The Beehaw project is entering some significant challenges

If this is an issue with people spinning up malicious instances. Could you switch to a whitelist of federated instances? Beehaw feels like the heart of lemmy and it would be a shame to see it go.

Thanks for the heads up. Short answer for me is that I joined for a civil place on the Threadiverse not a walled garden. So if you guys leave the Threadiverse I will have to find a new home.

So I think you all will need to decide where to take this community. I will understand whatever you all decide. Just please communicate it clearly when the time comes.

Thanks for all of the hard work you all have done and are doing.

I would just like to throw my voice out there as a mod on the instance.

I truly love beehaw, and will likely stay if this move happened. Beehaw was an amazing place to find after everything happened with reddit. And I love participating here and really like the community I've found here

All that being said. I would be extremely saddened and disappointed if beehaw decided to leave the fediverse. I am fully aware of how some off instance users can behave. It is definitely a problem, especially in some more vulnerable communities. However I also feel like the ability to federate has brought some life to the platform that would be sorely missed.

I would very much hope a white list would be considered before leaving the fediverse entirely.

Ultimately, I know this is not my project. And I have no decision making powers, but I think lemmy would be a much worse place without beehaw. I hope this decision does not come to pass, personally

Specifically, we chose Lemmy as the software that we would use to launch our endeavor to attempt a safe space for marginalized persons online.

As a relatively non-marginalized person, I think it's important to focus on this. Beehaw has grown beyond the marginalized group. If Beehaw were to leave Lemmy, the non-marginalized would be fine and can switch to different instances. The marginalized would follow Beehaw for that safe space.

It comes down to the purpose of a safe space. There's the group of people that want to avoid bigots, and there's the group that want to be a light unto the world, to effect change.

An example of a little bit of positive Beehaw has had outside of their community would be the influence it has had on me. I've read posts from the LGBT+ community that enlightened me to things I've never thought about. But I'm also not a bigot, just naive.

The negative is what has prompted these discussions: the bigoted trolls. It's just not sustainable for the small Beehaw team to moderate everything.

My view is that it's of utmost importance to maintain the safe space for the marginalized. Of those marginalized who want to connect outside the safe space, they are free to engage in Lemmy/Reddit and spread their light.

What would I do? I would find a new instance and continue to be receptive to LBGT+ discussions that come up on Lemmy. I don't feel right asking Beehaw to stay on Lemmy at the cost of keeping marginalized people safe from bigots. They deserve to be able to talk about things without having bigots come at them; to be able to laugh and cry and vent and have others understand—especially with the US Right becoming more brazen in their persecution of this community.

Just my 2 cents.

Hey all,

Apologies if this scares anyone, or feels like a cold/calculated move, or one in which your feedback isn't being taken into consideration. That was not the intent. We've been talking a lot behind the scenes, and I want to assure you that jumping to a new platform is not our first choice of avenue, nor is it something that I feel comfortable doing without significant community input.

I've been swamped with a lot of real life stuff lately and so I haven't gotten a chance to write up what's been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while now, which is the start to a conversation about some of the issues we've been struggling with. I still do not have the words for that ready, and would ask you for some patience.

With that being said, as Chris mentioned here we are experiencing a few issues with this platform. More information about these issues will be forthcoming soon. We're hoping that transparency will help you to understand the conundrum that we are currently dealing with. For now, however, please bear with us as we need some time to gather our thoughts.

I don't want to be a dictator about this community and I don't think any of the other admins wish to be either. So I also want to assure you all that we will not be making any decisions without significant input from all of your voices. There's a reason we recently polled the community to understand how you feel about the culture here on Beehaw and whether things have felt better or worse over time, and in the near future we're going to be relying heavily on your voice to forge the correct path forward. Beehaw is a community, and we greatly value your voices.

I think isolating is not a good move. I think many people on Lemmy are here to get away from centralization.

I stopped using beehaw about a month ago as too many servers were defederated.

I know beehaw has a great community, but being closed off is not appealing to me and I imagine it’s not appealing to many others as well.

Sorry to say I won't be following if you leave the Fediverse

I really hope this doesn't sound extreme (especially since I'm technically a Kbin.social user) but I'm really only interested in Beehaw as part the larger Fediverse. If Beehaw leaves the Fediverse it'll just be another tiny Reddit/Lemmy clone, but without the strengths of either platform, and I truly believe that it won't be long until Beehaw goes the way of the traditional web forum.

I think there is a lot of value (to the community, at least) in Beehaw being a safe and friendly place within the broader Fediverse. The more strictly/seriously you all take that goal, the more moderation is required to achieve it, of course.

In the end, I think that it's probably a lot of work to "clean up" the Fediverse, so I can understand why it may seem easier to just leave. But I also think that it's possible that you've lost a sense of perspective with regards to the positive aspects of federation that made Beehaw appealing in the first place. At the risk of making a bad/cheesy analogy, we've seen examples in history of countries trying to isolate themselves from the rest of the world in order to simplify things or preserve their own ways of living/thinking, and it really doesn't work or benefit them in the long run.

The internet was founded on the basic premise of connecting people, even though we've all seen that doing so brings about various challenges and some potential for conflict. The fediverse brings us back towards a truly open and connected internet, and in my onion that's where technologies like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., derive a lot of their charm and utility. As someone who has dabbled in this stuff for years, I can say that Lemmy was not very useful to me when it was just a handful of small echo chambers, Beehaw was the first "threadiverse" server I joined because I really felt that it was offering something new, different, and much-needed to the ecosystem, and I'll be more than a little bit disappointed if you all decide to leave.

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If the goal of beehaw is that the user base remain ever small, then by all means jump ship and move on, I can respect that and I wish you all the best. However unless your good faith "rockstars" are planning on building you a platform, you will likely find out that the grass is not always greener on the other side, and that migrations bring additional tensions and work.

May I suggest pinning this for more visibility?

Whatever the decision is, it’s important that everyone knows what’s going on. Whatever the outcome, I’ll stay/move to wherever Beehaw resides. I enjoy the space and vibe that’s created here.

As a Reddit App-ocalypse refugee, I'm not going back to a centralized forum, much less without an app. Even Lemmy's level of "hub-"alization is somewhat unnerving, but Beehaw has been a good compromise between moderation, federation, and app accessibility.

I would rather you could work out the kinks of the platform, instead of switching to another. I think Beehaw is highly positive for the Lemmy space, and that it would be best for everyone if the platform could be adapted to include meeting Beehaw's needs.

Losing Beehaw would definitely hurt Lemmy. This was not my first home on Lemmy, but I quickly saw that all of the good communities seemed to belong to this place.

However, I would probably never have found this place if you weren't federated. I would naively assume others are in the same boat as me.

I did initially come to Lemmy only as an alternative to reddit, but I've stayed because of the ActivityPub protocol. I'd probably not stay active on Beehaw on another protocol, and I'd definitely still keep a Lemmy account on another instance.

I do understand your concerns, and what you wish to achieve. Personally I would have just hoped you tried to achieve it here for longer. Though I do get the struggles with moderation.

Whatever you decide I wish the best for this community in the long term! I hope that regardless of it staying here, or moving elsewhere, it thrives and keeps the content and discussions that its members would like to have.

Is finding a new sysadmin an impossible task?

I'd hate to see y'all go but the growing pains are quite obvious and I would understand the departure. Lemmy has become the only social media platform that I use and I'll be sticking around here for time being.

Selfishly, I would like to see beehaw remain on the fediverse. I enjoy the community, the curation, and desire for strong moderation. It is a great window to the broader fediverse link aggregator community. Beehaw's ideals and structure clearly appealed to many Redditors and the like. The concept of federated communities seemed appealing, and beehaw is an important voice in the evolution of the moderation of a federated network.

However, the sacrifice that the admins have had to put into making the platform survive while the software finds its uncertain way through a mountain of growing pains seems unsustainable (just my pov through the last 3 months) - not just on the technical side. There's that saying - when you find yourself in a hole, quit digging. It's hard to see how moving from Lemmy to something more sustainable, if it exists, would be the wrong move.

Painful decisions rarely come with a flashing light that scream "now's the time" - but the loss of your major technical contributors sounds stunningly close.

Edit> fixed a typo or two

I don't have much of a stake in this but isolation is probably not the way forward.

I think everything laid out here is perfectly reasonable. Lemmy hasn't made it easy and easy doesnt seem to be on the horizon for that development team.

My personal thoughts is that I don't think that the currrent implementation of lemmy is going to reach a point where the capabilities of the platform is going to meet the requirements of the beehaw project. Definitely not in the near term, and low probability in the scale of years.

If the worse comes about ill probably follow along to where ever beehaw ends up and ill just set up an lemmy acc elsewhere.

I don't envy the situation

// the commenter gives yet another unsolicited solution

I think it would be interesting if yall and other like minded instance admins were to start a federation pact/ code of conduct which would layout the requirements for federation. In my opinion, fostering the kind of online community that beehaw strives to be (as I see it anyways), requires acting outside of the capabilities of the lemmy the platform. Granted, this would require a critical mass of instances willing to sign to such a pact but this may ease the workload from a moderation point of view.

If there's not going to be federation via activitypub I will not continue to use beehaw at all, so, this was very unfortunate to read.

If there is no ActivityPub integration, may as well kill the project right there.

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Just unticking the federation option would allow for a lot more direct control in itself. Pethaps more of a discussion of what the challenges of losing a couple technical resources are could help bring out some solutions. Maintaining an instance at a base level is pretty easy, performance is another matter perhaps.

I've seen this suggested a few times throughout this thread, so I'll just add my support for considering defederating instances that don't follow similar behavioural expectations to Beehaw. The best thing about Beehaw, and what drew me here rather than any other instance, was the Be(e) nice rules, and the fact that it's a safe place to be myself.

While I do think the majority of users from other instances are good people who are fine with following Beehaw's rules when they're visiting this space, the fact that Lemmy as a platform doesn't have adequate moderation tools for dealing with bad actors (as I understand it, the issue is that you can't block specific users from Beehaw, which means you're continuously chasing down bad actors' individual comments?) means it comes down to a question of what's more important: being federated with other instances, regardless of whether their values align with Beehaw's; or being more protective of the vibes of this space, even though it means becoming a more isolated space.

Coming from the perspective of someone who's part of a marginalised community, I favour the latter. There are lots of big, hostile spaces out there, where bigots can run free and say whatever they like without consequences. There's a lot fewer spaces that require everyone to treat others with respect. Defederate with the instances that don't share our values, with a view to being open to re-federating with them at a later date when Lemmy's moderation tools eventually catch up.

Edited for typos.

Beehaw is a big part of the fediverse. May I suggest you have a look at fediseer? It's the principle of public private key cryptography applied to lemmy whitelists. I can help you set it up - just reach out!

Beehaw will go back to being a very small platform if you move away from the fediverse

As a kbin.social user, we would all be diminished if Beehaw were to defederate. If I were to ever move instances from a kbin to a lemmy platform, it would be over to you guys. I hope that you guys are able to find the help you need to keep going as part of the wider fediverse.

Beehaw is wonderful and I will follow wherever it ends up. I have another lemmy account, and accounts on other sites for when I'm looking for memes and nonsense.

All that being said, Lemmy (the software that Beehaw runs on) development is incredibly slow and is riddled with problems

The developers of Lemmy have been running it on the Internet for over 4.5 years, but they only had a few thousands posts in 4 years... it lacks moderation (and spam) tools and it drops and alters data silently that shows they really don't use it or focus on the data.

kbin is newer, but it is only now starting to have an API - so Lemmy has attracted all the app developers because of API - and kbin also struggles with moderation and spam.

we may want to consider leaving the Fediverse for another software platform that does NOT include ActivityPub.

I can entirely understand that. Reinventing the wheel of basic forum features ties up a lot of kbin and lemmy development - and federation is the wild west. People can participate in your forum without having the context or understanding, or worse, to do attacks at an entire server to server level - manipulating votes and having wildly different policies.

Thank you for sharing your thinking.

Locking this post for now because it's quickly going off the rails. We will have more for you soon. Please be patient.

1. Do what must be done, anyone who wants both the beehaw experience and the lemmy experience can handle two accounts
2. Please pin this post, so people know what's being discussed

Would be cool if Beehaw switched to old school forums, like Invision or phpBB. Invision have now moved to a hosted forum model, so you don't need any technical knowledge to set it up.

FWIW, I'm appreciating the space for what it is and don't see the immediate benefits of federation. Hang in there.

Forgot my beehaw account password so commenting from an alt:

If you leave lemmy what exactly are you planning on doing with the $4,701.66 balance?

Per this post: https://beehaw.org/post/7563806

If there are moderation issues, wouldn’t it be easier to recruit more moderators?

The current number of moderators is small and I am sure a lot of people might want to step up to help.

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I'll follow if it's time to go. I understand. Thank you.

Thank you for being upfront and honest about the challenges you're facing. I'd like to also put my vote in for going whitelist only rather than moving off the fediverse altogether. However, I'm a big fan of beehaw and would likely follow a migration, but only if there's a good mobile experience on the new site.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think moderation grows exponentially with numbers of instances. A single comment may need moderation on each distinct instance. The more instances, the more moderation needs for that comment.

That seems unsustainable. I understand the conundrum.

Is a forum site a possibility? I honestly miss internet forums. It does kind of sound like what you're looking for beehaw to be.

Honestly, I wholeheartedly support this move. For a couple of (obviously subjective) reasons:

• Lemmy/kbin isn't ready. If Beehaw staff were able to fork their own version of the base code with their moderation etc. design preferences in mind, this would be another thing -- though even then it might not be enough to be worth it with the headache of fediverse moderation.

• Closed system/community is more personal, hence more productive and less noisy. At least before it outgrows itself.

What I'd hope but is also more work and potentially creates conflicts, is that the new platform provides good moderation logging etc. Which I think is key feature to ensure trust and self policing.

I'm not sure what it is really, but postmill exists. Another of my favourite post-reddit sites uses it; raddle.me.

It's a shame how much of Lemmy's recent downturn appears to stem from slow and misprioritized development. At this point significant instances are dropping like flies and users are leaving in droves. I do not have high hopes for the future of this platform.

Possibly something like LemmyBB could be an answer. Stay on Fediverse and get to isolate ( I think).

I can understand, but this would not be fun at first. I subscribe to a number of beehaw communities because they are the the biggest in their niche like technology. The beehaw communities are often even bigger than the same communities on instances like lemmy.ml.

Makes sense. Beehaw was always its own community first, federation seemed to be some extra stuff on top of that. Staying on lemmy with less federation or even a few forum software makes sense for the goals of the project.

You’d lose the people who wanted different, but I don’t think being a major social hub for everybody was ever the intent.

Every single part of Beehaw seems ill-suited to the fediverse. I joined (like many) after Reddit shit the bed by banning 3rd-party apps. I wrote a thoughtful (mandatory) application essay and... silence. Never heard back. Later, I reacted to a particularly bad take in a Beehaw thread and was told that I wasn't "being nice" like the rules required... Bitch, I'm not even a part of the your "community"! You chose to federate with the rest of us! I guess what I'm trying to say is byeeeeeeeee! Go start your own little puritan community somewhere I don't have to encounter it...

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Wherever it leads I'll follow !

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I'm a big proponent of federation and the Lemmyverse. While it would be sad for me to see Beehaw leave ActivityPub, I've always said that the admin team should do what they think is best for themselves and Beehaw and I will respect such decisions.

I probably wouldn't make a new account on another service because that would require a new app on my phone, but I'm OK with that if the idea of Beehaw prospers in another space.

@PenguinCoder @admin If I may suggest something on Lemmy as a stopgap measure, Beehaw can enlist the help of one of the AutoMod programs of Lemmy, so that any comment not on an approved user or instance list are removed on the specific "safe-space" communities. It might take some testing/tinkering but this may give you some of the granularity in moderation that has been requested.

Which features would you need to continue staying federated, possibly limited to white-listed instances?

I understand some of the negative reception to this, especially from users of other instances, but I also understand the reasoning here.

Don't know if ditching ActivityPub entirely is a great idea, but I do get why. Perhaps a whitelist on another ActivityPub service would be a better option, although I'm struggling to think of any (other than kbin) which exist in this kind of form.

So, my only curiosity is which alternative platforms?

There aren't many in this particular form (social news/link aggregation), as far as I'm aware. Most others are traditional forums, microblogging, and general social networks.

And moving to something new, potentially in alpha/beta, with an equally or just as small dev team may end up just being a horizontal jump out of the frying pan and into the fire, with eventually similar issues when it comes to tools and capabilities of the platform.

Basically, are we looking at something new entirely in terms of UX or something familiar? And are we looking at something centralized or using some other federated service?

Just a few thoughts.

• Is there a way to configure lemmy to have some private Beehaw only communities and some public ones too. Maybe this is some code changes, but one would not think that this would be crazy hard. Might need to have some user preference settings too about restricting what us in the site feed too.

• Would there be a way of running two instances. One federated and one not or the one not only federated with beehaw.

• How serious is the adim time issue and the skills gap issue. Maybe worth thinking about what your issues are and what would need to happen to fill them. More people, hiring things out, etc.

• I agree too, you guys have to decide personnally your priorities. Not having clear personal limits can eat you up. So do that as well.

Serious question; would it help if some of us left beehaw? I'm part of that influx and i first joined lemmy.world. Then i understood that it would be better to spread out among other instances and i created a few more accounts, one of them here on beehaw, because i really like the spirit of it. But if it would help, i would be willing to leave beehaw to help you cope with the load. If enough people would feel the same, it might lighten the load? Another option might be to close the instance for new people, until these issues are solved? I'm sure people would understand the reasoning for doing so?

If you would leave the fediverse, i would not follow. I'm not that big on social media anyway, the fediverse being the only exception.

Reason #7639843 why federation simply doesn't work

Well, that's kinda sad.

Sign of federated-not-Reddit-thingle carking it? Maybe. Sign that it's about time for myself to give up and leave? Maybe.

I blame everyone. Boo, us! scowls scoldingly at all, including itself

Maybe I am the weird one, but I always saw this "federation" as weird. It seems like a halfbaked idea. I don't think much is lost. Only downside is user count might be small

I like what Beehaw is, and I fully support whatever decision is made in the best interests of this community.

The idea of defederating, for me personally, feels too limiting. But even if Beehaw goes this route, I think I'll stick around and try it out. Either it'll be fine or it won't. And if not, no hard feelings!

I would be fine with this. If I want to continue to engage with lemmy instances I am free to do so. I can also follow beehaw, as beehaw is legit the only space online that feels safe from some of the types of people that are posting in this thread. It's wild to me the amount of people that revel in being rude, thoughtless, and reactionary. If keeping this space safe means relocating, I think it is the right call.