There is a lot of discussion happening in the background of our project here. We could not anticipate all of the challenges that we were going to face a few years ago. One of the reasons for this was because we had no idea what our choice of a platform would bring.
Specifically, we chose Lemmy as the software that we would use to launch our endeavor to attempt a safe space for marginalized persons online.
In the first year or so, this choice was completely successful for a very small number of users. And then we all experienced an enormous influx of users when Reddit announced/implemented their shutting down of third party apps.
Since then there has been a huge number of people that have joined the Beehaw project. This tsunami of users initiated technical problems, and otherwise, that we could not foresee.
Thankfully and fortunately, we have had a couple of incredibly knowledgeable persons that have swooped in to ’save the day’ and keep this site running.
Unfortunately, these persons will NOT be able to continue to support the Beehaw project much further. They have life commitments and other factors, including careers and family life, that will prevent them from contributing to our project in an ongoing fashion.
All that being said, Lemmy (the software that Beehaw runs on) development is incredibly slow and is riddled with problems that makes administration/moderation very painful.
Therefore, we are left with some options that may feel uncomfortable to us. For example, we may want to consider leaving the Fediverse for another software platform that does NOT include ActivityPub. To explain, Fediverse/ActivityPub are very positive concepts on the foundational level. However, the Beehaw project is struggling to include this because most of our moderation/content/ethos is being jeopardized from OTHER federated instances (i.e. it, mostly, is NOT coming from within our own Beehaw registered user base).
The aforementioned persons, that have ’swooped in to save the day’, have been discussing/working with us to come up with the best solutions that would enable the Beehaw project to continue while NOT needing incredibly experienced/technically adept persons around.
Right now, we are testing alternative software platforms and evaluating them based on everything that we want Beehaw to become in the future.
Thank you all for your continued support of the Beehaw project and entrusting us to make this happen.
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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.
Just a few thoughts.
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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.
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Would there be a way of running two instances. One federated and one not or the one not only federated with beehaw.
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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.
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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.
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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…
One, there was a point where the application system was bugged and some applications were lost so they had to stop processing applications. This is an issue on lemmy not on the mod team. Additionally, because lemmy is not setup for the sort of application process the mod teams want, there is no way to notify a rejected application. Your application might have been rejected.
Two, by replying here you are choosing to encounter this community. Don’t be surprised when you get moderated for not following rules.
Three, no one will miss these sorts of interactions. It’s not puritan to want to avoid something that takes away from your enjoyment rather than adds to it. Clearly at one point you thought so to and wanted to join. Perhaps though you only wanted to be a bad actor in the community and the application process worked as intended.
Your conduct here is indicative of why you might not have been accepted into Beehaw or had mod action taken against you. I can understand your frustration, but federation (as it is right now) is a two-way street: The servers share posts, but users are expected to behave according to the rules of the server they are posting to.
You are capable of not posting in Beehaw, and you are welcome to block Beehaw communities as you wish, if you don’t like Beehaw’s rules, mods, or expectations we have on your behaviour.
You know how on reddit, and many other platforms, subcommunities within those platforms have rules? Like some subreddits had a no image macros rule? If you posted an image macro to one of those subs, and get warned or your post is actioned, that entirely on you and not on the community. it doesn’t matter if you’re “part” of that community, you should abide by the rules of that community when you post in it.
Of course, you’re welcome to wilfully ignore or go against the rules of the communities you post in, but aside from being just a generally dick move, you also put yourself in the sights of the moderation of that community.
Bitch, I’m not even part of your “community”! You chose to federate with the rest of us!
And you chose to post in this community - abide by the rules or the moderators have every right to tell you you’re breaking the rules, or take action if it continues.
I think, based on the attitude you’ve displayed here, I can see why you were not deemed a good fit for the community when you applied.
The wording in the parent comment also seems to imply the Fediverse is just Lemmy/kbin, which is a weird self-centric take I see here (i.e. on Lemmy) a lot.
A lot of the broader fedi that has access to adequate moderation tooling are doing just fine and don’t seem too “ill-suited”. It’s really just Lemmy that’s like this.
I’m not entirely sure I’ll attempt joining “the new Beehaw” wherever it may set up shop (y’all are a bit too serious news-y for my liking, personally), but all the federated interactions I had with the folk from Beehaw had been quite positive, and it’s kinda sad to see y’all go. But I can definitely understand the reasons why, and I do have my own gripes with Lemmy (both the software and the unfortunate community it has picked up) as well.
I understand what you said about community rules. But the funny thing about the Fediverse and how people receive their posts is that it’s not uniform. I’m in kbin on a phone and I don’t see who is posting from what instance unless I click further. Same for the community or magazine someone is posting in - I can see that on my feed but once I click on a post I cannot see it. I’ve joined many communities and magazines and they are only identified by the topic name in my feed, not the instance. I cannot see any community or magazine rules from my feed or inside the posts.
Just saying that easily identifying a group’s rules is more of a challenge in the Fediverse (this is not an argument to ignore rules).
Mmhm, I can empathise with that. Although, it does still fall upon the user to ensure they’re abiding by the rules of the communities they interact with, but regardless of that responsibility, I do understand its tricky.
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.
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.
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.
Possibly something like LemmyBB could be an answer. Stay on Fediverse and get to isolate ( I think).
LemmyBB is just an alternate frontend. It is possible to not federate with any other instances though by turning federation off in the instance settings
Cool, I’m quite fond of the old school format.
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.
Forums are cool!
I don’t get the prevailing hatred of old school forums on the threadiverse. Forums are great!
I don’t have much of a stake in this but isolation is probably not the way forward.
I completely agree, I had a beehaw account and it was my main server until they defederated with Lemmy.ml
Too many communities were blocked, so I just switched to make my alt my main account.
I’m on lemmy.ml, looks to still be federated?
They may have refederated already. But I noticed I was missing a lot of communities that I followed and then saw that they stopped federating.
It seems each week there is another community they dropped, and for the most part it didn’t affect the communities I followed, but when it did o decided to drop it.
Yup, or at least re-federated.
Another .ml user here, and yeah it looks like it
It’d honestly suck to lose beehaw again, it’s such a standout server with a really lovely community
But if the devs and the technology just can’t keep up, then I guess there isn’t much that we can do
We still can’t even block instances yet, as far as I’m aware
??? Beehaw is still federated with lemmy.ml
Are you talking about Lemmy.world?
Same here, I started out in Beehaw but left to a smaller instance because of all the defedersting. This way I have a feed with all the instances I like mixed together.
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.
Comments/posts get moderated at the community level, any instance subscribing to it, will also receive the moderation notification to update its cache, so it doesn’t need to be moderated again. In theory, an instance “could” ignore moderation actions for a community it’s subscribed to, but that makes little sense.
A problem comes when a community decides not to remove a comment/post, then it gets spread to all instances that subscribe to that community. Only in that case federated instances need to apply additional moderation.
Federated instances subscribed to a community would have the option to either block the user, the comment, the post, the community, or the whole instance (defederate). Fine grained options like blocking a single user’s every comment on a post, or on a community, or on an instance… or blocking every post by any user from an instance that they send to a community, or… etc. would be additional options… but Lemmy is lacking most of them.
So moderation isn’t inhrently an exponential problem, but right now is limited to a blunt tool that mostly relies on the good faith of everyone for things to work… and it’s been shown over and over that there are people acting in bad faith.
Thank you for that thorough explanation!
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.
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
I think whitelisting would be the way to do. Over time a set of rule could be established and federation would only be possible with other instances with compatibles rules.
A lot of beehaw users would probably leave but it’s fine, this will take off a bit a pressure and allow the admin to focus on keeping this safe space safe for the users that really needs it.
So is the real issue not technical? More of a social/moderation issue? The post makes it sound like there are technical reasons that only experienced technical persons can solve. I’m not much of a sysadmin, but I’d be curious what the underlying technical difficulties were.
I second whitelisting, with slrpnk.net and Blahaj.zone at least.
Naw, lemm.ee is more of a blacklist-worthy place. And kbin.social.
I just woke up to two messages from Lemm.ee on BeeHaw, yours and this person:
Rude Message Text
[Image description: What a crappy news article. You can’t even read it without the ads shoving the paragraphs together. Your post is shit, OP]
I’m sure it’s part coincidence, but my experience with Lemm.ee hasn’t been much better than with Lemmy.world.
Seems like a lovely person…
Well, yeah, there are different kinds of people in all places.
I just don’t want to miss out when I’m in the fediverse, and lemm.ee does that pretty well as they don’t defederate from others without a very hefty reason, I follow some Beehaw communities here and if they decide to leave it would impact my Lemmy usage, to a degree, ultimately I hope the best for the Beehaw admins and I will respect whatever outcome they think is the best.
they don’t defederate from others without a very hefty reason
I understand why you might like that, but it speaks to a culture clash between Lemm.ee and BeeHaw - BeeHaw is acting pre-emptively to protect its mods, and Lemm.ee is prioritizing its users’ Fediverse access over other aspects of the user experience.
I have an account on lemm.ee and an account on Beehaw. I use lemm.ee as my main for browsing in general and pop in to beehaw a couple of times a week to see what’s up. Lemm.ee is a general purpose instance and the admin is very against defederation unless absolutely necessary. He’s super cool but sticks to his principles which are not the same as the principles of Beehaw, namely open federation vs a curated safe space. He does deal with issues as they arise but I would caution against viewing that instance as a safe ally because his moral compass so strongly forces him to be tolerant of people he personally finds abhorrent. The paradox of tolerance is strong lol he has personally dealt with issues with hexbear (he is Estonian and they just love Russia for some reason) and ended up staying federated with them. So he’ll deal with problem users and is open to communication with admins of other instances but the user mentioned above wasn’t using hate speech or trolling or doing anything other than generally being rude so that would be allowed on that instance. Just my 2 cents, it’s a good instance but not good in the same ways as Beehaw.
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.
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.
Beehaw has been online for over 18 months, it was well established when there were only 30 Lemmy servers and then Reddit API change came along in May… the sign-up page and application process couldn’t even cope with hundreds of users per day.
Then 1000 new instance servers went online in just a couple months where your 18-month established presence was suddenly getting all kinds of server to server action.
You have been on the front-line of a lot of people motivated by hate of Reddit. Not love of Beehaw.
I’ll admit the wording of the post made me react as if these potential changes were imminent. I will respect any decision the admin team makes, and I encourage you to continue to stick to the core ideas of Beehaw to which you’ve written extensively about, while being able to balance your own lives and mental health.
The idea I’ll throw in the ring is to introduce one of the Automod programs (example), which can help keep the designated safe-space communities more tightly moderated, and address some of the issues of moderation granularity. For example, a user/instance whitelist could be instated as to who can post to the protected communities, with all other comments removed. An application process can be instituted to add to the whitelist.
