Thinking about the direction of Beehaw

Over the years I’ve been trying to encapsulate, as simply as possible, what Beehaw interactions would look like ideally.

I kept coming back to all of my personal memories having holiday meals (Thanksgiving and Christmas for example) with very close family and friends.

Thinking back through decades of these meetings, I cannot remember anything but everyone being kind and charitable in action as well as speech.

Many pages of very thoughtful and reasonable philosophic explanations have been written, on our sidebar, about the behavioral expectations of Beehaw.

Let’s go back to the holiday meals for a moment and imagine having an open invitation for anyone to join. What do you think the outcomes would be?

This is the problem that our endeavor is experiencing. The open nature of ActivityPub (allowing anyone to join our table) is defeating our purpose.

The administrators, moderators and community members have been thinking about this for several months.

I, personally, believe that we all will come to a comfortable consensus moving forward.

toothpicks,

I have to be careful to not be an arsehole on the internet when I come to beehaw lol

survivalmachine,

Has anybody had a conversation about implementing non-federated communities or is that even a possibility with activitypub? I would love to have native beehaw communities that are only accessible by logged-in beehaw users, but still retain federation for some of my more niche communities that may not have a large enough audience here.

Although I could very easily just maintain my old account on a fediverse server alongside my beehaw account if beehaw ventures off into an entirely new direction.

When I read about the beehaw vision a few days ago, I fell in love, so I’m here for whatever y’all decide.

derbis,

This seems ideal to me. Does Lemmy not support this setup?

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

there are and have been conversations around the fediverse about this very same concept or need. See, eg, a cousin comment in this thread on the same idea: lemmy.ml/comment/7026804

And the short answer is no … the fediverse basically sucks at providing such a thing … so enamoured is it with federation that localised communities are obviously a bit of an afterthought. Thing is people actually want and need more private or local spaces as well as the big public spaces. Its why all the old school forums are still kicking.

And the worst part is that federation offers a great opportunity to provide both in a really useful and seamless manner on a single platform. But neither lemmy nor mastodon have a feature for it (with mastodon lead dev actively opposing the idea it seems).

I have to believe it would be easy for lemmy to implement.

As a contrast, misskey and its forks such as firefish, catodon, iceshrimp etc (and yea, these names are a choice, in a good way I think), actually provide local only groups and people like them.

Flax_vert, (edited )

Beehaw would die if you defederated it. Don’t do it. Beehaw also makes the fediverse a nicer place.

retronautickz,

I would prefer if Beehaw remained federated, but, as it is, I understand that the options of software for a platform like Beehaw on the fediverse are lacking on many aspect and started something new requires time,knowledge, and money.

petrescatraian,

@admin does Lemmy have any opt-in federation system? Like, only allow certain remote servers to connect? Maybe that would be a viable alternative

sarmale,

I think yes, an allowlist

petrescatraian,

@sarmale exactly. I saw on r/RedditAlternatives that someone created a Lemmy instance that was defederated from everyone - so it is possible to turn your Lemmy server into a walled garden. Maybe an allowlist would make for a better middle ground.

Gaywallet,
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

We simply need a lot more moderation tools than the current set of lemmy devs are willing to create, and many of them see some of the requests as frivolous or not in line with their personal beliefs on how the website mechanics should work. There’s also a metric ton of bugs, potential legal issues with how the platform deals with federation and malicious and abhorrent material, and the issue of the code of choice this website runs on not being a particularly popular or easy to pick up coding language meaning less access to talent to fix or work on new things. We’ve been talking about potentially moving platforms for some time now and with time there are just more discoveries of new issues.

petrescatraian,

@Gaywallet I see. What about the other federated choices? Like Kbin or Mbin, even Discourse?

Gaywallet,
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

These are among the platforms we are testing

petrescatraian,

@Gaywallet That's great to hear! 😁

derbis,

What in particular? Maybe these could be addressed as a fork. I would be willing to contribute to the extent I can

Gaywallet, (edited )
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

I will be honest with you, I do not think that it would be a good use of your time. This has been unfolding for a long time and its clear that there are both coding and ideological issues with lemmy as a platform (there’s plenty of discussions of this which have unfolded in the chat and beehaw support communities which I would suggest reading up on). However, if you are committed to making lemmy as a whole a better place, here’s a truncated list of some of the still existing issues:

  • There are not enough federation options to deal effectively with current problems, at minimum:
    1. One-way federation to protect our site culture
    2. Exemption from all feed & media reject to handle pornography
  • Purging posts and comments does not purge associated images
  • Reports are not sent to the right places (example: we don’t get reports about our users’ off-instance activity and reports are not sent to moderators which are off-instance)
  • The modlog does not work in a chronological fashion and does not allow to filter actions by instance or per community
  • Moderators are exposed to graphic images because a banned user’s description is still visible
  • If you are a mod of a community, and you get banned from that community you mod, you can still take mod actions
  • If you get site-banned from an instance and you are from another instance, you can still post on the community and people from your instance can see and interact with your posts
derbis,

Thanks for the thorough answer. I’ll have to do some thinking.

Where are these discussions happening? I haven’t seen much on the Lemmy instance itself until like yesterday.

Gaywallet,
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

They’ve happened here in the open in the communities mentioned but also extensively on our discord and matrix

Kwakigra,

Is it possible to have some communities be exclusive to Beehaw users? I’m not advocating for cutting off the existing communities, rather adding in a few walled gardens? That would filter out anyone who doesn’t want to bother explaining why they value what Beehaw is and include anyone curious enough to create a Beehaw profile to see what the less active but more Beehaw communities are like. Something like “The safest space” which is going to respectively attract and deter the people you would want.

As for having to deal with what y’all deal with at all, which the above would do nothing to diminish, I have thought for a while that y’all need more help. You guys are doing a ton of work and in my opinion a little too much work each. I don’t want y’all to get burned out and not be able to continue at all. Maybe an appeal to the community that y’all can’t continue like this without more help would encourage those with the ability to lighten the load?

MiddledAgedGuy,

Running with your holiday meal analogy, it warrants adding that while we can’t stop people from coming to the table, we are able to make them leave.

Of course the onus to this would be on the hosts of the meal, or in this case the admins and mods of Beehaw. I’m sure that’s a difficult, unpleasant, and often thankless task.

zauberin,

I don’t use Lemmy so much anymore, I settled on mastodon after everything (it just had a much more mature ecosystem imo) but I still come back to beehaw to lurk because of the community. I think that moving to another app is the way, anyone with an account here likely has another anyways if they like federation since the biggest instances are defederated from here (blahaj was for me). Best wishes for the mods, and I’ll probably still be here after whatever happens even if I’m not interacting a lot.

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