federated reports would help them get removed quicker I think
That is fundamentally anti federation suggestion
True to some extent IMO. The HB instance does this on their announcements/meta community, so apparently it might be possible unless HB added that feature into their codebase themselves
I’m in favor of either option, honestly. A whitelist or complete migration to something else.
When I joined, I wasn’t looking for a drop-in reddit replacement. I’d actually deleted my reddit account a few weeks before all the craziness went down because reddit and social news in general has a very bad habit of becoming toxic as shit.
Now, I get that I’m in a minority here. People left reddit and wanted something to replace it, but I don’t know if Beehaw was ever the right instance for that specifically.
While I don’t particularly care one way or the other about federation or the “Fediverse”, what does worry me is whether or not the platform Beehaw migrates to is better maintained than Lemmy.
If moving to something new and relatively untested, there’s a big risk that other, equally as important, development issues might crop up, especially if the dev team is relatively small.
I’m also curious to find out whether UX will be similar (eg. content aggregation with voting and whatnot) or if it’ll be something closer to older forums, though I’m aware you don’t want to really say anything until you’re decided, so I guess answers to that can wait.
Anyway, I’ll be interested to see what happens. Take your time, figure it out, and we’ll see what happens over the next few weeks.
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....
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.
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.
The Reddit-style presentation of topics and ranking comments isn’t really conducive to lengthy, quality discussions that persist over a period of time. The Reddit-style works for following current events and posting links to new things etc, but as a result, old topics - topics even a couple of days old - falls off the engagement radar. Once it’s gone from the front page, it’s gone from people’s consciousness. This is bad for a small community with few posts that value quality of discussions over blind sharing of links. For instance, say I create a topic called “share your favorite vegan recipes” - I may get some replies in the first couple of days, but then the topic will fall off the frontpage and completely die. This is further exacerbated by the voting system. On Reddit/Lemmy, topics and comments which have a higher number of votes get more visibility, and this creates two issues - one is it encourages group think and creates an echo chamber, the other is that it drowns out less popular topics or comments. This sort of intentional drowning of posts and comments actually may be a good thing - and even necessary - on high-userbase systems like Reddit, where a single thread could have thousands of comments - but it works against low-traffic communities like Beehaw, where every comment is valuable (unless it’s off-topic/spam etc of course).
Whereas in a traditional forum:
A topic gets bumped to the top when someone posts a comment, which encourages threads to live longer
There’s not as much importance given to the “newness” of a post
The lack of votes on a topic would give equal importance to all topics
The lack of votes on comments would encourage people to actually chime in if they agree or disagree with a comment, instead of just blindly voting
Forums also allow you to show a categorized homepage, where you can have several sub-forums appear on the homepage all at once. This is a better approach than blindly unifying the entire feed in one page, because this allows threads in low-traffic subs to keep their visibility and compete against high-traffic subs. For instance, consider a current news sub which may get a lot of posts ever single day, vs a niche sub such as gardening. With a unified feed, you’d almost never see posts from a gardening sub, unless you went into that sub.
With all the above reasons, forums are therefore more conducive for encouraging discussions, over a place which simply acts like a feed aggregator. Traditional forums are the solution to the doomscrolling issues that plague modern social media. Plus, they offer better moderation tools, with better granular permissions granted to mods, so you could grant various levels of access. Also, you can place several restrictions on users to reduce spam, for instance, you could grant a user rights to post a topic only after they’ve read all the rules, and maybe participated in a quiz or something. You could grant additional rights to people who’ve gotten a certain number posts in their bag. You could have a “trusted poster” system where a user could have mod-like abilities. There’s so many ways a forum is a lot more flexible than a system like Lemmy.
So overall, I think Beehaw’s ethos and vision would align better with a traditional forum, over a feed-aggregator style forum like Lemmy.
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.
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.
I’m a big proponent of federation and the Lemmyverse. While it would be sad for me to see Beehaw leave ActivityPub, I’ve always said that the admin team should do what they think is best for themselves and Beehaw and I will respect such decisions.
I probably wouldn’t make a new account on another service because that would require a new app on my phone, but I’m OK with that if the idea of Beehaw prospers in another space.
@PenguinCoder@admin If I may suggest something on Lemmy as a stopgap measure, Beehaw can enlist the help of one of the AutoMod programs of Lemmy, so that any comment not on an approved user or instance list are removed on the specific “safe-space” communities. It might take some testing/tinkering but this may give you some of the granularity in moderation that has been requested.
I would probably follow beehaw elsewhere as long as it was safe to do so for me. I think this is something important to keep alive wherever it may be. I also think for anyone who wants to stay on lemmy and would miss beehaw, if you can create your own. It may not be the easiest thing thing for everyone to do but I’m sure there are more people out there who want a space that has the simple fundamental rule of be nice. We need more of this online and honestly trying to keep it within the confines of lemmy alone doesn’t make sense. Spread kindness and let the spirit of beehaw grow far and wide.
Unfortunately, studying any form of therapy doesn’t automagically remove all of your own issues. Just think of all the therapists and doctors having a screw loose themselves. This subject is one of my blind spots and that’s why I’m looking for outside opinions.
Knowing her, bringing it up like in the original post would probably make her uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t want to do that without a good reason, so I’ve decided to have my feelings challenged in a neutral place first. If Beehaw decides that there’s nothing to worry about, I’ve learned something about myself and there’s no need for that talk!
Everywhere you browse, people have such strong opinions about everything and are so toxic or extremely negative. You start playing a game, want to check the forums or something and most of the posts are people being mean to each other. You open social media to keep in touch with people that you’d like to maintain a certain...
I don’t know whether you’re using other fediverse services, but here is a link that only shows nice servers: https://fedi.garden/
About toxicity and negativity, I’m only on two Mastodon servers, two Lemmy servers (active only here), and on Kbin. Depending on where you’re engaging, you can notice more or less of those bad traits, but their levels are sickening to me. Two or three days ago I commented to a reply I was given, stating what I thought about their opinion. And suddenly I was involved in that toxicity and other bad behaviours made by other random people.
Things can be said in another way, in a nicer and good faithful way, but people consider that, because you cannot see the other party in the conversation, they can behave however they want without consequences for them. But there are consequences, and unfortunately they’re for the receiver. I’m sure outside internet those behaviours would be more limited, in general.
And this is not something that occurs recently or during the last 5 years. I’ve been browsing internet since 2006, and it was as bad as it is now, just with other intermediaries, like online chats, forums, etc. People don’t have legitimacy to act in any way they want, but they do nonetheless. And here is my last thought. What if you are toxic to an user, on the other side of your screen, who happens to have depression or other mental disorders, and you don’t know that fact? Would you feel OK knowing that you’re driving someone to hurt themselves, or worse?
I’ve faith on Beehaw, because I notice admins and moderators are really serious about being nice, and conversations, as far as I can notice, are superb. We all just need to defend this way of acting, pointing out the bad actors and censuring their bad actions.
I filled out the form and clicked “create”. It turned into a spinner for a few seconds then just went back to the form. No error, but no action either. When I search for the new community, there are no results.
The number of communities on beehaw is pretty set, but if there’s something niche you wanna talk about it’s encouraged to post it in whatever community is closest, to encourage more discussion and ensure that more people will see it. Your post generally won’t be taken down for being off topic, as I understand it. It’s pretty small here, so the number of communities is small here too.
Is creation the act of bringing forth something that did not before exist, or does creation include creativity?
Yes - it can include creativity as it can include evil.
Creativity can be expressed through these acts of maintenance, nurturing, and care, all of which set at odds of destruction.
Sure it can, that said - I don’t think maintenance, nurturing or care are at odds with destruction.
Maintenance can require the destruction of other ideas. For example, if you try to build a society built on love, is it wrong to destroy bigotry? That’s not to say that the people expressing these ideas need to be killed but rather that the idea of bigotry must be destroyed from their mind for tolerance to take its place.
Nurturing can be born out of destruction. For example, is Beehaw not born out of the destruction of other platforms? We try to nurture a different culture but I can hardly think it would exist without destruction happening in the first place.
Caring can bring people to destruction. For example, is it not care that makes us want to destroy authorities that harm our loved ones? Is it not care that makes us want to destroy the police system as it exists today?
you know, i feel like you were very heavily affected by being called out about this comment. i’m not sure i fully understand why, but it seems like the accusation of being a dick and being aphobic really bothered you. and you are certainly correct that they could have more clearly (and nicely) worded their intention check. it would have been nice for them to have said something like, “hey, your comment is coming off kind of aphobic to me, could you clarify your intentions?” instead
i think, the trouble with flippant comments on the internet, is that (without a lot of extra work), you have a pretty hard time ensuring that your comments are interpreted correctly. i think we can agree that this is largely a misunderstanding, right? at least, by how much you’ve emphasizing reading comprehension, i hope we can agree on this
and i don’t think they were misinterpreting it at you. does that make sense? like, i think their intention was fairly straightforward (“i don’t want to allow what is possibly aphobia without calling it out”). again, they could have worded it in a clearer and kinder way. but i think that intention, at its heart, is a decent one. i don’t believe their intention was like, “i’m going to misinterpret this on purpose to antagonize you”
and i’m not trying to make you come off as a bastard here. i empathize with you a lot, it sucks to make an offhand comment and have it blow up into a shitstorm like this. it’s ass, and i’ve been there before. a lot
honestly that’s why i’m writing this, because in retrospect, i wish someone had told me to chill the fuck out (directed at my past self, not you)
the other reason i’m writing this, and the reason i’m not writing to the commenter, is because you are the one who signed up for a site whose only rule is “be(e) nice”
i can tell you’re actually genuinely trying here, and i want to recognize that, and also say that you can do better
“i’m being nicer than i could be” is such a shitty, self-destructive path to go down. this is the same shit parents use to justify abusing their kids in different ways than they were abused growing up, only to look back and realize in horror that what they were doing was still abusive
the rule is not “be(e) nice when someone is nice to you”
the rule is “be(e) nice”
and i hope you believe that you can do it. i know it’s fucking hard. i know it takes so much restraint. i’m lucky that a lot of my worst bullshit was on reddit and it’s been nuked since the migration. it’s taken years for me to get to the point where i get a spicy reply and don’t go full aggro on their ass in response. but i did it and you can do it, too
and i think that’s so important to develop. not just for others, but for yourself. i think signing up for beehaw says something about you, that you value kindness and you want to be better at it. that you want to be a person who gets a spicy reply and can still treat it with reasonable intentions. that you don’t want to perpetuate the cycle of people endlessly escalating arguments on the internet
if you need help, i’m happy to help. if you want to throw a draft my way for a first pass, go for it. if you need anger management techniques, i got em. i believe in you and i’m happy to put my money where my mouth is in terms of supporting you
anyways, i hope something in my long ass post reaches you. i hope you can tell, i really genuinely don’t want this for you
oh, and just to make it clear: i’m not advocating for letting yourself get walked on. but you can definitely stand up for yourself and be kind about it at the same time
Honestly, I think defederating from some of the major instances is a big part of the reason it’s as nice here as it is. Beehaw doesn’t need to be a giant to have a place and a purpose, and it doesn’t need to be the only Lemmy instance anyone uses either.
I think we all need to get past this nonsensical idea that everything has to be the biggest to be worthwhile. Nobody goes to a nice local restaurant and wishes they were at McDonald’s. It’s okay to just make something good and let it be. It doesn’t have to explode to monumental proportions, and when it does that’s not really that great a thing.
Federation is an amazing tool in large part because of defederation. If instances aren’t using both they might as well all be screaming down the same meaningless content firehose, as far as I can tell.
Perfectly valid way of doing it. I know a lot of people hate All on Lemmy or Reddit, and I get it. I just like to spend a portion of my time on All to see things that I would never learn about on my own.
I’ve been learning so much about Australia and NZ that I would never learn otherwise and I enjoy that. I’m in the US, so I’d never see local news from there if I stick to subscriptions. Do I want to learn all sorts of things about that? Not especially, but All lets me see what catches my eye. World just has a little too much to make it efficient, and the vibe in general is just more Reddit. Beehaw comes off more friendshipy to me, which also encourages me to participate in talking about things that I may not be as knowledgeable about.
But that’s just what I want for me, everyone else may want something else, but that’s why we have options.
Given the approach/philosophy of Beehaw, I’m kind of confused and surprised by the choice of Lemmy for building this community space. Not that I disagree with it, but it undeniably complicates administration/moderation in a variety of ways thanks to federation (as has become apparent with new Lemmy instances & the population...
I appreciate that Beehaw stands for greatness beyond the apathy of the 4.5 years of Lemmy established developers who seemingly don’t use Lemmy to discuss Lemmy. “…the opposite of love is not hate – it’s apathy. It’s not giving a damn. If somebody hates me, they must “feel” something … or they couldn’t possibly hate. Therefore, there’s some way in which I can get to them.” ― Leo F. Buscaglia
Beehaw on Lemmy: The long-term conundrum of staying here
Yesterday, you probably saw this informal post by one of our head admins (Chris Remington). This post lamented some of the difficulties we’re running into with the site at this point, and what the future might hold for us. This is a more formal post about those difficulties and the way we currently see things....
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....
[Slightly NSFW] Should I ask stepdaughter to wear less revealing stuff in private?
Not the bad porn script you were expecting, I swear. 🙃...
I'm so tired of the current state of the internet
Everywhere you browse, people have such strong opinions about everything and are so toxic or extremely negative. You start playing a game, want to check the forums or something and most of the posts are people being mean to each other. You open social media to keep in touch with people that you’d like to maintain a certain...
problem creating a community
I filled out the form and clicked “create”. It turned into a spinner for a few seconds then just went back to the form. No error, but no action either. When I search for the new community, there are no results.
Passion and destruction - a collective exploration
I’ve recently been thinking a lot about self-destruction....
What Does It Mean to Be Demiromantic? (www.them.us)
[CLOSED] a Beehaw survey on some policy and the site's vibes
good morning, Beehaw...
So, what led Beehaw to decide to use Lemmy?
Given the approach/philosophy of Beehaw, I’m kind of confused and surprised by the choice of Lemmy for building this community space. Not that I disagree with it, but it undeniably complicates administration/moderation in a variety of ways thanks to federation (as has become apparent with new Lemmy instances & the population...