Beehaw Support

Indeed. I enjoyed the asklemmy community over there, but lately there have been some "questions" posted that clearly have an agenda. Basically begging the question. I'm not saying I'm some free-market, anti-regulation libertarian. Far from it. But like you said, not every post has to be about that, and that we can discuss other things other than the downfall of capitalism. So I unsubscribed from that community, and even considered leaving Lemmy altogether since I feel like those types of posts/comments are so pervasive lately.

Yes capitalism is failing us but their belief that forcing everyone into their "ism" will lead to utopia is a disingenuous lie.

Same, once I blocked it and hexbear lemmy went back to being a better version of reddit again. Substantially less shitpost and bad faith baiting.

I wouldn't be surprised. The CCP is keen on building a ChatGPT style LLM on its own. Their traditional SNS is WeChat, which was a WhatsApp alternative, and thus was not as powerful as Reddit.

They are investing in Reddit alternatives I read, and they want these SNSes to be pro-CCP because that's how they'd enforce their LLM to be pro-CCP. .ml and the Lemmy code project itself would be a perfect example.

Thank you.

Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

unless we're compelled to, it is exceedingly unlikely we will upgrade. we are fully committed to moving off the platform so it just makes no sense to prioritize Lemmy updates.

with respect to refederation: we already polled that with both SJW and LW months ago and were given a very definitive no, do not refederate from our userbase. only 11% and 17% of our users were in favor of refederation respectively, and majorities were fine with continued defederation from both. our defederation policy was also strongly supported. (i believe this is the first time these numbers have been posted because they were so definitively in favor of the status quo.)

At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.

we're not and have never been in this for numbers so this is immaterial to us--we've been quite public that we'd be fine having a community of a few dozen people, because that's what we were before the Reddit fiasco. in any case: please understand that we are not responsible for the health of the Lemmy ecosystem. and even if we were (which we reject categorically) we have definitively been told to leave the platform because of our disagreements with the Lemmy developers. bettering this platform is no longer a priority for us in any way--and it is the general opinion of the team that we wasted a lot of time prioritizing that given the developer antipathy toward us. you can read more on that here if you'd like.

Here is my view/reaction as a Beehaw user. I am not an admin or mod, just a regular user. I don't want this to seem like an attack, but know ahead of time that I disagree with a lot of what you said.

Nearly a year later, it’s obvious that the decisions of beehaw admins during that critical period of time when redditors were first trying Lemmy were highly disruptive towards the development of the platform as a whole.

How so? It is not obvious to me, and some examples would be great.

The first level of disruption came from the direct fragmentation of communities caused by that defederation decision.

As a personal opinion, the communities Beehaw defederated from are communities I don't want to interact with. This is not a net negative for me.

The second and more devastating impact was the impact on the perceptions of new users, who were given a manifestation of their worst fears about Lemmy and it’s federated structure. Many potential users were turned off Lemmy because they didn’t like the fact that they could suddenly be blocked off from major communities on other servers due to arbitrary admin decisions, and beehaw essentially provided the perfect example of that at a critical growth phase.

Do you have evidence of this? It is a pretty bold claim and if it is so impactful, there should be evidence. As side note, Beehaw's goals (from a user perspective mind you, I am not speaking for the admins or mods) are not exponential user growth, but quality community. If users are turned off by the fact Beehaw is pro defederation with communities that are a large source of trolls or hate (not saying SJW is one of those), then Beehaw isn't the right community anyhow.

With regard to lemmy.ml, I think the main issue is that beehaw has disabled downvotes. The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers.

I like the removal of the downvote. It makes for a more positive community, and because Beehaw has an active mod/admin team we don't tend to have issues that are not taken care of fairly quickly.

The tankies are significantly outnumbered on Lemmy as a whole and a combination of downvoting and active moderation from other admins effectively minimizes the problem for most other major servers.

To me, the issue is that this relies on a lot of other large communities to moderate users, and more often than not that is more difficult than it sounds for the good ones, or non-existent in the crappy ones. Especially with the Lemmy devs resistant to adding good moderation tools.

But because beehaw doesn’t allow downvotes, has dwindled to a small userbase, and has isolated itself from other non-extremist servers (SJW),

Again, Beehaw's focus is quality over quantity. Honestly this felt like it was meant to be an insult, but in the grand scheme of things doesn't have much relevance to me

you have been left much more exposed to the tankie propaganda, with your only recourse being the nuclear option of defederation.

Defederation is the most extreme, but if so much bad stuff is coming from a single source that is not properly moderated, it seems like the most logical to me. I think this goes back to a lack of moderation tools and poor moderation in other instances, not to Beehaw's relatively smaller user base or defederation from other instances.

Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works.

Does sh.itjust.works still have open sign ups? Then I don't think a mistake was made nor should the admins refederate.

I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

I am not privy to the inner workings of Beehaw, but I know they are focusing on moving to a new platform, so this seems like it would be a lot of wasted effort for the small team that is Beehaw.

I think that beehaw admins, not dissimilarly to hexbear admins, tend to disregard how their actions impact the fediverse as a whole and focus solely on the proximate impact on their own userbase.

This is a difference of philosophy (at least for Beehaw, hexbear is a different story/issue). Beehaw's focus on it's userbase is why I am here in the first place. The greater fediverse isn't my concern, and it is not the admins responsibility.

This is a faulty mindset, because the fediverse is the ecosystem which we all share, and that ecosystem needs to be protected and maintained in order for all of the different organisms (instances) residing therein to thrive. Without our connection to the fediverse, all of our instances would simply wither away.

I think when Beehaw moves platforms, things may change. Better tools might allow for a more open relationship. That being said, Lemmy has been hostile to Beehaw (when they tried to reach out the Lemmy devs to petition for better mod tools, they were told in no uncertain terms they were welcome to GTFO). I know Lemmy isn't the whole fediverse, but putting in a bunch of effort on a platform Beehaw is leaving seems silly.

Again, these are just my thoughts as a Beehaw user, but to me the issues you bring up are not issues for me at all, and in a lot of cases are actual boons.

My understanding is that a lot of the reasons for defederation stemmed from a fundamental lack of sufficient moderator tools. Tools that have not appeared and the lack of which has prompted Beehaw to consider moving to a different ActivityPub supporting platform in the fediverse.

You bring up good points. I can't say I ever truly understood why beehaw defederated from that particular instance. You think beehaw is going to die? I'm not sure most on here want it to get bigger. This isn't a commercial enterprise. But maybe the mods understand the intricacies of the SJW thing better than I do and will reconsider. Anyway, lemmy.ml sucks and is a problem, at the moment.

The tech subs often don't go political.

Occasionally there will be posts on Lemmy development goals and those are where Tankies write Tankies stuff.