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.
Beehaw is my favorite lemmy instance, its actually the only one with meaningful discussions and lively community. I’m grateful for your time and commitment towards a place where people are nice and have meaningful discussions. You the admins do all the work, you have to make the call. I will come with you but I’m not certain how it will go. If there are easy to use mobile apps and notifications I’ll be more likely to get notified about new content. I just haven’t seen any old school boards that tick all those boxes. So, if I have a vote (which I believe I dont) I vote to stay and rather help you improve the admin tools.
I’m sorry, but that is just straight up not true. There are meaningful discussions happening all over the Fediverse, and quality content is spread across a lot of instances depending on your interests.
I notice your account is from Beehaw—perhaps you aren’t seeing the quality content elsewhere because they defedetated from just about everyone.
If anything, I feel that Beehaw’s emphasis on the vague requirement of “niceness”, combined with their aversion to any sort of debate leads to less quality and an increased echo chamber—colloquially known as a circle jerk. Isolating yourself from everything you feel is uncomfortable is just the other side of the coin of the no-holds-barred free speech that they seem to dislike. Both sides either want to be free from other people’s opinions, or free from the consequences of their own.
I’m sorry if my subjective comment offended you. I do like the fediverse, and I did highlight that I’m happy to help improve lemmy instead of jumping to a different platform. Of course you’re always free to take a single line of my reply and build your argument out of it. Being able to admin an instance to ensure that people dont call each other names and ensuring a space where everyone wants to participate is a great goal to stand behind and not in the least a ya-sayers echo chamber. But of course any ability to admin may also be over used to create just that.
I’m not offended, I just felt your comment had some inaccurate points and I was pushing back on that. No malice or offense intended beyond seeking a discussion.