Good. I'm sick of reading all over the place what fascists the Beehaw moderators are, and I'm sure it's even more exhausting for you, so I'm glad you're drawing these boundaries. I've mentioned it a few places, but there seems to be two camps on what the Fediverse should be. There's the camp that thinks the Fediverse should be a fully unmoderated peer to peer free for all, and there's the camp that thinks the Fediverse should be a distributed governance model in which users are free to choose the admins whose moderation style matches their desired moderation style.

People have a lot of rage at Beehaw for being moderated a certain way, and the questions I always find myself asking are: "Why do you want to engage with a community you do not like?" if the person seems to hate Beehaw, or "Have you considered the possibility that you like the discussions on Beehaw specifically because it's curated that way" when someone seems upset that they need a secondary account to access Beehaw because their main account is on lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works.

I, personally, am in the second of the two camps I described at first. Hence, this is my primary account. I really like it here. I like it a lot. For this reason, I want you to keep doing what you need to keep it being what it is, and if that means you and Alyaza taking breaks, good! I can only imagine that rage is even more exhausting for you fine beefolk since you've invested more of yourselves into making this instance what it is, and you have to deal with it much more constantly.

So take some time to engage as a user. Go to some dance clubs. Go tubing on a river. Love yourself, just as a general concept.

I'm just stunned that anybody is making an effort, honestly. As an older tech nerd with kids and adulting and all this crap, I can't imagine the kind of impact it must have on people's time and attention to run a site like this.

Of all the recent spin-ups of reddit alternatives, I'm honestly more excited for beehaw than anything else. Having a consistent vision and concept of operations seems to be the only way to prevent media from sliding with the rightward-shifting Overton window. Every other social media site taught us that if you do nothing, your site will turn into an alt-right hellhole.

Be(e) nice to the admins and mods who have made what we have possible. Kudos to all y'all. Beehaw rules.

It's always a bit sad when something you love starts feeling more like "just" work.

Sounds like a good plan to chill a bit and rub shoulders with the mortals.

You guys are probably going to have to recruit more mods in the near future to avoid burnout if we keep growing like this.

Hang in there!

If people don't like Beehaw, they are free to go elsewhere.

They seem to forget they request to be here and have read the rules. Don't like them? Goodbye then.

I've noticed some 'I'm right and everyone else is wrong' types turning up on Lemmy world/ml.

I'll probably drop those accounts. This place is like a breath of fresh air.

Long may it stay!

Thanks for all the work you do for this space to thrive! Is there anything community members can do to assist other than not being jerks?

Thank you for putting your own mental health first. The loud minority of assholes can be emotionally exhausting. I like Beehaw the way it is, and that takes effort. I am VERY grateful!

love the clarity, love the honesty, love you. big W

You’re doing something special here. Successfully defending a haven of respect and decency in today’s social media hellscape is spectacular. I did not realize the scale of the backlash but in retrospect that’s just me being naive. I’m sick of this sort of constant argumentative, bitchy, mean or outright hurtful behaviour that would get anyone kicked out of any IRL group but that is somehow supposed to be a hallmark of superior intelligence online.

I applaud your effort to educate and enlighten. If I were you I’d wield this more readily (maybe it’s OK if you do too?):

Thank you for this update, and I hope you guys are all doing OK. Look after yourselves! And thank you for this space. It's the first place in ages I actually have felt I want to post or comment on something in anticipation of a friendly discussion instead of worrying about trolls or aggressive responses :)

I want to praise you for redacting a "Code of Conduct" with only one "BAD" example, while making it clear and concise. Kudos.

Also please don't become calloused, take care of yourself and enjoy the community you're building.

Suggestion: What would you think of having some sort of "community ambassadors"; not in a role of mods, but just people who'd be willing both to orient newcomers, and politely engage those who might be trying to cause trouble, to either diffuse the situation, or lead them to show their true colors for easier modding?

I've been in some communities with such a non-mod ambassador role, and I think they were a positive influence.

Self love is the best kind of love. I hope you find the reason you work so hard for this community again. Thank you, and to all the mods and admins I really appreciate you all. Always fun to read discussions here

Hey. This is the only instance so far where I've felt safe to be out. I really appreciate all the work you and the other admins have put in to making this place, it really does feel special. That being said, putting yourself first matters, and if it's this community or your own health, you know what to prioritize. The rest of us will be able to figure things out!

Lots of voices saying the same thing I'm about to say, but I really want to pile on so you know many of us mean it...Please take care of yourselves mod team! You have created the best place on the internet, and deserve lots of time to rest and revel in your hard work.

I hope we as a community can do enough to make those bad actors feel like it is a waste of time to engage with us.

Thank you for this post. I really appreciate all that you and the other admins have been doing to keep Beehaw going. I hope you're able to disengage when you need to and manage the burnout. Take care of yourself.

I always really appreciate the effort y'all put into clarifying how you want this community to be run or actions y'all are taking. I wanna say that I really enjoy the feeling I get here: that people typically are good faith and see the human on the other side. Being a mod or admin and trying to exemplify the community you hope to foster has to be incredibly exhausting. That being said, the effort is noticeable, and I'm really thankful for y'all's passion for this project of beeing nice :)

You all are definitely doing good in my view but I don't think it fair that we'd expect you to spend all of your time moderating literally every aspect of this community.

May I suggest that it just be a community rule that if somebody has a request we just say they should put it in Beehaw Support and let the community engage on the topic to discuss the merits.

If we are all fairly like minded on respecting others and the defederating or bans that have occurred it would seem we could self regulate those discussions and catch people up as a community rather than expecting the moderators to handle every engagement.

You've been transparent on actions that have been taken and why, I think we can handle propagation of that info ourselves at least.

Beehaw isn’t Reddit and anyone who came here only to recreate their Reddit experience might not find a home. There is this razor thin line where a community is big enough to seem vital and active, but not so big it becomes a shithole. Surfing that edge is probably very hard and I appreciate you making the effort to do it.

I have a lemmy.world account also and it’s fine, but beehaw feels like a new kind of experiment with this sort of internet community. It is good and valuable. Thanks!

A lot of good opinion has been stated in the comments here, but I'd just like to express how grateful I am that Beehaw exists. It's like a safe outpost in the wilderness that's welcoming and comfortable, but will only stay this way if everyone behaves themselves to the bare minimum of human decency.

I don't think that's too much to ask of users. Thank you for the work you do to keep this place what it is!

The new direction is more than fair honestly. I both really appreciate and sympathize with the need to point out that these hostile bad faith responses are upsetting. For a long time, commentary on attack dogging a forum has had to sidestep the issue that having to deal with this shit is emotionally draining. It's reasonable that there is a place for eveyrone at the table but the chairs have an emergency eject for diners who start throwing food. It's bad enough that everyone still eating has to finish their meal with a mess everywhere.