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

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I agree that if your goal is to be centralized, heavily control what your users see, and only your team is capable of doing such a thing, then federation is not the solution.

However, as someone on the outside looking in, I doubt you would have the user base you do, or maintain it for very long if it were just an old-style centralized forum. It seems to me that those forums were simply not preferable to the level of content and connectivity offered by the myspaces, facebooks, diggs, and reddits of the world.

If you're open to maintain interaction with other servers, and just find moderation too resource intensive, then I think you're probably just bigger than you can afford right now, and should shoot for fewer DAUs.

The number of people out there who want a safe space for the disenfranchised can't just be your moderation team, and that's why the fediverse exists. Amortize that responsibility over multiple instances, don't feel like it's something that only you are able to solve.