While I would understand your reasoning for doing so, I would be disappointed to see it happen. There’s decent discussions on Beehaw that I enjoy taking part in, however if you guys decided to defederate or switch to a different platform entirely, I doubt that I would make another account somewhere else to follow. I like Beehaw’s content, but I have enough accounts to keep track of these days after everything split from Reddit, so it would ultimately be a loss for me.

I’m not sure if this is a commonly-held opinion for those of us outside of Beehaw, though.

I’m subbed to some communities on Beehaw and I would miss them. But not enough to make an account on Beehaw to get them back.

Defederating Beehaw would not only weaken it as an instance, but remove its positive influence from the wider fediverse. The big platforms wield so much power and influence and money, the smaller upstarts need to connect as much as possible to stand a chance at relevance as a credible alternative. We’re all better together. I really hope you reconsider.

You’ve already defederated lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, so I don’t care

Right now, we feel that Lemmy and ActivityPub have downsides that are limiting us from achieving that goal.

Could you expand on this? How exactly does these things prevent you from Being Nice, if that’s the goal of your community?

I feel like I’ve given my answer to this question regarding Beehaw once before…

But as I see it, the main driving force and overall source of value for services like Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc., is federation. That is to say, federation among a wide variety of different users and servers across the fediverse using protocols like ActivityPub is what sets this entire thing apart from legacy centralized and corporate social media, like Reddit or “X”.

I was initially on Beehaw myself and I liked the mature and kind atmosphere, but I ended up splitting for Kbin due to issues with defederation (on top of being curious and interested in Kbin as an alternative software to lemmy). But whether we’re talking about “Beehaw.org” or “Kbin.social”, in my view the federation is a huge part of the appeal, and I wouldn’t see myself continuing to use a server if it cut itself off from the rest of the network, regardless of whether they did it for “good reasons” or not.

Like, if Beehaw wants to be just a significantly smaller and more highly moderated centralized alternative to Reddit, that feels like a pretty weak pitch which, at best, might end up with a community roughly the size of a classic forum. I’m not really interested in that. I want the Fediverse to succeed as a decentralized, open, scalable, and community-moderated alternative to legacy social media. Frankly, my interest in Beehaw as a community hinges completely on it being a part of that movement or not.

I can understand how federation may have posed significant challenges towards your goal of detailed moderation and creating a safe and friendly space, but only in the sense that you were possibly not fully prepared for the level of exposure to a large number of federated users. But even so, if Beehaw is ever to grow into something bigger (which, to be honest, is not a given, especially if you set out on your own as just another disconnected and insular social media website), you will eventually have to deal with the harsh reality that the kind of moderation that you’re interested in doing is going to be a significant challenge as your community scales, federated or not. (For example, you may be prepared to moderate content in English, but are you prepared to moderate content in other languages? How will you know when someone starts spreading disinformation and hate speech in Burmese?)

Finally, I think you might want to consider the general movement towards federated social media. Between ActivityPub and the Fediverse, Meta’s interest in federating Threads, BlueSky being developed around federation to some extent, federation support in things like WordPress, and a number of other social media platforms tip-toeing their way into the idea, I personally feel that there is a pretty interesting paradigm shift happening right now. Some of that has to do with moderation, responsibility and government pressure on big tech, I think.

But nevertheless, social media is gradually moving towards federation, and I think that’s a good thing for the internet as a whole. You nice people at Beehaw will really have to search yourselves to determine whether you see the value in federation (both in terms of connecting people, but also in terms of allowing various communities to self-moderate to some extent) or not.

I do hope you’ll stay, even though it means facing the growing pains of moderation challenges sooner rather than later, because the fediverse is better with us all connected and communicating together. I’ll be sticking with the fediverse with or without Beehaw, but I do wish you all luck in your goals should you decide to set out on your own.

Why do you care what other instances think about it? I’m honestly asking and expecting an answer here. This isn’t a sassy question.

You built a wall and now you’re asking people outside of that wall what it feels for you to leave. Well, I’d care if I could see what’s inside the wall, but I can’t. I tried subscribing and it was impossible.

So why do you care what people outside of your wall think? Again, I expect an answer here.

To be honest, I probably wouldn’t notice. I don’t think I follow anything on Beehaw and I don’t see much content from there. I tried to join a while ago when I first joined Lemmy, but was never approved. I kind of thought it was already a pretty closed off community, so it wouldn’t really change my opinion much. It would be sad for your users who will probably not receive benefit they otherwise would, but if that’s what they want, then either you’ll provide it or someone else will.

Edit: Apparently I don’t see anything from you because my instance was already defederated by you. I guess that explains it.

I don’t think you guys cared when you defederated from the rest of the fediverse and turned up your nose at everyone else. I’m not sure why you care now. You guys go and do your thing, but I don’t think you’re very relevant to the fediverse.

You speak very vaguely, and I don’t think you’re being fully honest with your reasoning, but by this point, I don’t think it really matters.

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I mean, the very fact that you’re asking this on a different instance is kinda your answer.

Beehaw isn’t relevant to the fediverse as a whole. I don’t see there being any downside (to the fediverse) to y’all staying federated, to y’all staying with lemmy as your forum but defederating totally, increasing the instances you’re defederated from, or abandoning the software for anything else.

Don’t take that wrong, I’m glad someone is willing to try the experiment y’all are doing, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s just that beehaw has never been relevant to the rest of lemmy. That was never the goal (as you said). I have an account there that I rarely use because it isn’t really part of the fediverse at all. Beehaw is its own thing that might as well not be connected.

I dunno that it’s a good use of resources to try a new forum solution, when lemmy is viable for that currently, but that’s a different subject than what you’re asking.

And, since your goals don’t include being a kind of example, nor existing as a beacon on the fediverse for people of like mind to find, I would say just defederate totally.

Without the loaded malice of some of these comments, sincerely, I forgot beehaw existed. It looked like the place to go during the migration and was constantly getting good word of mouth on all the Reddit move channels. Then the barrier to entry went up with the essay application, which was 100% fine as a decision, but obviously made it a hassle for the masses trying to find a home. Couple that with no open community creation, leaving no landing spot for niche communities and I went elsewhere.

But even after taking a shotgun approach and making accounts on multiple instances when stability and federation was still struggling, beehaw started defederating from everything. Again, 100% your decision. But the reasons were often blatantly showing that beehaw was not willing to engage in the learning process of this new interface with the rest of us.

So, again no malice, I literally forgot beehaw existed till seeing this post. So if your admins and users think you can achieve whatever elsewhere, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.

After many hours of talks, it became clear 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.

I have two questions.

1. What are your long-term goals for your platform?

2. What are the downsides to Lemmy/ActivityPub stopping you from reaching those goals?

Also to answer the main question I’d like for it to stay but at the same time, the last time I checked Beehaw had around 700-ish Monthly active users. That means there probably wouldn’t be that much of an impact on the general discourse of Lemmy more broadly.

That seems like enough to sustain a pretty big community on a private server even if about half of you left. So if you guys do decide to leave I wish you the best.

You don’t really explain why activityPub is limiting you. It’s hard to help you here.

Beehaw seemed too fast and heavyhanded with defederating a while back. IMO, defederation is really a “last resort” style of option, not a “first response,” so Beehaw using it essentially as a “first response” to some of the bigger instances kinda told me that Beehaw wanted to be off on an island by itself. Like it wanted to be a private forum instead of a Lemmy instance.

I don’t miss Beehaw, and Beehaw disappearing from Lemmy wouldn’t matter to me, because as far as I am concerned it kinda already did that.

The purpose of Lemmy is to be open and connected, not a private walled garden. If it doesn’t fit what you want, then use something else.

Basically, what is there for 90% of Lemmy users to miss, if you effectively banned 90% of Lemmy users by defederating the biggest instances in the first place? They already dont interact or see your content, unless they’re using multiple accounts, which would be no different if Beehaw wasnt a Lemmy instance at all.