Thinking about the direction of Beehaw

Over the years I’ve been trying to encapsulate, as simply as possible, what Beehaw interactions would look like ideally.

I kept coming back to all of my personal memories having holiday meals (Thanksgiving and Christmas for example) with very close family and friends.

Thinking back through decades of these meetings, I cannot remember anything but everyone being kind and charitable in action as well as speech.

Many pages of very thoughtful and reasonable philosophic explanations have been written, on our sidebar, about the behavioral expectations of Beehaw.

Let’s go back to the holiday meals for a moment and imagine having an open invitation for anyone to join. What do you think the outcomes would be?

This is the problem that our endeavor is experiencing. The open nature of ActivityPub (allowing anyone to join our table) is defeating our purpose.

The administrators, moderators and community members have been thinking about this for several months.

I, personally, believe that we all will come to a comfortable consensus moving forward.

Kwakigra,

Is it possible to have some communities be exclusive to Beehaw users? I’m not advocating for cutting off the existing communities, rather adding in a few walled gardens? That would filter out anyone who doesn’t want to bother explaining why they value what Beehaw is and include anyone curious enough to create a Beehaw profile to see what the less active but more Beehaw communities are like. Something like “The safest space” which is going to respectively attract and deter the people you would want.

As for having to deal with what y’all deal with at all, which the above would do nothing to diminish, I have thought for a while that y’all need more help. You guys are doing a ton of work and in my opinion a little too much work each. I don’t want y’all to get burned out and not be able to continue at all. Maybe an appeal to the community that y’all can’t continue like this without more help would encourage those with the ability to lighten the load?

admin,
@admin@beehaw.org avatar

Is it possible to have some communities be exclusive to Beehaw users?

I’m, fairly, certain the answer is no.

In response to your second paragraph, we are better than holding our heads above water. We have been planning/discussing solutions for months…we will come up with a way out of this predicament…it’s only temporary.

Caliper,

The behavioral expectations of Beehaw are a lot like those of tildes.net, where I’m also a member. Although I thoroughly enjoy the conversations there, I also long for other types of content, content available in the fediverse. And Beehaw is, for me, the perfect place to access that content. Beehaw has a great community that generates good content and conversations, but it also allows me to browse other stuff from ‘all’ and interact with different people. I enjoy reading what other people think, even if they have a way of communicating that doesn’t jive all that well with the rest of Beehaw.

What I can imagine is that moderating Beehaw within the context of the fediverse is a pain in the ass. The burden on the admin and moderator team must be a lot bigger than if Beehaw was on its own.

zauberin,

I don’t use Lemmy so much anymore, I settled on mastodon after everything (it just had a much more mature ecosystem imo) but I still come back to beehaw to lurk because of the community. I think that moving to another app is the way, anyone with an account here likely has another anyways if they like federation since the biggest instances are defederated from here (blahaj was for me). Best wishes for the mods, and I’ll probably still be here after whatever happens even if I’m not interacting a lot.

MiddledAgedGuy,

Running with your holiday meal analogy, it warrants adding that while we can’t stop people from coming to the table, we are able to make them leave.

Of course the onus to this would be on the hosts of the meal, or in this case the admins and mods of Beehaw. I’m sure that’s a difficult, unpleasant, and often thankless task.

admin,
@admin@beehaw.org avatar

I’m sure that’s a difficult, unpleasant, and often thankless task.

It is!

Flax_vert,

Beehaw would die if you defederated it. Don’t do it. Beehaw also makes the fediverse a nicer place.

IcyPenguin,

Personally I think Beehaw needs other instances and the Fediverse needs Beehaw

JackGreenEarth,

Beehaw needs other instances much more than the fediverse needs Beehaw.

IcyPenguin,

Agreed

retronautickz,

I would prefer if Beehaw remained federated, but, as it is, I understand that the options of software for a platform like Beehaw on the fediverse are lacking on many aspect and started something new requires time,knowledge, and money.

jay2,

I think that ‘Star Trek - The Next Generation’ covered this very dilemma with (S2E18) Up The Long Ladder. In one hand you have stagnancy and in the other pure chaos. I don’t envy you for having to tackle issues like this because there is no perfect solution, but I would encourage you to find a balance. Balance is a prerequisite to longevity.

You would not have enjoyed holiday dinners at my house. While my parents were good people, you can’t pick your relatives. We had the infamous Uncle Tom and Aunt Janet, who would swallow anything and everything you had in the bathroom medicine cabinet, even if it landed them in the emergency room later. And Grandma, a devout catholic that spent every Sunday at church learning how to love thy neighbor, who would go on long cuss ridden tirades insulting and slurring on minorities. And then there was Uncle Pete, who was thrown out of Bob Evans on Easter Sunday for announcing to the entire dining room that ‘He could puke better than this sausage gravy’. I do actually miss Uncle Pete. He did have a hell of a way of getting his point across, and that sausage gravy was totally bunk.

While thinking about it all still raises my blood pressure even 40 years later, those moments brought their behaviors from my subconscious to my conscious where I could take notice of it. It did empower me to actively NOT be like that. I saw first-hand several of my future potential selves and chose to take a higher road. I find a bit of comfort in that. I wonder if I wasn’t exposed to those behaviors from a third person perspective, would I have been able to avoid them.

Oh, and sorry about dropping that bomb the other day. I was in a rare mood. I removed it as you rightfully requested of me. In my defense, I used the word appropriately, but I totally understand.

You seem like a decent enough fellow. Best of luck.

Smoke,

I think that ‘Star Trek - The Next Generation’ covered this very dilemma with (S2E18) Up The Long Ladder. …The one where the crew execute the clones that Planet A were making of them to make up for their lack of genetic diversity, and forced them to marry into Planet Ireland instead?

derbis,

I, personally, believe that we all will come to a comfortable consensus moving forward

This is a somewhat uncomfortable ellipsis for me. Can you be more specific about the emerging consensus? Last time I asked this question it went ignored.

Where are these discussions happening? On the beehaw Lemmy or elsewhere?

I only saw one thread alluding to this posted by a beehaw admin on Lemmy.ml.

admin,
@admin@beehaw.org avatar

Where are these discussions happening?

They’ve happened here a couple of times on Beehaw. I suspect that there will be more of these discussions, here at Beehaw, in the future.

Penguincoder,

Where are these discussions happening? On the beehaw Lemmy or elsewhere?

survivalmachine,

Has anybody had a conversation about implementing non-federated communities or is that even a possibility with activitypub? I would love to have native beehaw communities that are only accessible by logged-in beehaw users, but still retain federation for some of my more niche communities that may not have a large enough audience here.

Although I could very easily just maintain my old account on a fediverse server alongside my beehaw account if beehaw ventures off into an entirely new direction.

When I read about the beehaw vision a few days ago, I fell in love, so I’m here for whatever y’all decide.

derbis,

This seems ideal to me. Does Lemmy not support this setup?

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

there are and have been conversations around the fediverse about this very same concept or need. See, eg, a cousin comment in this thread on the same idea: lemmy.ml/comment/7026804

And the short answer is no … the fediverse basically sucks at providing such a thing … so enamoured is it with federation that localised communities are obviously a bit of an afterthought. Thing is people actually want and need more private or local spaces as well as the big public spaces. Its why all the old school forums are still kicking.

And the worst part is that federation offers a great opportunity to provide both in a really useful and seamless manner on a single platform. But neither lemmy nor mastodon have a feature for it (with mastodon lead dev actively opposing the idea it seems).

I have to believe it would be easy for lemmy to implement.

As a contrast, misskey and its forks such as firefish, catodon, iceshrimp etc (and yea, these names are a choice, in a good way I think), actually provide local only groups and people like them.

johnjamesautobahn,

I’m new to the fediverse and chose to join Beehaw because the community interactions feel positive like an active private forum that I’m on, but with the structural flexibility of a federated platform.

There is definitely a tone change between local communities and the outside federated feed, but I worry that secession and isolation will lead to community atrophy— it’s already a small instance and without the cross-pollination of outside users and content it may not have enough momentum to succeed

interolivary,
@interolivary@beehaw.org avatar

I don’t think the goal of Beehaw is momentum or growth, or at least that’s the way it’s seemed to me

Reil,

Without substantial growth after being cut off from the activity of the fediverse, Beehaw would not be large enough to stave off serious atrophy. The lemmy/kbin end of the fediverse is already very slow to begin with.

interolivary,
@interolivary@beehaw.org avatar

Beehaw was around much before the current “population explosion” of the Fediverse, though, and by all accounts was doing just fine. Naturally it didn’t have as much content as it currently does, but the sort of reddit-esque content flood that some people seem to need really isn’t a requisite for sites to thrive.

I’m on a small lemmy/reddit -like content aggregator / forum that has maybe a few hundred users, and while it’s certainly quiet compared to Lemmy nowadays, it’s got a small active community and nobody feels like it would need more “volume” to be a nice place to be.

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yea for sure …

I’ve said it a few times in similar conversations before … the big-corp mega social media era (~2008-2023, Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Instagram) has had huge cultural effects on the internet that go way beyond whether you’re on one of the platforms or not and which will ripple into the future for a long while.

We’d all do well to consider what parts of that culture we carry in our expectations and behaviours … and the whole doom-scrolling through an all-encompassing feed as a form of entertainment expectation is a big one. Social media always needs to be a big place … is another one.

These aren’t all necessarily evil … but as universal expectations they certainly aren’t good either, IMO.

jarfil,

I think the worry is less about growth, and more about dying out. Too much external input can drown out the local conversation, but also too little external input can put too much pressure on the members to generate content, leading to burnout and also killing conversations.

It’s a precarious balance between “so much that it gets out of control” and “so little that there is nothing left out”.

interolivary,
@interolivary@beehaw.org avatar

See my other comment on this thread, I think it applies to your comment too

Pratai,

Walled gardens don’t have a long life expectancy, so… do whatever you’d like in what little time you have, I’d say. Not trying to stir a pot- just speaking from a purely observational perspective.

millie,

I think that if we defederated, Lemmy would be much worse off for it. I think we’d also be a lot slower, and I’d be checking it a lot less.

Beehaw brings something to Lemmy that Lemmy really needs. It’s leftist, but it’s also very compassion-focused, and we kind of lack that elsewhere. The rest of the otherwise kind of similar communities largely lack the spirit of getting along in good faith that I see here.

Like, what other community do you ever see people responding to hostility by reminding people where they are and it actually mattering? People seem to largely respect the space. Not to say it doesn’t ever have a need for moderation, it clearly does and y’all do a great job, but with that moderation it manages to be an exemplary space.

It would be a shame for Lemmy to lose that positive influence and that good example. And it would leave the more lefty-leaning options kind of… meh.

But it also really helps to bulk out the experience of using Beehaw. We don’t get that many posts, so it’s nice to be able to go to subscribed or all instead of just local. It’d definitely be a bummer to lose that.

Anyway, I think you’re much closer to your goal than you might see while you’re on the moderating and administrating end. You see all the nasty stuff up close, but we get to see the result. And compared to the rest of the internet, it’s an oasis.

bermuda,

When the idea of beehaw leaving the fediverse comes up I see a few users from outside of beehaw get pretty upset about it. I wonder if this is some kind of FOMO reaction? Just food for thought.

sonori, (edited )
@sonori@beehaw.org avatar

I do hope we stay federated, while I get that moderation is a pain for you Admins and better tools need to be developed, I think you all have been doing a very good job. Nearly all my interactions with the wider fedeverse we interact with have been positive or neutral, and I think it would be rather dead and boring here if it was just us. It’s nice to have diverse subscription feed where I can find posts on more than just the few communities here, especially slrpnk, Bajhaj, lemmy.ca, and midwest.social

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