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How would you feel if Beehaw left the Fediverse? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by suspended@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I am one of the admins of Beehaw and I'm trying to get some feedback on our potential move.

Let's start out with a little Beehaw history before judgements are passed, please.

A handful of us were beta testing Tildes when we decided to have discussions on a Discord server.

We decided that our 'Northern Star' or guiding principle would culminate as 'Be Nice' with purposefully vague/flexible interpretations. Our overall goal is to provide a safe space to disenfranchised persons.

We talked for a little over a year and some of our members became impatient. Then someone stepped in to suggest a couple of platforms that we could consider getting started with.

One of those platforms was Lemmy. None of us knew, at that time, anything about ActivityPub.

During the Reddit exodus (surrounding the API outcry and blackout), our instance exploded. We were, initially, crippled by the mass amounts of users seeking refuge.

Thankfully, someone stepped in and volunteered hundreds of hours of work to stabilize our instance and refine it further.

After many hours of talks, it became clear to us that our overall goal could be achieved outside of Lemmy/ActivityPub.

Right now, we feel that Lemmy and ActivityPub have downsides that are limiting us from achieving that goal.

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[–] Ashtear@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

I can't give feedback without specifics on what exactly you feel the downsides are of federating.

I will say this: in my six months on kbin and Lemmy, I have seen more assumption of good faith in interactions, and I do believe Beehaw's users has been a significant part of that. It would be a negative for the Fediverse if Beehaw defederated. That said, the users are of course under no obligation to provide the emotional labor to make those kinds of efforts.

If the reason is because your mods are saying they can't handle the workload, I get it. I think that's a 100% valid reason for defederating, whether or not it's temporary as Lemmy's moderation support matures. It's already a challenging assignment, even without a stricter ethos like Beehaw's in place. In general, there are a lot of new mods across Lemmy, and it's a significant vulnerability, in my opinion. The next big surge of users, whether from Reddit imploding again or something else like a major publication's story on Lemmy going viral, won't be about creating more buckets for users like it was this past summer. It will stress the buckets themselves, and some of the mods holding those communities together won't be ready for it.