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.
My opinion is that Beehaw’s philosophy seems to be fundamentally incompatible with the concept of federation.
You guys want a very specific community that’s heavily moderated to ensure everything within it conforms with the “safe space” environment you wish to preserve. While that’s your prerogative, the reality is that the vast majority of instances, and users on those instances, aren’t going to come anywhere close to your standards, nor do they have any desire to. That means you’re going to be continually fighting fires in terms of the moderation you’ll have to do in order to preserve your community’s ethos.
You guys want a walled garden community. Federation is the complete antithesis to this concept. You’d be better served by forum software, or a completely isolated Lemmy instance. The Fediverse as a whole may be better served by you guys doing this as well, since any major community hosted on Beehaw presently that others in the fediverse enjoy could disappear for everyone on your next whim of which instances you wish to defederate or when you leave entirely.
You’d be doing both yourselves and the wider fediverse a favor by going off and doing your own thing as you seem to want to do, in my opinion. Frankly I’m surprised you’ve not already done this a lot sooner.
It would be better if the protocol had the capability for stuff like access controls where you could require that external users request permission to join your local communities and to be able to post there (where the moderation queues would show such requests per server). That way you could maintain visibility and protocol compatibility and make it easy to link between discussions, while maintaining quality of communities.
I agree that it would be nice if the software was as versatile as possible.
That said, at a certain point it just feels like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and I’ve always seen Beehaw as a little like one of those cases. They want an admin-controlled environment with only communities there that are admin-approved. They only want very specific users to participate under a ruleset that is a lot more restricted than any other instance on the fediverse. They seem uninterested and unwilling to compromise to integrate with the rest of the fediverse at large.
At a certain point, it’s right to question why they’re using a federated platform at all. Their use case really does seem to be best suited to a self-hosted forum, or a whitelist-only Lemmy instance where they don’t federate with anyone by default and can choose to federate with very specific instances that may share their philosophy, or none at all.
It’s not new though. There’s endless email lists with open archives and admin controlled posting permissions. That’s also a federated platform. But in that environment is what people expect, part of the tradition, and people know there’s going to be various rules when they post to a bunch of mailing lists, versus here where expectations and tools are wildly different.
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It sounds like it is time to defederate. We’ll miss the instance but we understand why it must be done