hey folks, we'll be quick and to the point with this one:

we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.

we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is--particularly with federation in mind--basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we're being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).

an unfortunate reality we've also found is we just don't have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don't scale well. we have a list of improvements we'd like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible--but we're unanimous in the belief that we can't wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.

aside from/complementary to what's mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:

• these two instances' open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
• the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
• our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
• and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don't care about what our instance stands for

as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:

There's a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it's not just that, there's a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it's really hard to trust and support who's around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there's more hostility around them. They'll even shut themselves off when there's fake nice behavior around. There's a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it's not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can't even assess that for people who aren't from our instance, so we're walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn't sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.

Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren't open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.

and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it's in effect. but we hope you can understand why we're doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.

this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community's owner, i should add--we just have differing interests here and that's fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we'll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.

thanks for using our site folks.

A few quick notes on discussions the administrator team has had, since we've fielded a lot of questions in these particular fields. We're posting this both for transparency and to help us limit the load of having to respond to each of you individually.

• We would like to become an official nonprofit at some point, but there is a cost associated with this, we are not lawyers, and we might need to change where/how we collect donations to do so.
• We've upgraded the server approximately 7 times now. We're trying to balance fiscal responsibility with server costs. We are aware that digital ocean isn't the cheapest server and we are trying to be conservative with estimates and give ourselves extra runtime at whatever tier we are on. We're also hoping that the upcoming lemmy version will solve a lot of our CPU-bound issues.

We are aware of the following bugs:

• the "report created" indicator flashes in the bottom left corner for some users randomly, even non-moderator users
• sometimes, briefly or without a refresh, the username in the top corner will not be your own; as far as we can tell this is purely cosmetic and is not a security issue
• sometimes the post you're in changes to another post for no clear reason

hey folks. here's a new FAQ on the community, since the currently pinned thread is a bit haphazard and crammed now, and we've had more time to go over stuff.

What is Beehaw?

in summary, we're a community that wants to cultivate a sense of real belonging to something, to foster meaningful conversations, and to ensure everyone feels valued and respected in a way that isn't the case with other social media out there. we've thought and written a lot about this. if you'd like more than that summary, we strongly encourage you to read the following three essays, which explain how this community is run, what we priortize in running it, and why we've designed it this way generally:

• What is Beehaw?
• Beehaw is a Community
• A few thoughts on Beehaw's design

This sounds very cool! How do I join?

you can register here.

you don't need to write a whole essay, however: please answer the question fully, and try to engage with at least some of the content above/on the sidebar before you register.

this is not personal, but we've grown a lot in the past week and are primarily interested in users who really care for the philosophy of our community. if you don't answer the question fully, you will likely get caught in registration limbo (see below), and you might waste the username you want.

How long should I expect to wait to be approved?

anywhere from a few minutes to a day. in general, try logging in after about 24 hours. if you haven't been approved within 24 hours your application is almost certainly in limbo because you didn't answer our entry question to our satisfaction. this doesn't mean we're rejecting you, per se, but it generally means we didn't think you engaged with the content above/on the sidebar. this is inelegant, but Lemmy doesn't make it reliably possible to tell you to reapply, so this is a shortcoming we have to make do with.

if you have been approved and you used an email to sign up you should receive an email for that, although it might be marked as spam. we're still trying to get Gmail to consistently take our emails, so again the 24 hour rule is best if you're unsure or haven't received one.

if you have issues of this sort, please report them in the following thread!

I'm in! How can I keep Beehaw running, or otherwise contribute?

our instance is 100% user-funded. you can one-time donate or become a monthly donor here. you can donate anonymously both ways. as far as we're aware cryptocurrency is accepted by OpenCollective, it's just more laborious and you'll probably have to contact them to clear it.

if you have volunteer labor or advice you're willing to give us on how to keep the site running smoothly, we also generally appreciate that. our Matrix and Discord communities are the best way to offer that stuff to us.

How do I help keep the community running smoothly?

be considerate! think about the things you say and how you want to say them; be kind and charitable; don't assume the worst of people; but above all: Be(e) nice!

it might seem trite, but genuinely we've found there is no better distillation of what we want to accomplish here than that ethos. if something makes you feel like that ethos is being violated, err on the side of caution and report it (on desktop it's the flag button in the three dot menu on any post). it can't hurt. so far though we've found most people kind of know what we mean, and we're hopeful you'll be able to pick up on that too.

as for non-moderation ways you can keep things running: contribute to discussions! share stuff you find interesting! contribute your expertise and help out folks when they ask for it! it's okay—and very understandable—to lurk based on the toxicity commonplace on other social media, but we really do try to make this space as welcoming as possible to everyone here and we hope you'll find it a safer place to come out of your online shell.

What else should I know?

we always take feedback. while we can't promise any changes, you can provide thoughts and comments on just about anything on the site in Beehaw Support, or on Discord or Matrix (where we maintain real-time chat). we try to get a sense of what the community wants and needs all the time, so we'll frequently be asking for input from you to help inform our decisions.

downvotes are disabled on this instance and will probably always be. we find them unproductive. communities cannot be made by users on here. we do take feedback on what gets made and when to make communities, as a part of the above point. you can always find a running list of communities we have at this link, or under the Communities button on desktop.

we are all volunteers, and this is not a job for us. we would like to not have it be one, so we can just be members of the community with all of you. please help keep it that way!

in the very, very long term, we aspire to become a co-op or similar, as a part of fulfilling our ethos.

as with the last thread, feel free to sound off on other questions you have. i, other mods, and community members will try to get to them as able.

First off, I wanted to say hi to all the new members we've had join in the past month. Thank you for joining us here at Beehaw. A community doesn't exist without its members, and it's exciting watching this instance grow.

I've always been a proponent of keeping explanations as simple as possible and allowing discussions to clarify the finer points, but I've noticed that I've been repeating myself a lot recently with the influx of new users and lot of fantastic questions about what we are, what we're doing, and why we're different.

This is to be the first post of a series in which I'm going to share my own thoughts on the vision of Beehaw and how I hope it can be brought to fruition. It's also a place for me to share my thoughts on what's wrong with other social media platforms, such as some of the major pitfalls of most moderation systems. To be clear, I don't speak on behalf of everyone who's been involved in starting this instance and I certainly don't speak on behalf of everyone here, so this isn't meant to be a manifesto, or a set of rules etched into stone tablets for you to obey. I will try to frame ideas that I hold through my own eyes (I), and ideas which I believe the establishing community holds through the lens of our eyes (we).

A condensed history of the formation of Beehaw

The group of users who created Beehaw used to exist on another platform. Many of us came to that platform from many other platforms before it. We were sold on the idea that it was a different platform, where discussion would be encouraged, and things would be different. While the platform was still small, there was a much higher feeling of cohesion and community and users being aggressive or hateful to each other was incredibly rare. When they were mean, it was often over emotionally charged issues and typically resolved itself with apologies or slight changes in who interacted with who. Over time this platform, like many others before it, got infested with a group of people I like to refer to as rationalists.

I'm simplifying their mindset to that of the rationalist, because rationalism touts itself as a belief that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge, rather than belief or emotional response, and they often touted such ideals. While I agree that beliefs and emotional responses can get in the way of important work, the kind of rationalist that I take qualms with is someone who doesn't understand that their own beliefs or emotions are clouding their judgement. At times they repeat racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted narratives because they are not as learned as they think. They often end up causing a lot of harm to minority individuals who already struggle to get society to listen to them because bigoted notions dominate the common narratives found in society.

On this platform I attempted to address this emerging problem of rationalism. To be clear I do not view these people as bad people. I simply think they are misled or unintentionally ignorant. When I was younger, I found myself in possession of many of the thoughts they discuss because I was also taught them through the lens of a colonial oppressive system. It took a lot of work to undo some of the brainwashing that I had gone through and to realize the harm that I was causing by 'debating' these issues online.

Unfortunately for me my attempts to address this problem on said platform were met with ire by the creator of said website, and I was told in no uncertain terms that I should cease these meta-discussions altogether. That message and that final thread that I had created on the matter lead to a discussion on an informal community for the website where likeminded individuals began to lay the groundwork for what we felt was wrong with this system of moderation and the problems we saw in modern social media platforms.

The spirit of Beehaw

The issue as I see it with modern social media is the way in which rules are enforced. There are many good reasons to itemize specific behavior which is not allowed, but the downside is that extremely specific rules are easy to maneuver around. We've all experienced someone who's a real jerk on the internet but manages to never get banned because they never explicitly violate any rules. I'm not sexist, they'll claim, but happen to post a lot of articles calling into question modern feminism or criticize the wage gap.

I think many people today would agree that someone 'debating' the benefits of phrenology in the open would constitute racist behavior, but there was a time and place in the world where it was considered real science, despite many scientists distancing themselves from this field very early on and critics writing scathing commentaries on this emerging field. This same guise of civility is frequently exercised by bigots, with modern examples of sexism, homophobia and transphobia being easily found on nearly any major social media platform.

Humans are pretty good at figuring out when someone is being a dick online, even if they are acting within the defined rules, and one solution to this problem is to recenter humans in our online social platforms. The idea of not having a ton of explicit rules, and instead having simple rules like "Be(e) nice" is a startling one for most, because it upends what we've come to know and expect from the internet. However, by keeping the rules simple and instead attempting to enforce the spirit behind the rules, we're able to deal more effectively with problematic individuals and create a space in which you aren't worried about whether you're going to have explain to someone why you're a human and why you shouldn't be subject to incessant bigotry online.

What is (and isn't) Beehaw

That brings us to the fundamental question of what Beehaw is and isn't. Beehaw is a social media platform. So, we do want you coming here and sharing links to news articles, websites you find, starting discussions, connecting with others, and in general doing what you see on other social media websites. We want you to do this while being nice to each other. If you aren't nice, we'll remind you to be nice. If you continue to be problematic, we'll escalate from there, but it's going to be on a case-by-case basis. If your first reply when we ask you to be nice to each other is to fuck off, I'm going to respond in kind. I also understand that being emotional is a normal part of being a human and that some of us struggle with anger more than others, and I'd like for this to be a community which is open to the idea of reversing actions, such as bans, if you're willing to talk with the community about why you think it should be reversed. Of note, we simply do not tolerate intolerant behavior. Being explicitly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or bigoted in any other fashion is not tolerated here.

But how might one determine when it's okay to be intolerant towards people you believe are being intolerant or who are being intolerant but doing so because they are uneducated or have not spent time deconstructing their own privilege? Many philosophers have written extensively about this subject, and I simply don't have time to write an entire manifesto. In simple terms, I am not advocating for tone policing. I believe that being outraged and angry at people who are destroying our society is a good thing to do. When the supreme court removes protections for abortion, it's okay to be outraged and to take action into your own hands - they have done something intolerant. When someone advocates online that you don't have the right to your own body, it's okay to tell them to fuck off. In fact, I greatly encourage it. This is being intolerant to the intolerant.

However, when someone online shares an opinion and it feels like they might be intolerant and you jump to the conclusion that they are intolerant and you launch into a tirade at them, this is not nice behavior. You didn't check if they have the opinion you think they have, and that's simply not nice to someone which you don't know.

It gets even more complicated when you consider someone who is sharing an opinion they have which is actively harmful to many individuals in the world, but it's due to their ignorance. I personally believe that so long as this person is not actively spreading this intolerant viewpoint and are working on themselves to become a better person, that it would not be particularly productive to launch into a tirade against them. I understand, however, how someone could be quite rude in response to such intolerance and I agree that this person may desperately need to be educated appropriately, but there is no way for that discussion to happen on this platform in a productive manner while lobbing insults at each other. I can understand why, at first brush, some might consider this tone policing. However, I disapprove of the intolerant viewpoint, and I approve of it being corrected, but I also approve of the intolerant person attempting to become a better person.

The only way for a platform which is hoping to exist as an explicitly nice place online to avoid taking sides in a situation like this is to withdraw from the quandary entirely. This kind of nuanced political and philosophical discussion is just simply not meant for Beehaw. I'd like to think that I'm aware and learned enough to avoid 'debating' things like phrenology, which are obviously racist, but I'm also smart enough to realize that there's likely some ideas which I've internalized or been taught by a colonialist western society which are harmful to other minorities. I want to be able to learn about how everything I was taught was wrong, and to be corrected, and that space can only exist when we don't let users berate each other over ideas they project on others (whether that projection happens to be correct or not).