I am one of the admins of Beehaw and I’m trying to get some feedback on our potential move.
Let’s start out with a little Beehaw history before judgements are passed, please.
A handful of us were beta testing Tildes when we decided to have discussions on a Discord server.
We decided that our ‘Northern Star’ or guiding principle would culminate as ‘Be Nice’ with purposefully vague/flexible interpretations. Our overall goal is to provide a safe space to disenfranchised persons.
We talked for a little over a year and some of our members became impatient. Then someone stepped in to suggest a couple of platforms that we could consider getting started with.
One of those platforms was Lemmy. None of us knew, at that time, anything about ActivityPub.
During the Reddit exodus (surrounding the API outcry and blackout), our instance exploded. We were, initially, crippled by the mass amounts of users seeking refuge.
Thankfully, someone stepped in and volunteered hundreds of hours of work to stabilize our instance and refine it further.
After many hours of talks, it became clear to us that our overall goal could be achieved outside of Lemmy/ActivityPub.
Right now, we feel that Lemmy and ActivityPub have downsides that are limiting us from achieving that goal.
I have two questions.
What are your long-term goals for your platform?
What are the downsides to Lemmy/ActivityPub stopping you from reaching those goals?
Also to answer the main question I’d like for it to stay but at the same time, the last time I checked Beehaw had around 700-ish Monthly active users. That means there probably wouldn’t be that much of an impact on the general discourse of Lemmy more broadly.
That seems like enough to sustain a pretty big community on a private server even if about half of you left. So if you guys do decide to leave I wish you the best.
I’d be curious about the downsides as well
Lemmy is missing some moderation tools still and that will take time to implement. Communities with stronger moderation may also attract trolls, which Lemmy might not be able to handle.
Not sure about activitypub though, especially if the alternative is a centralized platform
Mod tools are the obvious answer, but it’s a platform in development. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to trade off the pain of migration/adaptation to another growing platform also in development because one part of it is supposedly a bit further along right now. The vagueness and incongruence between the action and reasoning suggests they aren’t genuinely offering their true reasoning. It also seems like they’re trying to say that federation was never appealing to them, which seems ridiculous to me. Rather they will cast it to the wind now, following immature decisions they made about federation that didn’t turn out very well.
700ish active members is a lot for the fediverse currently
We currently have 40872 monthly active users.
700/40872 ~ 1.7% of all monthly active users.
What ratio is that to contributing users? Active users is nice and all, but without content there’s nothing to be active for.
Beehaw’s long term goal is a curated safe space for neurotypical white people