2y ago

Where will we all be(e) next year?

In this post I am speaking as a Beehaw fanatic and not as an admin. That is why it is placed in the chat community. To be clear, I am not speaking on behalf of the Beehaw admin team nor the community as a whole.

Currently, we have $5,430 that is in our collective purse to be used to further this endeavor. When I take a step back, and look at that amount of money, I am humbled. That is hope…it is an expression of where we want to go and what we want to preserve.

You may be wondering where we are with the testing of alternative platforms and any other considerations.

The testing phase, as far as I can tell, is over. We are, I believe, in a stage of digesting all of it. And, I have a feeling, that we are holding out hope that there could be other options we haven’t encountered yet.

I appreciate the patience of everyone involved and I don’t want to make a hasty decision.

Thankfully, we have had persons such as PenguinCoder to rescue us from the huge Reddit exodus and all the technical problems associated with the Lemmy software platform that we rely on right now.

There have been whispers that PenguinCoder could be working on a new platform for the Beehaw project.

Thank you all for grabbing onto our northern star, be(e) nice, and running with it.

47 comments

For whatever it's worth, if whatever this community transitions to isn't federated - I'm out. There is simply not enough content on beehaw alone to satisfy my consumption. I love the community, do not get me wrong, but I need more.
I thank you and the other admins for all you do.
- Sadly the same. I'm all for pulling in a new instance, but I run an instance with users and we enjoy a good mix of content, beehaw and not. If they leave, I wouldn't be joining. Now if they find an alternative to Lemmy that's worth my users migrating then maybe we look into that, I'm not exactly thrilled with what the devs have been working on, but I do believe in the Fediverse and want to see it succeed. Lemmy specifically, well, there are definitely things that need work.
  I think the tantamount goal should be uniting users, not dividing them even more post-reddit. Focus on tooling that makes it easier to mod and repel attacks rather than putting up more walled gardens, so to speak
  
  20 years ago we went to different forums and had different types of discussiuns on each. I guess I don't really understand why we need the whole internet on one site?
  
  Thank you again for your work!
Just a few days ago, I posted that I’d leave Lemmy, if Beehaw leaves. Since then, I got temp-banned on lemmy.ml for calling fascists fascists, decided that it was the proverbial straw, deleted my instance after 4 months, my backup account, and created a new account on Beehaw that is not subscribing to anything federated, but only local communities. I used Lemmy not because I thought it was amazing, but because I simply hated spez more. But the quality of discourse was low.
One exception was usually posts in Beehaw communities. That, together with some comments in What is the current thinking about what platform Beehaw should be on? Stick with Lemmy or try something else? (the comment chain disappeared with my old account, though), made me create a new account on Beehaw after I left the "Fediverse".
A lot of words to say, I’ll follow Beehaw to whatever software is used, as I treat it like just another small discussion site like tildes or HN anyway.
- yeah I was initially all for the fediverse but it seems the more and more I interact outside of beehaw, the less and less I seem to enjoy it. Even just browsing comment threads makes me almost pissed off the way people are talking to each other. It feels like a very recent trend too. I try sometimes to tell people that I'm not fighting them but for some reason people outside of beehaw that I talk to almost universally get extremely hostile when I just talk to them about things. It's such an odd reaction. People on beehaw seem to be fine though.
  I guess people come on here just to fight and then get confused when somebody doesn't want to fight.
  And not to wave fingers at people, but I have noticed that whenever posts on beehaw get sour it's often from the non-beehaw accounts.
  
  It feels like a very recent trend too.
  I’m disagreeing there. It was always common in large Reddit communities. And because so many people browse with All on Lemmy instead of subscribed, even small communities have that issue on Lemmy.
  almost universally get extremely hostile when I just talk to them about things
  There’s a great German word, "Streitkultur (German wikipedia)", roughly "argument culture", but with a positive tinge, about people having a positive argument about differing point of views. And sadly, that is lacking for most people. The lack thereof in politics made me get disgusted and leave politics alone over a decade ago.
  
  Some people on the fediverse do not want their views challenged and react with hostility. It's not like that all over, but it can certainly be frustrating if some users treat this as a walled garden of thought and lash out at others for challenging their viewpoints.
  
  Sorry to hear that. Mileage probably varies a lot depending on the communities. I usually stick to a few tight but active communities, and discussion is pleasant
- Man, a lot of what you said resonates with me even if I'm still sticking with this fediverse thing. It's like the transition from the hopeful vision of the internet from the 90s to the cluttered mess we got around late 2000s and so on.
  Lemmy and fediverse can grow in size and popularity, but so does the potential for harmful accusations from outsiders, using instances embracing extremist views as source. As long as Lemmy has members holding onto that rose-tinted Freedom Max (TM) view, it can and will be an issue.
Wherever beehaw goes, I will gladly follow. I'd have a lot more content to share if I didn't fear an onslaught of bad takes and debatelords from other instances.
Let’s spend dev time making lemmy great, not developing yet another thing.
- @penguincoder@beehaw.org is a pretty active dev for Beehaw, has been very open about his views that the lemmy software is built on very shaky foundations, including the programming language and architecture choices underpinning the whole thing, making moderation unnecessarily difficult and making it hard to comply with legal requirements of hosting such a service, and providing severe limits to scale. It might make more sense to build up a new forum from the ground up, compatible with ActivityPub, than to try to fork Lemmy, or persuade Lemmy's existing maintainers to start accepting big patches.
  
  I mean Rust is a godsend as a decision for the language to use. Kbin for example uses Php, which means I'll never contribute to it. Other alternatives would be like Python, Node, or Golang, but why? The first two won't scale as well on a single node and all will have worse static typing (especially Golang). When I examined the code, it seemed like a standard sql+rust stack. I can't imagine anything even major needing changing, let alone a full rewrite.
Speaking as someone who joined during the "Reddit Exodus," when I left Reddit I was not anticipating (or actively searching out) a direct Reddit replacement. I was happy to look for forums that worked for me, but wound up stumbling on Lemmy first.
All this to say that I was already ready to face accounts on different sites (or at least browse different sites) and I don't think not being federated would be a dealbreaker for me.
I would certainly be concerned about the level of discussion without federation, though. To me, as an individual who has not had to deal with the struggles of Lemmy mod tools (or lack thereof), the contributions from other instances definitely help get a conversation going. And with troublemaker instances blacklisted I find more often than not they are adding and not detracting.
Obviously that's all with the added benefit of me not having to be a mod. I guess at the end of the day, my hope is that PenguinCoder's developing platform will play nice with ActivityPub, so we can still work with other instances. I suppose if it worked really well, other instances may want to even migrate to it (assuming it was robust enough).
It seems like eventually you guys are just going to wind up on an message board. At the end of the day it seems what beehaw wants more than anything is just a safe well maintained space to discuss and isnt hung up on federation or growth.
Federation was a nice way to be(e) seen and get new like minded members, but if the lack of mod tools make curating this community difficult, then its not a good fit. Unless some better lemmy compatible alternative or fork rises that gives you what you need, it sounds like the choice will inevitably be what kind of message board software you want to run.
- If there were a good forum software that had decent threading and strong mod tools, I would honestly be fine with that. I have no interest nor investment in federation. As it stands right now, it's a liability that allows a community to be overrun from sources that are totally out of your control.
  
  If there were a good forum software that had decent threading and strong mod tools
  Agreed and that is something we are aiming for with whatever software we've been looking at. Good user experience and mod tools.
I know of someone making a replacement for the core of Lemmy with a focus on good architecture for administration and moderation tools. It'll have a compatible API so the apps and front-end doesn't have to change to use the new core. He says he's more that 1/3 through to something that can be released in alpha. I'll keep you and the Beehaw crowd in the loop for when the alpha release is ready.
- OK. Thanks.
With Pebble shutting down already, I'm going to stick with Beehaw where it ends up. The ethos around discussion and understanding is the reason I have this account.
I'll probably stick with kbin and hope you guys join a threadiverse standard again at some point.
Is there any reason why you can't start by improving KBin for moderation needs? It seems like they could use the extra help.
Apologies if this is out of scope and annoying (as I'm not on top of where beehaw is up to with its issues with lemmy's mod features)
Just saw this 3rd party moderation interface/tool that someone has just started. I'd bet it doesn't really help any of the issues here, but nonetheless figured it's an interesting approach to beehaw's issues, where instead of writing a new platform and ditching federation, writing a moderation interface may be an alternative, though I'd imagine there are things beehaw feels they need that can only be done on the backend.
https://lemmy.tgxn.net/post/152704
- Entering in your credentials as an instance admin, mod, or otherwise, into a third party website is an absolute no-go.
  
  From what I gathered it's a tool you can run yourself alongside your instance.

47 comments