If I can ask a noob question in this highly philosophical and technical thread— what’s your intended client experience for Beehaw? I’m using Voyager on iOS and will be sad to lose it if Beehaw migrates (or even doesn’t migrate to v19), though there may be a similar client for one of the other platforms under consideration.
Surely y’all aren’t all using a web front end, right? It seems there may be value in choosing a platform that has community support for clients as well as mod tools.
We’ve been in support of and worked with several apps for a front end client. Ultimately it’s not something I’ve spent a ton of time thinking about, because it feels secondary to having the necessary tools to ensure our community can remain healthy by keeping the niceness and kind behavior. Front end development doesn’t require explicit sign-off by the developers of the platform, either, so it’s a space easily rectified if someone feels it is currently lacking.
having come from reddit, where I was ignored or didn’t feel safe commenting, Beehaw is a breath of fresh air. and it makes me hopeful.
I don’t really participate in Discord servers anymore (after watching several explode) so this is a lot of my social interaction. I’m still not super confident in my ability to engage (especially on topics I don’t know a lot about, but I like learning, so I like to read those threads regardless) because similar to what someone else mentioned in the thread, I don’t know that I have a lot of value to add.
I really enjoy my time here, is what I’m trying to say. I told my partner immediately after reading this “wherever they go, I’ll follow” and I meant it. this is also my first experience with Lemmy, but I’m not attached to the software. what works for the community works for me.
just trying to offer words of support! you guys 1000% deserve it. so happy I came back.
IMHO you might be overthinking things a bit, while missing some other parts.
First, Lemmy is a NLnet project funded by the EU. The lead devs don’t work for free, and proposing “bug bounties” could be seen as competition and/or not in their personal interest.
Second, Lemmy is two layers in a tech stack:
ActivityPub
Mastodon
Lemmy server
Lemmy client
The focus of Lemmy devs is on the server side, with the rest basically a MVP to keep ongoing funding (NLnet funding is tricky on its own, the main two devs have little room to do anything they didn’t get pre-approved for, if they want to get paid).
There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it means they are not “project leads” or “community leads”, and they won’t care about it either.
What Beehaw seems to need, is one or two additional layers to the stack:
Mod tools
Community building (current mods seem to work fine for Beehaw)
Community features (seems to be a good number of bots out there)
Extra features
This is not something the Lemmy devs are able or willing to do, so Beehaw and similar projects will need to add them, or find them somewhere else.
I would suggest starting bug/feature bounties for whatever is needed, on a forked repo of Lemmy; take from upstream whatever works, and leave Lemmy devs to run their own show. Maybe call it “Beemy” or something.
That would be great to hear from the devs in response to why can’t you work on feature? If the reason is because someone else is setting the software priorities so the devs can get PAID; okay got it. Instead we get the contradictory answers of:
So which is it?? The Lemmy devs priorities are their own and their priorities don’t line up with most of the community; or their priorities are beholden to what NLNet says so they don’t get paid??
So which is it?? The Lemmy devs priorities are their own and their priorities don’t line up with most of the community; or their priorities are beholden to what NLNet says so they don’t get paid??
Both.
NLnet works like:
You come up with a project, with whatever priorities you want, and split it into some tasks.
If NLnet deems it worthy, they’ll pay you for each task they consider you completed successfully.
Until community donations, or commercial services (which are compatible with NLnet), exceed what they’re getting paid by NLnet, they’re beholden to prioritize tasks that NLnet has agreed to pay for.
If those tasks “don’t line up with most of the community”… well, tough luck. The community is free to contribute or donate more.
Yes, adding or changing tasks is possible, but it still requires NLnet approval to get paid.
PS: in those threads there is mention of not addressing lolicon “pornography” as a priority… keep in mind NLnet projects are EU funded with an EU perspective, and multiple countries in the EU consider lolicon “fictional non-realistic” drawings as “not pornography”. For the realistic ones, maybe @db0 could weigh in on the blocking statistics.
The focus of Lemmy devs is on the server side, with the rest basically a MVP to keep ongoing funding (NLnet funding is tricky on its own, the main two devs have little room to do anything they didn’t get pre-approved for, if they want to get paid).
That’s not actually true. You can discuss with NLNet and change your tasks midway.
You can discuss it, NLnet is under no obligation to approve any changes. Their philosophy is one of “we’d sooner return the funds to the EU rather than waste them on low return projects/tasks”.
I’ve done some research about projects NLnet funded (considering to apply myself), and some of the postmortem read like horror stories. People would ask NLnet to change tasks as a project evolved, NLnet would refuse, meanwhile people would spend their time on what they thought was best for the project, only to later find out NLnet considered some of the tasks unfinished and refused payment, ending up with people effectively carrying a project with extras, only to get paid for half of the original tasks and none of the extras.
If I were to work with NLnet funding, you can bet I would focus strictly on approved tasks and be wary of changing any of them.
I am already working with NLNet myself and have been able to add new tasks. I am in the process of asking them to change some of them as well and onboarding more members. Let’s see.
I haven’t commented on anything in quite a long time, but I’ve been checking in now and then and I just wanted to say that wherever Beehaw goes, I’ll be following. Really immature behaviour from the Lemmy devs.
IKR? I’ve been working with developers for 30 years now and I’ve never seen this level of egregiousness. In my opinion, the Lemmy devs are way out of line here.
I have. Check the story of how Linus (the one from Linux), changed the way he approaches suggestions after his old ways drove some guy to commit suicide… over a patch that he didn’t commit (how’s that for dark humor).
I have. Check the story of how Linus (the one from Linux), changed the way he approaches suggestions after his old ways drove some guy to commit suicide…
I’ve never heard of that before and I couldn’t fine any evidence of this happening. Linus was an ass and they stepped down after an intervention by the other core devs: gizmodo.com/linux-founder-takes-some-time-off-to-…
The learning empathy sabbatical was a separate issue, but I seem to remember his talking about the other case was referenced in relation to it… somewhere. Can’t find it now either, the keywords for “rejected patch” seem to have drowned it out 🤷
I always appreciate how much thought, effort, and time you all put into these documents and the community and everything; thank you from the bottom of my heart. There’s no place I’d rather bee, and whatever direction ends up being taken I’ll gladly come along.
There was an event I used to go to every few months. When you got there, you’d head up to the registration tent to check in but the first thing said to you was always “welcome home!” and the second was “do you like hugs?”. That’s how it feels here, like walking into a tent of people who care that you’re here because they want you to share in the positivity they’ve found.
There’s definitely something about walking down a trail in the woods carrying a bunch of gear a mile or two when suddenly you start running into hippies coming the other way, welcoming you home and telling you you’re almost there. And then it becomes trail-side camps, and then the big tent.
Not trying to belabor this analogy but I’ve been thinking about what you said all day and:
You’re totally right, but every, every interaction I’ve had with another bee feels like they’re the kind of person who’d turn around right after walking past you on the trail and say, “you know, I forgot something back there. Can I help you carry anything?”
Thanks Beehaw admins for continuing to have a vision for a better internet and for reminding me once again that there really are online communities that try to be and do good.
I don’t post or comment a lot on Beehaw specifically, because I often feel like I won’t have the energy or head space to write something that really contributes to the community. It’s a strange sort of impostor syndrome related idea where I feel like the quality of content on Beehaw should be so high that I might not reach it without really trying. After all, I want the community to be the best it can be(e).
That being said, I do read a lot of what’s going on here and I especially appreciate the frequent posters on the communities I subscribe to. Taking into account the issues with lemmy as illuminated by the Beehaw admins here, I feel some sense of urgency - I want to protect Beehaw, its content and its community of kind people from disappearing, or having its continuation be threatened, simply because it exists on lemmy.
I guess in the end I just want to say that I really appreciate that the admin team is taking steps to preserve the wonderful community they have built and cultivated. While I haven’t been that excited about Beehaw potentially moving to a different platform, you make a very good case for it and I’d honestly be happy to follow Beehaw wherever it goes :)
I really appreciate you taking the time to write this up. I want to assure you that not everything has to be perfectly worded and your presence and words are always contributions whether you feel they are or not 💜💜 After all, you cannot know what someone else is thinking or how much they appreciate what you’ve said, especially if they worry about their ability to contribute too!
As for the community itself, don’t worry, we’re not going to let it languish or disappear. I can’t speak for the entire admin team, but it’s one of the highlights of my life and will do everything in my power to keep it healthy. With that being said a community is not a one person job and I’m glad people like you are around to contribute 😄
Thank you admins for being so transparent with the users and putting in the hard work! The energy and thought you put into this community is outstanding and I really appreciate it!
The lemmy devs don’t think they need to do anything because they don’t think transphobia is a problem. They don’t care about giving you effective mod tools because they don’t think bigotry needs to be stopped.
We see this shit time and time again. This nonsense faux “free speech” commitment and just general unwillingness to allow people to create safe spaces if they choose is endemic to new platforms, communities etc. that simply don’t care to put in the work because they aren’t personally bothered by the issues. New mods always act like it’s a virtue to “let the community figure it out” even when 1 or 2 people cause outsized issues.
All of this is to say I believe in the beehaw vision and will gladly follow y’all where you go.
Yeah, I’m getting very sick of these “free speech” types. Like, I don’t want to create an echo chamber, but, seriously, we don’t to hear the goddamn Nazi point of view. Platforming that sort of thing normalizes it. Mainstream platforms won’t even permaban stochastic terrorists like LibsOfTiktok. In fact, social media platforms carry much of the blame for the divisiveness in society these days. That’s why the Beehaw project is important. We need to show the world that there’s a better way to do things. That it’s possible to disagree with someone without being at each other’s throats, entertaining dissenting opinions and perhaps reconsidering one’s stance on things, and growing as a person by widening the pool of experiences one is exposed to. For example, I used to be a vague “libertarian” type, but my position has evolved to the point where I’m a left-wing anarchist now. People can change for the better. Again, I’m not saying we should listen to the ultra right wing’s point of view, but I bet there’s tons of people out there in their own little bubbles who have never left their homogeneous communities and have never heard the stories of the marginalized. We may not be able to change everyone’s minds. But if we can change some, well, that’s a win for all of us.
I don’t want to create an echo chamber, but, seriously, we don’t to hear the goddamn Nazi point of view.
I’ve been avoiding comment on most of this thread because I really don’t want to be seen as the instigator even more; however I wanted to comment on this specifically. Absolutely agreed with you on this point. I utterly hate the go with the flow, echo chamber style of discussions. I mean sure, if you’re talking about how to make chocolate chip cookies, there’s not really that many different ways to do it. Your recipe, will echo mine, for the same results. But in a lot of areas in life, there really are a lot of different takes. Your experiences and views and other nuances shape your ideas and expression on any given topic. They won’t be the same as mine. And if they are, and all we talk about is 100% stuff I agree with; well, I ain’t learning a damn thing am I? I’m just reinforcing my stance. Conclusion shopping. It is really important to have a different point of view that can be well explained and defended across the spectrum of what that may be.
There is no defense for treating people (human beings) as lessor than you because you disagree with their existence. Be it Nazi’ Transpobia or otherwise. That’s not a difference of opinion. That’s a fundamental difference of what it means to be human. There is no echo chamber telling some wanna-be dictator POS’ Nazi sympathizing fuck, to fuck off.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh *****, this is a Nazi bar now,” he continued. ”And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down. - Michael B. Tager
If 10 people are sitting at a table and one of them is a Nazi, then you have 10 Nazis.
Beehaw wants zero of those people, echo chamber be damned.
I also find that the people advocating for people not to live in “echo chambers” are actually advocating for everybody else to be open minded. Because they’re not actually concerned with whether people are closed minded or not. It’s just a useful cudgel to make themselves look reasonable.
I agree - PieFed is almost ready. But not yet, and it would be rash to migrate to PieFed today.
The state of PieFed currently:
In the last week two new developers have started making significant contributions, so now there are 3 of us. Once they get more comfortable there could be a radical increase in development velocity.
I’ve been making steady progress through the key issues that will enable me to declare the ‘beta test’ phase complete. I expect the beta test phase to continue for another couple of months.
piefed.social is subscribed to over 700 communities and handling the load of federation very well (max 50% cpu usage), on a server costing 6 € per month. The number of weekly users is about 20% of what Beehaw has but PieFed is built to run very efficiently so I do not anticipate issues there.
A bit late but i love what I’m seeing, specially like not having to resort to external sites for the tiled image view like we had to at Reddit, useful for both pics (more likely wallpapers in my case) and memes (my most common use case :P ). Looking forward to see it grow :D
In the last week two new developers have started making significant contributions, so now there are 3 of us. Once they get more comfortable there could be a radical increase in development velocity.
That’s awesome to hear, man! Thank you for creating this project, and for your efforts in making the Fediverse even better! ^^
Heya Rimu; thanks for commenting on this discussion. We’ve been tracking on piefed for a while, but as you noted it doesn’t yet seem ready. Your software contributions and efforts for the Fediverse community are certainly notable however. I can’t speak for the rest of the Admin team, but I like what I see with piefed code, actual open source development community, and a roadmap. There are a few issues in addition to the ‘large crowd’ that Beehaw might bring though, which I’d rather not blast in public. Please reach out to me on Matrix (Handle in PF).
Once again, thank you! Love what you’re doing for safety and moderation tooling. Would love to help contribute, but have my hands in a lot of cookie jars ATM.
EDIT: Those shortcuts better be VIM shortcuts… I mean, it’s only six key combinations to quit right??
There’s also Piefed (Federates with Lemmy and is sympathetic to Beehaw, created with Python and Flask), and Sublinks (Drop-in replacement for Lemmy created with Java).
Also, I would personally be a little wary of choosing Kbin, as the developer’s behavior over the past few months has been concerning. Mbin would likely be the better option between the two, but that’s just my 2 cents.
Also, I would personally be a little wary of choosing Kbin, as the developer’s behavior over the past few months has been concerning. Mbin would likely be the better option between the two, but that’s just my 2 cents.
I don’t want to be too negative here, and to any mods that read this, if this is too negative, feel free to remove this post. But in the time that I’ve been a Kbin user, this is what I’ve personally witnessed.
The Kbin developer has a tendency to disappear with no communication for months at a time, likely caused by taking on way more load than one person can handle without burning out (He is virtually the only developer of Kbin, is taking on developing the Kbin mobile app, is the only admin of the largest Kbin instance, Kbin.social, and the only moderator of multiple communities there, which have languished in his absence, as seen in the posts on m/Kbin and m/Kbin Meta).
He appears to have an extreme lack of trust in others, wanting instead to take on all responsibility himself. This becomes an issue when he disappears, since he is the only one with merge privileges on the Kbin github, resulting in many PR’s for hotly requested features languishing until he suddenly reappears, having been silently working on some aspect of the backend without informing anyone else, making collaboration difficult.
That difficulty appears to be why Kbin was forked into Mbin.
As an example of the trust issues: Even though the Kbin community has repeatedly asked to be able to help him manage Kbin.social, either as an admin or putting in requests to moderate his communities filled to the brim with spam, nothing has changed, and it’s been business as usual.
Before his most recent absence, he mentioned he was going in for a minor surgery that would leave him laid up for a couple days, then went radio silent for over a month, leading people to fear the worst. When he reappeared recently, his explanation for why he didn’t post a quick “Hey guys, I’m okay, but won’t be around for X time,” was that he didn’t want to “Cause chaos.” 🫤
Running an instance myself, the lack of mod-tools is very frustrating for quite some time now. I totally agree with pretty much all improvements beehaw suggested in the past to solve these issues. It’s a shame how this topic is handled…
The problem with this, in my opinion, is Lemmy is written in Rust. From what I can tell, there aren’t enough Rust developers to pitch in AND there are better languages to use in a web application.
I concur; the best language is the one you know to get the task done. That said, Excel VBA isn’t the correct language to use to write a Super Mario Bros Clone. I mean you can, but that doesn’t make it the best language to do so.
In this case, the problem absolutely is that Lemmy is written in Rust. The developers constantlystate there are only two devs for 40k+ people. IF Lemmy was written in another programing language, regardless of using the ‘best’ one, there would likely be more able and willing development contributions. Then again with an attitude like this regardless of chosen programming language; I doubt it.
there would likely be more able and willing development contributions
As I said in the linked comment above, I’m not convinced that this is actually true and we’ve yet to see evidence that it is true.
the problem absolutely is that Lemmy is written in Rust … Then again with an attitude like this regardless of chosen programming language …
I mean, didn’t you just say it there? The problem isn’t with Rust, the problem is with people, the resources available, the devs willingness to implement what you ask for and such. The problem sounds to me more social than technical. I really don’t think the programming language is what is standing in the way here 😅
I think the definition of best programming language here is not popular and hyped but “the one I use”. I really believe Java is worse than Rust for contributors. We’ll see how it goes.
JS only has “Java” in the name, other than that they’re pretty different languages (basically: JS is a clusterfuck, Java is a “get paid by the line” hyper-explicit enterprisey invention with deployment horror stories).
The best language is subjective, but performance-wise most traditional web-oriented languages are dogshit slow and will incur huge costs both in hosting and performance mitigations. Things like rust, go, or C will ensure long term performance.
I wouldn’t recommend C or C++, even the NSA is asking people to stop using them in favor of memory safe languages. The equivalent in performance, is Rust.
traditional web-oriented languages are dogshit slow and will incur huge costs both in hosting and performance mitigations
Also, for volunteer-run websites like Lemmy sites, costs are very important as hosting costs is essentially the whole cost, since the volunteers aren’t paid.
For companies who pay devs a salary, the hosting is negligible compared to the engineer salary so it’s more efficient to just scale up and spend less time optimizing.
An option is to add a plugin system or API that allows integrating mod/filter tools written in other languages.
Email systems already do something like this. Postfix and others support milters (mail filters) which run as a separate process and communicate via a socket.
So I’ve been working on a personal project link aggregator/forum that incorporates a lot of ‘useful features’. It’s not something that is prime time ready yet, but one of the key killer features I want to get operational before showcasing it, is exactly what you say. A method to allow plugins to be created an ran by admins and maybe mods. There is a lot that needs to go into the security of this though, and so it’s not just a here run some code type of situation for users.
Mod tools are sorely needed on this platform, but I also don’t want to be dictating how users of my software must use it. That is, what I may think are problems certainly may be, but how to solve it won’t be the only way I say it should be. To that note, my plugin system (WIP) is a toss up between Lua scripts in a sandbox for mod programs/automodding, or the more basic expr language for Go.
So right now for Lemmy or other alternatives I’ve aware of, this capability does not exist. For my project in this space, I don’t want just another Lemmy. I want a BETTER Beehaw.
Probably not. There are several alternative projects being worked on with varying states of completeness and refinement. But the alternatives all seem to have off set visions for their projects.
It’s honestly pretty frustrating to see the Lemmy Devs’ responses whenever basic moderation tools are suggested.
While I think Beehaw does get a lot out of the wider federated community, it’s really hard to make the case to stay when the devs are practically begging Beehaw to leave.
It sounds like (if I understood correctly) Beehaw is looking at an alternative platform that can still federate, which sounds like the best solution in my opinion.
It will certainly be very interesting to see what the future holds for Beehaw.
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