Hello there and thank you for being a part of Beehaw!

The formation of Beehaw is documented well.

This is a tale of one individual that swooped in, during the recent Reddit blackout, to bolster our community.

I remember the three days, in particular, when Reddit announced that they would ‘fuck over’ all of the third-party apps associated with their site.

Those three days were incredibly stressful to me. We had thousands of users flocking to Beehaw and, subsequently, Beehaw was down more than 80% of the time.

All the admins were scrambling and, initially, we received help from Helix. They helped us stabilize some pressing issues and I’m very thankful for their early help.

Minutes later someone else sent me a DM (i.e. direct message) offering more assistance. We chatted a little and then they asked for root access of our server with the assurance that I could stop them at any moment. To explain, they gave me a window in which I could see what they were doing (in real time) that I could stop at any moment.

I watched them work their magic, and at no time did I witness any wrong doing.

That was the beginning of our relationship with PenguinCoder.

I took a huge risk entrusting them with complete access to Beehaw. Maybe, I shouldn’t have done this without speaking to the other admins. Forgive me for stepping out of line here. I had a hunch and I went with it.

Not only has PenguinCoder gotten Beehaw out of all of that technical Reddit refuge wave. They have, also, continued to improve Beehaw every single day.

Technically speaking, Beehaw would not exist in its current state without them.

Anecdotally, PenguinCoder is a pleasure to work with. Incredibly generous, knowledgeable, friendly, kind, considerate and the list goes on.

I can’t imagine what this place would be without their contributions.

We are, truly, blessed to have them here with us.

  • PenguinCoder@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    235
    ·
    1 year ago

    Hey man why you talking bout me…

    J/K. Thank you for the kind words. I really am happy to be able to help out here for a lot of reasons. I understand the risk, heavily, but I appreciate the trust you and the other admins have placed in me. I hoped I have shown it to be a correct decision. I want to do my best for Beehaw and what is the best. I won’t say everything I do is right or the correct thing, but I normally have a reason for it.

    Thank you kindly; genuinely happy to help and want to keep doing so.

  • SpudNoodle@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    80
    ·
    1 year ago

    This didn’t go where I thought it was going… in the best possible way. I love the positivity and genuine goodness in this post and these people. Thank you for restoring a little of my faith in humanity.

    • Helix 🧬@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      hardly doing anything because I lack the free time, penguincoder does most (99%) of the work nowadays ;)

  • nlm@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    1 year ago

    That sounded scary at first!

    You guys are doing great, all of you!

    And yeah, that was a risky move, a good one in hindsight, but still has to be scary?

  • coyotino [he/him]@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    1 year ago

    Thank you both! I came to Beehaw after the period of technical challenges, and I’ve been amazed at how slick the site is for how small the operation is.

  • Rentlar@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Maybe I shouldn’t have done this without speaking to the other admins.

    Maybe, but desperate times call for desperate measures and worst case scenario you might have needed to restore a backup.

    It takes all sorts of experience to get a place like Beehaw running smoothly. Thanks to you, the other founding admins and to PenguinCoder.

  • dleewee@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    1 year ago

    Would love to hear the highlights of what PenguinCoder did to remediate things.

      • PenguinCoder@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        Pong.

        @dleewee@beehaw.org the list is extensive and I don’t remember everything. But I’ll gather a high level list and reply to your comment. To clarify, what do you want highlights of? That specific initial fix of Reddit influx, or others/all?

        • Phrey@lemmy.sdf.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          Both would be interesting to hear about. What were your thoughts before getting access and did they match up with what you saw afterwards?

          Any stumbling blocks you encountered while trying to implement fixes?

  • cubedsteaks@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 year ago

    Does beehaw not want people here who left reddit for lemmy? I am genuinely asking, not looking to troll or attack anyone. I’m obviously very new to lemmy in general and just trying to understand some of the discussions I often see on lemmy regarding different instances and who has federated with who.

    • Anabriated@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      I think beehaw is intentionally not moderated and controlled as a reddit replacement. There are lots of people who are looking for a reddit replacement - beehaw cannot be that for them. Some people get frustrated and speak out, some of them accept it, some choose to move on. The way lemmy works is also fundamentally different from reddit, some lemmy instances look to replace reddit by federating with everything, and that’s totally okay. Beehaw does not do that for moderator and community health.

  • SoftwareSlicer@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for sharing about this, That’s really quite a cool and inspiring story to hear regarding the development of the platform and specifically the nature of the people and connections who made it possible. It might have been a bit of a risk but it seems unlikely that the platform would have scaled as well without outside help.