in summer 2023, when I moved here from reddit, the lemmy instance beehaw.org was extremely divisive. they wanted to create a website according to certain rules rather than a free for all. some people were saying it would be the end of the threadiverse before it even began.
since that time, there have been various other intrinsic and extrinsic threats. I do not see much panicking about beehaw. did the threadiverse survive beehaw? or is this only a shell of what we might have had otherwise?
I don’t really care. It was I think the first instance I learned about (must’ve been the most popular at the time) and I applied for an account there, but by the time it got approved I had already started posting on lemmy.world, so here I am.
See, here’s how Beehaw affects the rest of the Fediverse:
It doesn’t. Nobody cares about Beehaw except Beehaw. And we’ll all go on for a few more months without thinking about them at all until someone mentions them again.
Lemmy users mainly have a positive view on Beehaw.
Umm what? Most of the comments there are telling them to get lost? Seems like them defederating for every little reason rubbed the rest of the fediverse the wrong way
Might have a bit to do with the regular admin posts where they talk about leaving Lemmy all together.
I don’t see how a single instance doing something against the grain would be the end of the whole fediverse, considering how the system works.
And all they want is a place free from bigotry. Which is noble, but pretty naive. Even if you went to extreme lengths of vetting users before letting them post, you’re still gonna get a assholes who slip through just to cause trouble.
A few will still slip through, but fewer, presumably. Which is the whole point. Content moderation does have an impact on content and in turn the user experience.
I think that the “controversy” simply died down. Simply because there was no controversy on first place - just a conflict of interests, where you can see both sides being reasonable but ultimately wanting mutually incompatible things.
I think a lot of the “conflict” was based on people expecting the threadiverse to be user owned Reddit, without understanding how the Fediverse operates. As people start understanding the nature of how this place works, one would expect them to also calm down a bit about different communities having different moderation strategies.
Then again, it’s the internet. Some people are not exactly keen to understand.
This, too. And additionally, perhaps some entitlement? Like, from my impression a lot of people were expecting Beehaw to conform to what they want (access to the comms and users from there), regardless of that going against Beehaw’s goals.
Hello guys, just wanted to chime in and say that it’s good to see you three explain things in a calm manner in this thread. Nice to see you around.
Simply because there was no controversy on first place
To add on, a lot of the discussions I saw were about highlighting what the differences were and discussing what the pros and cons were, so that users could make informed decisions about the instance they picked during the migration.
That’s generally a good thing, as long as you don’t harass others for what they want. There’s a lot of different ways to do the fediverse
Haven’t heard much about them lately, which I just learned through this post is because they defederated from everyone else. Anything I’ve read about them is that they want a certain type of community, but beyond that they’re really vague. I honestly just avoided signing up for their instance because they seemed kind of uptight and I’d rather be in a place that is welcoming to more people with diverse interests.
Beehaw still exists? I guess I don’t ever really see any communities hosted there pop up on All. Or maybe I’m just not noticing.
Beehaw defederated from a lot of other major instances.
Seems like they shot themselves in the foot.
Unless their goal was to create an echo chamber of about 15 people, and if so, they’ve been very successful.
That is exactly their goal. They openly state it, and I respect them for that.
Federating with others was never really what they wanted. It’s a semi-private discussion space with strict rules.Initially they were not so upfront about it. Things changed as they experienced more of the fediverse.
Nobody’s been riled up. You need to go to Reddit for that :)
Probably died down because they de-federated nearly everyone.
I have never seen anything valuable and/or good coming from that instance. Only trolling or hate. So I put it on my instance ignore list.
Their chat communities occasionally have some decent stuff
Was it really? How?
They are heavy-handed but are upfront about that fact, and their reason for it - wanting a safe space, since a lot of people go out of their way to make the rest of the internet as unwelcoming as they can. If that’s not acceptable to you, you’re just not in the target audience. If it’s any sort of threat to the fediverse I am really not seeing how. If they want to be a bubble and deal with the “recruitment” issues that causes on an already miniscule platform, they absolutely can.
Reputation-wise for Lemmy instances and the FV in general, I would think we have significantly larger issues.
Rilers gonna get riled. I’ve only seen Beehaw mentioned recently as a nice, drama-free space.
Some people in this thread say Beehaw defederated almost or entirely from the rest of the threading/fediverse; just a glimpse of their instance federation and block lists show that isn’t the case. If you or your instance has been blocked by one that pretty much only requires users to be nice — I think that warrants some introspection on your part rather than dismissing them.
I’m completely for social sites that set an ettiquette standard and stick to it. And I’m getting too old for bored teenagers’ edgelord hot takes, so in principle I should probably be in the target group for Beehaw.
That said, looking through the recent local posts on the instance… it doesn’t look terribly interesting either. Not that I look for aggravation or confrontation in a forum, but I guess the people who sign up for a “nice” one, in this case at least, are fairly normie, and don’t have much interesting to say?
Meh. Their admins are human like any other. One of their main subs banned me for saying that as an Asian, I didn’t have any opinion or strong feelings on the holocaust.
You don’t have strong feelings or any opinion about millions of innocent people dying?
You don’t think it’s bad?
That’s got nothing to do with your race. That’s just really shit.
If someone is of Asian decent from any country Japan invaded, their ancestors experienced equally bad atrocities that are largely ignored by the global community.
Yeah but I wouldn’t say I have no opinion about them. It’s super fucked up and horrifying.
I don’t have any strong feelings or opinions about the holocaust in particular, as opposed to any of the other multiple genocides and atrocities humanity has committed over the ages, or even just the assorted hundreds of millions of deaths from war, famine, disease, etc. They all suck, but I see no reason to get more emotional about one specific event than any of the others.
I get that it’s especially sensitive for many people because they feel connected to the event via personal, family or national ties. None of those apply to me. How strongly do YOU feel about the Crusades, which were very much an attempted genocide? Chances are, you don’t, because it’s just not culturally relevant.
The crusades were atrocities in my opinion. Straight up racism made manifest under the guise of religion.
Yep. So was the holocaust. But at least for me, it’s an intellectual outrage, nothing that works up my emotions. Apparently to some people, that’s unacceptable.
Right well that would be an opinion. Do you really not see how your comment may have come off as nasty?
Possibly. Is that on the level of getting permabanned, though?
I’m surprised they’re still on 0.18.4. They made that big post complaining about moderation actions not federating, then the 0.18.5 hotfix came out and the only change was that fix, and they never updated anyways? I even put a comment on their post to let them know the hotfix for their issue. There’s no database changes, it’s the simplest update.
You are too dramatic. What happened is that many left beehaw (me included). You can see beehaw has a lot less activity now then it had last year.
You can see beehaw has a lot less activity now then it had last year.
Fediverse Observer and FediDB show a drop in active users, but the pattern of peak in July 2023 and then a slow regression isn’t unique to Beehaw, and is a pattern seen across the Threadiverse.
You left, but Beehaw being willing to give teeth to the concept of defederation is the reason I joined. I don’t think the decision hurt their user-count. It definitely helped distinguish their culture from the rest of the Fediverse.
I agree. I could see Beehaw survive longer than most other Lemmy instances, their community feeling is much stronger.
You left, but Beehaw being willing to give teeth to the concept of defederation is the reason I joined. I don’t think the decision hurt their user-count. It definitely helped distinguish their culture from the rest of the Fediverse.
Fair.
Walled gardens don’t have a long shelf-life on the internet. They’re fading away.
sorry but that’s like the dumbest thing anyone ever said. have you heard of intagram facebook tiktok linkedin grindr tindr and every other APP
None of those are walled gardens kiddo. Look at how Behaw is run and compare.
Not the same.
Tell that to metafilter, or hackernews? Or a multitude of other smaller niche communities that chug along perfectly happy (Yes there are less now than there used to be but that is mainly because of the insanely aggressive way Discord is being pushed on communities all over the internet and destroying their foundations) Sometimes a nice little garden with a wall to help transport you away from the hustle and bustle of life is exactly what you need.
We shouldn’t aim to build the Fediverse into a walled garden but there is nothing wrong with small walled gardens interspersed along the periphery of the Fediverse. It is a good thing. Let them be their own place!
I think this is a really good point. It’s a shame that they don’t want to Federate with some of the larger instances, but that’s the whole point of the fediverse. If you Federate with who you want to Federate with, and you have control over your own moderation and red lines. It’s virtually impossible to have meaningful conversation among a broad group without someone getting offended. So you might choose to let people occasionally be offended, or you might choose to create a safe space for a limited group.
It’s a philosophical question with no single right answer. The fediverse doesn’t have to be all things to all people, which is exactly why it can be all things to all people. Corporate social media has to have one set of rules for everyone, and the system for deciding and enforcing the rules is generally just about money
So many comments here are such incredibly low effort and echochambery that they’d be completely unwanted noise on either of those forums.
The technology communities are have a low signal-to-noise with the number of jump-to-conclusions reaction comments instead of discussions. That’s in contrast to a much more balanced blend of discussion/nuance/jump-to-conclusions on HN.
I don’t regularly lurk Metafilter but every time I visit, they seemed to have a substantially better signal-to-noise ratio than here when I browse around.
No way should they should consider federating until people clean their act up here.
Exactly but people on Metafilter do generally enjoy the fediverse, I believe there is an instance on the fediverse run by a Metafilter person. I don’t know if Metafilter users want the world of their site to directly intersect the fediverse but it doesn’t have to for there to be a healthy exchange of ideas and people from one to the other and back.
To be very specific about what I mean here, people getting in the habit of using Metafilter as a social and community place outside the context of giant corporate social networks are training their minds to do the most important thing necessary for a greater context of people to use the fediverse, which is thinking of the possibility of digital social and community spaces as possible and desirable outside the context of venture capital, massive corporations, capitalism and profit. Metafilter doesn’t need to connect to the fediverse to have a positive synergy with it necessarily. Beehaw can be seen in a similar way.
Besides, we are many people in many different contexts, people shitposting in one context might be extremely well spoken on a technical subject in another. It matters which version of people we invite in and it matters that we let there be places for those different versions of people.
A walled garden is a suffocating structure when you are trapped in it with nowhere to go, but at the edge of the busy city of the fediverse, a walled garden is sometimes exactly what is needed. The walls of the garden no longer dictate the edge of the possible space of internet communities but rather the transition space between a niche community purposefully separated from the broader network and the broader network.
We are stronger together and a vital feature of the fediverse is federation, but we are better together when “together” means a tangled knot of interrelationships and boundaries, not a giant unified monolith. We are trying to make a city and this is the nature of them.
