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.

  • seathru@lemm.ee
    1·
    10 months ago

    I’ve always felt being on the fediverse was antithetical to Beehaw’s mission. It wants to bee a kind, safe place for disenfranchised users, but it feels like less of a tight knit community when it is federated.

    The best example I can think of is like a high-school club/group. Being on the fediverse is like your group claiming a table in a crowded lunch room. Yes you’ve got your group together where you can talk amongst yourselves, but everything you say can be heard by everyone else in the room and likewise their conversations are going to butt in whether you like it or not. An unfederated or semi-private forum is more like getting an unused classroom for your group to meet in. It’s still open for anyone to join as long as they don’t create trouble, but having your own room makes the conversation feel more personal/intimate and people are more likely to open up about personal stuff they wouldn’t want to yell out in the lunch room.

    Probably a poor analogy, and I may be misunderstanding their goal, but that’s my 2 cents.