UPDATE: RESULTS HAVE CLOSED! thank you for your participation—we've received over 1,500 responses which is quite a lot more than we expected. aggregated results and community creation decisions should hopefully come in due time.
hello folks!
with our backlog cleared and many new people around, now's a good time to do our first-ever Beehaw Community Survey--the first of what will likely be(e) many to come. this survey should take no more than 5 or 10 minutes to fill out, so we strongly encourage you to do so when you are able to. you can find it at the following link:
the survey is comprised of seven optional demographic questions to help us assess the overall identity of our community and three questions relating to Beehaw and the Fediverse. it also asks you about 17 possible communities we are considering and whether you would actively participate in them if made.
the survey will be open for approximately a week. we'll definitely close it before July 1, so please get your responses in before that date. it'll also be locally pinned for at least the next three days or so, so please mind that. thanks!
results will also be aggregated and posted on here in a summary sometime thereafter. no ETA on that though.
I just wanted to say that I feel very strongly that, should it be implement, the community be called WorkReform, not AntiWork.
In the spirit of Beehaw, I think AntiWork goes against the ethos of "Bee Kind" as it sets the entire community up to be adversarial to anyone who enjoys work/finds work meaningful. Work reform is a much more inclusive goal.
I had a hard time with that one since I would not join an anti work community, but I was fairly active on /r/WorkReform.
It'll be nice if you guys can use something other than "Google Forms" for future surveys. Something a bit more privacy respecting than "Google Forms" will be a better choice for platform like Beehaw. A few suggestions,
I couldn't find Puerto Rico on the list, please consider adding it; I understand we are US territory but many of us consider ourselves our own country.
Minor complaint - my country / region (Taiwan) is not listed in the "countries" dropdown list, and Kosovo is also missing. Consider asking for "country or region" instead of "country" and include states with limited recognition when asking nationality.
Would you guys consider creating any sort of houseplants community? Plantclinic community, and/or succulents community? If I’m being entirely honest those are the ones I miss the most, and the ones on other communities still aren’t very active/don’t exist (in the case of succulents, as far as I can tell!). /c/greenspace helps to fill the void a bit but doesn’t quite do it
A bit of a meta comment/thought. Looking through the list of proposed communities, I see a few that were a “Reddit thing”, communities that would be like AskReddit, Ask Me Anything, and Today I Learned. In some sense, I wish for Beehaw to have its own identity. That it figure out its own way to do things. That might just be a differentiating choice of name for the same thing, but one that helps convey our values through the names’ connotations. Or it could be that we come up with our own ideas for communities that can cover a wide variety of topics.
In the text about our creed, Be(e) nice, I see a desire to be(e?) different. That Beehaw isn’t Reddit. I feel that should help guide the communities we create.
Done. As a side thought, I wonder if it would have been interesting to include both a “would contribute to” and a “would be interested in reading” (or similar concept). Undoubtedly there are countless lurkers here as there are on any social media site. It could be interesting to see what people are interested in lurking vs contributing to.
As a personal example, I don’t think I could contribute well to worldwide news, but I think it’s important to consume it to keep up to date (and I assume Beehaw would have more interesting stories than traditional news media’s “front page”).
Although, as a counter to my own suggestion, I suppose there’s no point in having a community that people are interested in reading but no one is interested in contributing to.
Just want to give a quick shout out that the questions are exceptionally well worded for encouraging valuable feedback. It's super easy to ask “What communities are you interested in”, but “What communities would you contribute to” is a different, and more valuable question. This is one of the most well-thought-out surveys I've filled out for an online community in a while. Is one of the admins possibly a sociologist, demographer, or otherwise someone who writes surveys for a living? Or did you just write a really good-ass survey based on your experiences taking not so good surveys?
Obviously it wasn't on the survey but I figure I should at least mention what I'd like to see directly, I would really love to have some kind of automotive community here. I'd be happy to pitch in and help develop it, but I do not think I could be a full time moderator.
Having a friendly supportive place to talk about cars, driving (high performance or otherwise), projects, and grassroots motorsports would be awesome.
This is probably a much later addition I don't know how much interest there is here. Just putting it in the suggestion box.
Hooray Tabletop! I mentioned it in my sign-up, but I am really looking forward to having a dedicated space to talk about TTRPGs, mini-wargaming, and the like. Hopefully it gets added to the list.
I think it may be good idea to also add a separate general medicine-focused community.
Health communities on social media tend to gravitate towards wellness and less-than-evidence-based practices - which is fine on its own, but may not be what some would expect by the name alone.
The only question that tripped me up for some reason was whether I consider myself to be white or non-white. I'm Filipino American, and personally I have a kinda nebulous identity toward race. I suppose I could "pass" as white, but I find myself unsure of identifying absolutely as White or Non-White. I'm not educated in best practices here, but I think a "Mixed" answer could fill the gap well without getting overly specific.
Seeing the communities list is really exciting! Maybe one day we'll have the activity to warrant all of them 😄. I have a boatload of photographs I've taken over the years but never really got around to posting anywhere. I'll likely find my ways to sneak them in relevant communities if c/photography doesn't come around, but if I had to pick One and Only One, that would be mine.
Great idea to have such a survey. I couldn't find any questions regarding sex apart from the one about gender identity. That is, I'm trans but this doesn't show because I just selected 'female'. Likewise people that are intersex would not necessarily appear here. Or maybe I made a mistake somehow? If I was meant to fill out the field with the blank below, I probably wouldn't feel comfortable doing that because this would again make a distinction between 'the normal female' and an other, i.e. 'trans women'. I'm female/a woman. But I'm also trans. Both aren't necessarily connected.
A better solution would be imo to have an extra field asking if you identify as cis/trans/other. I get that this is kind of a tricky terrain though, just wanted to let you know/discuss it.
This is a great idea! One of the online communities I’m in does an annual census and having data to analyze community change over time has been really valuable and interesting.
I do have a question/suggestion though: if the camping/hiking community is established, could it be encompassing of outdoor recreation in general? I ski in the winter and hike/camp in the summer and find generally that people who do one often do other outdoor activities (snowshoeing, biking, kayaking, etc) throughout the seasons. Including winter-based outdoor activities will also help keep engagement up throughout the year.
Let me just say that making a broad spectrum survey is very hard. I respect those who have problems with it and with Beehaw for having to stomach data collection for a community with such a broad set of needs.
I'd use both askBeehaw and AMA if they were moved into subcommunities, but I don't think they need to be. They're basically just 'topic is you' or 'topic is me', which is what Chat is for. If anything, Chat is more-or-less askBeehaw right now, and we don't have enough notable users to sustain an AMA.
So I ticked that I'd use them, but I don't think they're necessary - at least not until beehaw is far, far bigger. I even suspect Chat would be almost empty if an askBeehaw was created right now.
And a community for the Labradors among us that want to show off our favourite toys is a great idea; but not as specific as TIL. Especially since 'TIL' can often overlap with 'TIFU' (eg: "Today I learned that you can't put standard dishsoap in a dishwasher.")
Something that encompasses 'TIL', but also 'mildlyinteresting', 'YSK', 'lifehacks' etc sounds neat. More of a 'fun fact' area where people show off pictures of cool bugs they found, or ideas they want to share. I just don't know what you'd call it. (And the TIFU-type posts will still suit Chat.)
I typically avoid demographic questions for a lot of reasons, but I wanted to participate for beehaw's sake since I understand their intentions. Damn though. Some of those boxes are just filled with all sorts of loaded emotional yuck.
I don't mean it as a criticism. Again, I get why and the value, but phew... 😬
Great survey, I'm excited about some of the community options. I would love something akin to r/BuyItForLife - a genuine place to find products based on the feedback of real people. In particular, low waste products (maybe that fits in the sustainability category?)
I would be interested in a vegan & vegetarian community, but since vegetarian is a superset of a vegan diet, the combination would make the community effectively vegetarian. One of my favourite communities on reddit was r/vegan, where the discussions were usually much broader than just food-related, and on the other hand there was no need to look through delicious-looking food pictures to find out they were not vegan when looking for food. Hence, I would appreciate a specifically vegan community even more.
Interested in seeing the demographic information that comes out of this. Aside, it would be useful in the future to have the ability to select multiple options on the gender and sexual orientation questions. I fall under more than one option in both of those.
My two pence:
I really appreciate the nod to the Rest of the World in having a world news community but I honestly can't see myself participating in it. The dreadful things happening in the US are hard to avoid on social media, as is the deep deep anger they foster. Following so many other countries is a lot of weight to add, given that I also can't avoid the UK's self-immolating bin fire either.
I also question the quality of commentary it would foster being so broad. But maybe it would be a better home for say news about Ukraine and that would be worthwhile.
Seeing the list of potential new communities is useful. I had a hard time even clicking on even one option and it was a bit of a stretch. I probably wouldnt realistically participate in any of them, they do not suit me. So it is more to know about the instance.