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.

  • newtraditionalists@beehaw.org
    5·
    11 months ago

    I agree with this entirely, but I think the missing context is the mental health of our admins. Not to mention the sheer number of hours of unpaid labor they do, they are subjected to some heinous things. I don’t want them to sacrifice themselves for us. I will follow beehaw if they leave, I already have another lemmy account to see a wider scope of the fediverse, but beehaw is too special to abandon.

    • apotheotic (she/her)@beehaw.orgEnglish
      5·
      11 months ago

      I certainly agree that the beehaw admins shouldn’t be sacrificing themselves or their health in order to support the platform - if the continued federation of beehaw has that cost, then federation must be sacrificed first.

      However, I do think that there are other paths forward between “admins sacrifice themselves” and “beehaw is off the fedi” and I wanted to share my hopes and voice <3