Beehaw on Lemmy: The long-term conundrum of staying here
Beehaw on Lemmy: The long-term conundrum of staying here
Yesterday, you probably saw this informal post by one of our head admins (Chris Remington). This post lamented some of the difficulties we’re running into with the site at this point, and what the future might hold for us. This is a more formal post about those difficulties and the way we currently see things.
Up front: we aren't confident in the continued use of Lemmy. We are working through how best to make the website live up to the vision of our documents—and simply put, the vast majority of the limitations we're running into are Lemmy's at this point. An increasing amount of our time is spent trying to work around or against the software to achieve what we want rather than productively building this community. That leaves us with serious questions about our long-term ability to stay on this platform, especially with the lingering prospect of not having the people needed to navigate backend stuff.
Long-time users will no doubt be aware of our advocacy for moderator tools that we think the platform needs (and particularly that we need). Our belief in the importance and necessity of those tools has only hardened with time. Progress of those tools, however—and even organizing work on them—has been pretty much nonexistent outside of our efforts from what we can see.[^1] In the three months since we started seriously pushing the ideas we'd like to see, we’re not aware of any of them being seriously considered—much less taken up or on the way to being incorporated into Lemmy.
In fact: even within the framework of Lemmy's almost nonexistent roadmap and entirely nonexistent timetable on which to expect features it has been made clear to us that improving federation or moderation on the platform are not big priorities.[^2] We have implicitly been told that if this part of the software is to improve we will need to organize that from scratch. And we have tried that to be clear. Our proposal is (and has been) paying people bounties for their labor toward implementing these features, in line with paying all labor done on our behalf—but we've received mixed messages from the top on whether this would be acceptable. (Unclear guidance and general lack of communication is symptomatic of a lot of our relation with the Lemmy devs in the past few months.)
Things aren't much better on the non-moderator side of things. The problems with databases are almost too numerous to talk about and even Lemmy's most ardent supporters recognize this as the biggest issue with the software currently. A complete rewrite is likely the only solution. Technical issues with the codebase are also extensive; we've made numerous changes on our side because of that. Many of the things we're running into have been reported up the chain of command but continue to languish entirely unacknowledged. In some cases bugs, feature requests, and other requests to Lemmy devs have explicitly been blown off—and this is behavior that others have also run into with respect to the project. Only very recently have we seen any overtures at regular communication—and this communication has not hinted at any change in priorities.
All of what was just described has been difficult to get a handle on—and having fewer users, less activity, and more moderators has not done a whole lot to ease that. We honestly find that the more we dig and the more we work to straighten out issues that pop up, the more pop out and the more it feels like Lemmy is structurally unsound for our purposes. (One such example of what we’re working with is provided in the next section.)
In summary: we believe we can either continue to fight the software in basically every way possible, or we can prioritize building the community our documents preach. It is our shared belief that we cannot, in the long-term, do both; in any case, we're not interested in constantly having to fight for basic priorities—ones we consider extremely beneficial to the health of the overall Lemmy network—or having to unilaterally organize and recruit for their addition to the software. We are hobbyists trying to make a cool space first and foremost, and it's already a job enough to run the site. We cannot also be surrogates for fixing the software we use.
PenguinCoder: A brief sketch of the technical perspective
I've said a few words about this topic already, here and here. Other Beehaw admins have also brought some concerns to the Lemmy devs. Those issues still exist. To be clear: this is a volunteer operation and Lemmy is their software; they have a right to pick and choose what goes into it and what to put a priority on. But we have an obligation to keep users safe and secure, and their priorities increasingly stifle our own.
In the case of this happening for open source projects, the consensus is to make your own fork. But:
The problem with forking Lemmy is in starting from all the bad that is inherently there, and trying to make it better. That is way more work than starting fresh with more developers. IE, not using Rust for a web app and UI, better database queries from the start, better logging/functions from the start; not adding on bandaids. A fork of Lemmy will have all of Lemmy's problems but now you're responsible for them instead.
We don't need a fork, we need a solution.
To give just one painful example of where an upstream solution is sorely needed: the federation, blocking, and/or removal of problem images.
- You post an image to Beehaw.
- Beehaw sends your content out to every other server it's federated with
- Federated server accepts it (beehaw.org is on their allowlist), or rejects it (beehaw.org is on their denylist)
- If the server accepts it, a copy of your post or comment including the images are now on that receiving server as well as on the server you posted it to. Federation at work.
- Mod on beehaw.org sees your post doesn't follow the rules. Removes it from beehaw.org. The other instances Beehaw pushed this content to, do not get that notice to remove it. The copy of your content on Beehaw was removed. The copy of your content on other servers was not removed.
- The receiving federated instance needs to manually remove/delete the content from their own server
- For a text post or comment that's removed, this can be done via the admin/mod tools on that instance
- For a post or comment including a thumbnail, uploaded images, etc; that media content is not removed. It's not tracked where in Lemmy that content was used at. Admin removal of media commences. This requires backend command line and database access, and takes about a dozen steps per image; sometimes more.
There are dozens of issues—some bigger, some smaller—like this that we have encountered and have either needed to patch ourselves or have reported up the chain without success.
Alternatives and the way forward
If possible the best solution here is to stay on Lemmy—but this is going to require the status quo changing, and we’re unsure of how realistic that is. If we stay on Lemmy, it is probable that we will have to do so by making use of a whitelist.
For the unfamiliar, we currently use a blacklist—by default, we federate with all current and newly-created nodes of the Fediverse unless we explicitly exclude them from interacting with our site. A switch to a whitelist would invert this dynamic: we would not federate with anybody unless we explicitly choose to do so. This has some benefits—maintaining federation in some form; staying on Lemmy; generally causing less entropy than other alternatives, etc. But the drawbacks are also obvious: nearly everything described in this post will continue, blacklist or whitelist, because a huge part of the problem is Lemmy.
Because of that we have discussed almost every conceivable alternative there is to Lemmy. We are interested in the thoughts of this community on platforms you have all used and what our eventual choice is going to be, but we are planning on having more surveys in the future to collect this feedback. We ask that you do not suggest anything to us at this time, and comments with suggestions in this thread will be removed.
As for alternatives we’re seriously considering right now: they’re basically all FOSS; would preserve most aspects of the current experience while giving us less to worry about on the backside of things (and/or lowering the bar for code participation); are pretty much all more mature and feature-rich than Lemmy; and generally seem to avoid the issues we’re talking about at length here. Downsides are varied but the main commonality is lack of federation; entropy in moving; questions of how sustainable they are with our current mod team; and more cosmetic things like customization and modification.
We’re currently investigating the most promising of them in greater depth—but we don’t want to list something and then have to strike it, hence the vagueness. If we make a jump, that will be an informed jump. In any case logistics mean that the timetable here is on the order of months. Don’t expect immediate changes. As things develop, we’ll engage the community on what the path forward is and how to make it as smooth as possible.
[^1]: Other administrators have probably vocally pushed for these things, but we’re not aware of any public examples we can point to of this taking place. Their advocacy has not produced results that we're aware of in any case, which is what matters. [^2]: Perhaps best illustrated by the recent Lemmy dev AMA. We’ll also emphasize that Beehaw’s admin team is not alone in the belief that Lemmy devs do not take mod tools or federation issues particularly seriously.
A few high level notes about this post, given some of the discussions and behavior in the informal chat post by Chris the other day:
- We understand this is perhaps the biggest crossroads we've hit yet, and a seriously big issue. It's understandable that you might have strong emotions about the Fediverse as a whole, or the action we are taking as an instance. If you are not from our instance and you come into this thread with a short hostile comment about how we aren't respecting your views or that we should never have joined the Fediverse in the first place, your comments will be removed and you will be banned.
- Any suggestions for what we should do, that involve actual effort or time, such as finding developers to fix the problems we've had should be accompanied with an explanation of how you're going to be helping. We've lodged countless github tickets. We've done our due diligence, so please treat this post with good faith.
- Similarly doing nothing more than asking for more details on the technical problems we are struggling with, without a firm grasp of the existing issues with Lemmy or the history of conversations and efforts we've put in is not good faith either. We're not interested in people trying to pull a gotcha moment on us or to make us chase our tails explaining the numerous problems with the platform. If you're offering your effort or expertise to fix the platform you're welcome to let us know, but until you've either submitted merge requests or put in significant effort (Odo alone has put in hundreds of hours trying to document, open tickets, and code to fix problems) we simply may not have the time to explain everything to you.
- I want to reiterate the final paragraph here in case you missed it - we are not looking to make any changes in the short term. We expect it would be at the minimum several months before we made any decisions on possible solutions to the problems we've laid out here.
- Finally, I want to say that I absolutely adore this community and what we've all managed to build here and that personally, I really care about all of you. I wish we weren't here and I wish this wasn't a problem we are facing. But we are, so please do not hesitate to share your feelings 💜
98The Lemmy dev AMA really shook my faith in the future of lemmy itself. That being said, I'll support and stand behind you, regardless of what you decide. If we make a new platform, I'll follow, if we choose to stand our ground and make the best of it, I'll help do my part. I believe in Beehaw and I'm proud to be part of the community.
59I'm also quite unnerved by the responses to @Gaywallet@beehaw.org in regards to the promotion of instances that spread bigoted ideas and harrass other instances on join-lemmy.
The complete disregard seems to run counter to the ideology that beehaw is built on. It becomes clearer to me as time goes on that beehaw and lemmy have very different (and in some cases opposite) goals and priorities in mind. I for one would be completely onboard for a switch. I've admittedly used beehaw and lemmy in general less and less as the moderation issues and shift of tone in conversations have increased.
I think the admins and moderators of beehaw have been doing a wonderful job with the hand dealt regardless.
52As an admin of furry.engineer, pawb.fun, and pawb.social (our lemmy instance) i have to concur. After just a few months, i’m just… tired.
Keeping the hardware happy is easy and fun, but moderation is nearly impossible. Also the waves of reactionary argumentative users from instances with open sign up are getting out of hand.
I’m about ready to switch to whitelist federation personally, but would need to build said whitelist. I will monitor and see where beehaw goes from here, because if our moderation team agrees, we will probably take similar action.
I have no faith in the lemmy devs to take these issues seriously. Has anyone looked at kbin to see what is different in terms of moderation?
49I am so tempted to say F-it and just start my own ActivityPub Fediverse project to replace Lemmy. It's such a daunting commitment, though, and we each have our lives to live. I wish the admins of Beehaw all the luck and success in what they're having to wrangle with. It's too bad the Lemmy maintainers are so unwilling to work toward fixing the clear major pain points of the software.
44I'm a simple man. Where Beehaw goes, I follow.
I have had enough of attempting to engage others in good faith, and assuming everyone is an rational actor.
Beehaw is a community that chooses to be excellent to one another, and to not be garbage human beings. I'm on board with that. Fuck the toxicity everywhere else. I'm with you and will die on this proverbial hill.
37All the admins here have given me plenty of reason to trust that you'll make the right decision for Beehaw, whether that's staying or moving. This is a good place and I'll stick with you no matter what you decide.
36All I can say is it would be a big, big loss.
Beehaw made me believe in the idea of building a healthy network, especially in the beginnings.
I remember the day I asked Chris to federate with us, we used allow-lists, and maybe this should have been the way to go, considering how much trash has happened in the meantime.I totally agree with your criticism about the state of the platform itself, slow progress, missing and broken mod-tools etc. unfortunately it seems that development cannot keep up with the speed of growth and the associated demands.
So, imho, you make the Fediverse a better place that's why I hope you stay ;)
36The thing is, when Beehaw is no longer in Lemmy, it will be a regular VBulletin, phpBB, Discourse, etc. community. Nothing wrong with that.
The question will be: if the change is made, will the users follow? Because a lot of users in this post https://lemmy.ca/post/4990126 have said that they prefer Beehaw to stay in Lemmy because it is a Reddit alternative. It is big risk.
32Honestly, I'm happy to join if beehaw move on to something like a forum and not-federated. IMO (which may sound selfish to some but) I join beehaw because of the vibe and the rules that I'm happy to follow. I'm not really joining beehaw because I want to use it as a Reddit replacement, but I want to interact with the community. I feel like Beehaw identity doesn't really tie to lemmy or on specific software.
So whatever if it federates or not will not really affect me much. I only speak for myself, of course. For others, it might not be the same case. I feel safe commenting and talking in beehaw own community, so... whatever the decision, maybe I'm happy to stay/follow with beehaw. Thank you for the transparency and hard work you all put into beehaw :)
31I'm grateful to people who build safe spaces, whether online or IRL. And I'm sorry when they struggle to find the tools they need.
If you decide to switch to another plateform that fits your needs better, I'll follow you.
28I'm still a fairly new member, and for the most part, Beehaw has required the least amount of pruning to create a timeline of content I actually want to see. Being on the sidelines and hearing how the Lemmy devs have reacted to various issues, it sounds like they are very emotionally immature and most likely will drive the platform to be "open" in their own interpretation.
I appreciate the hard work that the mods and admin team here do and it seems like the goals of Beehaw and Lemmy have become antagonistic towards each other. I still haven't seen any really good implementations of the fediverse in general, so I have no loyalty to that ecosystem.
I think you guys know what you are doing and are smart enough to pick the best platform if that will ultimately make your lives easier. I don't think Beehaw should feel like a job (and especially should not require the hours of a job), so I'd support moves that would actually make it a fun project. On Lemmy, it seems like there are a lot of barriers keeping the project from being enjoyable.
28Wow. This is a lot.
First off, I want to thank all the devs, admins, and mods, for all the time they have put in on Beehaw. I cannot even begin to fathom what you folks go through and the time you have put in to give us this space. All I can give you is a few bucks and my heartfelt appreciation.
Now to the heart of the matter (now I've got that Don Henley tune in my head.): If the developers of Lemmy are not serious about mod tools, then yeah, time to book. Moderation is kind of a no-brainer when it comes to running a successful community, especially one built on the vision and values established here at Beehaw. If we have to go with a non-FOSS solution for a bit, I'm down, as long as the spirit of this space remains intact. That is non-negotiable to me. I'm so done with mainstream social media, that if anything happened to this space, I'd just settle for my Firefish account, and just be done with everything else. Hell, I may just retreat to Discord where a bunch of my gaming buddies are.
But as long as long as Beehaw exists in some form, I'm there.
27A fork of Lemmy will have all of Lemmy’s problems but now you’re responsible for them instead.
Most of this web dev stuff is out of my area of expertise, but this? I felt this in my soul.
27Late to this discussion, but speaking as a Reddit refugee and a very average user, I'll follow beehaw wherever it goes...
...but I will probably also fire up my nearly-forgotten kbin account as well.
The fediverse is far from ready for the challenges that it faces but I'm very interested in its development and future. I really think it or something like it is what the internet is trending towards. I'm quite lucky being in some of priveleged categories so I don't face the level of harassment many fellow beeple do very day.
I think we have a good thing going here and it's so freeing to read and comment without having to read past all the usual hate and bad behaviour.
So Im happy to lurk in one place and be myself in another. Do what you guys have to do. I'm in.
26I'd honestly love it if Beehaw went somewhere else. Lemmy is reminding me more and more of reddit. I'm starting to feel like this whole place is bad for my mental health.
The only thing I will say is Beehaw users are generally not the problem.
I can donate again, but it doesn't sound like that's the problem here.
26I'm sure I'm saying nothing new with all the comments here, but I thought I'd comment anyways:
I don't think it would be the end of the world for Beehaw to migrate to a new non-federated platform, and I would probably maintain my account there as well. I honestly think Beehaw and Lemmy might both be worse off for it though.
When Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works a while ago I made a second account to browse the defederated side of Lemmy; but I've found I rarely use that account anymore. The number of bad (and often hurtful) takes I've seen coming from the wider Lemmy community are exhausting and I can't be bothered to look through them most of the time.
Right now I feel (aside from all the work our overworked admin team deals with) Beehaw is in the perfect sweet spot. It has the welcoming and protective environment, which I feel is absolutely necessary; and it has activity from select instances that helps keep it interesting and fresh.
I think if Beehaw left Lemmy, I would miss activity from the friendlier instances, and I'm sure they would miss the activity from Beehaw as well. If Beehaw left, I genuinely think the whole of Lemmy would be just a little less safe and a little less friendly.
Having said that, it sounds like the current model is simply unsustainable, and maintaining the integrity of all of Lemmy is not your job. I hope you can find a solution that makes everyone happy while still maintaining your sanity.
My personal suggestion would be to contact the admins of some of the friendlier instances and maybe try making a shared suggested whitelist that just has confirmed friendly instances with admin teams you trust. Each instance could obviously alter their own whitelist, but it could be a good starting point for any new instances who are looking for safe instances to federate with (pending approval).
Good luck to you all in navigating this issue
26Whatever does end up happening to Beehaw, o7 (salute) to all the hardworking mods and those working to maintaining Beehaw.
25Hugs, y'all. Do what you feel is best. <3
I've been on Discuit more than Lemmy, but honestly? If Beehaw defederates or switches to a different platform, I'm more likely to visit Beehaw on a daily basis than I have been. I just prefer well-tended walled gardens. I grew up with forums being the way. Smaller communities feel the best. Even when the software base is good, the community management part is ... complicated with the fediverse.
25I would love for beehaw to stay on lemmy, not necessarily for federation but for my personal ease of use. I understand your issues however and would not be opposed to moving to another base. My main concern would be the availability of an (or possibly several) open source app to participate on the platform, because platforms that are browser-only/PWAs I end up not using on my phone because it never works right for me. And if I don't use them on my phone, I don't use them at all. So for me the main advantage of beehaw on lemmy is being able to use apps like Eternity, Jerboa, and a host of other options to browse and participate in it.
23Personally, I wouldn't mind if Beehaw changes forum software. I first came here to check out Lemmy on what looked like a safe instance, yes, but I stayed because I appreciated the calm community. I stopped participating when the Reddit migration happened, however, and Beehaw got more attention than before from other instances, and posters who don't appreciate Beehaw's policies. TBF however, recently I've gotten into more traditional forums, so perhaps I'm biased. But I believe that Beehaw is more than a Lemmy instance.
23I'd rather not see Beehaw split from Lemmy but if you feel you have to then I for one wouldn't mind seeing it using a phpbb board.
Glory to the old forums! /old grumpy mode
22I'm very sad to see this. The saddest thing is the state of development I guess and this is just the fallout. I do hope that you will try an allowlist at first (at least before deciding to leave the fediverse altogether) and maybe struggle through until things get better (I do believe they will get better; software development is just inherently not a super fast process).
The problem with forking Lemmy is in starting from all the bad that is inherently there, and trying to make it better. That is way more work than starting fresh with more developers. IE, not using Rust for a web app and UI, better database queries from the start, better logging/functions from the start; not adding on bandaids.
FWIW I actually think Rust is the perfect language for the backend. It's just that the quality of the code in Lemmys backend isn't great (from my limited experience). You can write bad code in any language. What you really need are professionals that are good at coding (unfortunately this is rare even among professionals). (Humbly) I am one such person. If you are serious about trying to start a better Lemmy alternative from scratch, I'd love to be involved in the backend discussions.
Perhaps Beehaws issues could be something a new development community could gather around. My perception is that you have a lot of non-technical people who would be great at project management, requirements analysis, UX design and that sort of thing. This is kind of what Lemmy has been lacking from the start.
I am not part of Beehaw, but that's only since I admin another instance. I could see myself having joined Beehaw if it wasn't for that. So again, if you are really serious about a potential new development, I'd love to be in on it.
21I think you will find this conundrum on any software you switch to. FOSS is hard, and needs a big enough community of motivated people with the right skills to make a project successful. People are largely doing this work as hobbies; it's hard to fund such projects. Doable but hard.
The most obvious alternative to go for is the Reddit code base which was open source and has been forked as Saidit. This is the most likely place to find something mature enough and feature rich enough for what you may need but again whether things will progress is another conundrum as who else is maintaining or using that codebase?
Lemmy and any other project like Kbin will need people and work to get it where you want, not just suggestions and a list of requests. The problem is not a lack of interest in achieving what you want from Lemmy, it is realistically that it is a small project team with a big task on their hands and Beehaw are not it's only users.
Ultimately Lemmy may not be the software now to do what you want for your community. Federation may also not be the right thing for a community of your ethos. Maybe the simplest solution is complete defederation and build the community in an environment you can completely control, even with the limits Lemmy current provides with it's software. Come back to the fediverse when you feel the software matches the ambitions, but in the meantime build the community you want.
19My biggest thanks to your continued transparency and will to keep us informed on what's going on in the upper offices of the hive.
If Beehaw eventually moves, I'll likely follow, but I fully acknowledge how scary that "restart" could be.
18I do not have any solutions but want to thank and show support of the admins for the continued thoughtfulness and transparency about the issues the site faces.
I am surprised by the ELI5 on how Lemmy federation works. I guess I assumed it was somehow P2P, not a mass entanglement of duplicated content, which as mentioned is a nightmare for problematic and/or illegal content.
I don't know how the creators expected Lemmy to grow with each instance's storage and hosting costs also growing exponentially as the fediverse expands.
18An outsider point of view
Lemmy started as a passion project and been growing slowly over years and then out of nowhere a small group of developers had to not only adjust to new influx of people, but also a barrage of ideas, suggestions and comments on what they should prioritize. I'm not sure how much experience different people here have with open source development, but the amount of changes in 3 months Lemmy developers managed to do is impressive to say the least. And there will never be open source project that manages to satisfy everyone.
Fundamentally people assume that with open source project all ideas will get implemented either by developers or if someone does the work and makes a pull request. But like with every other project the maintainers are allowed to have their own vision and not implement everything someone asks for or have different priorities or specific structure in mind.
Beehaw always tried to create something where they have complete control over everything. And that worked with federation when they were one of a few "big" instances (some people might not know but Beehaw is 21 months old, opened on 2021-11-12), but once influx of new users came in the existing tools weren't enough to have the level of control they wanted. So they clsoed the doors on new users and isolated themselves and at the same time angered a big portion of fediverse users for taking advantage of new user influx but the cutting them off from the rest of the fediverse.
I'm not sure if people checked the posts where Beehaw listed features and tools they want and a lot of them are super tailored to Beehaw vision which is not in step with federated Lemmy as a whole.
I don't think that the Beehaw vision and fediverse can coexist as they have diametrically opposed ideas.
17I appreciate the transparency through all of this. It's nice to know about the problem while there's still some time to handle it. To be honest - I probably would not follow Beehaw to any new non-federated platform. Its nothing against Beehaw (I love this community and its admins) but I'm just not convinced that we could ever attain enough regular users to keep critical mass on the niche topics I follow. That's the real advantage of Lemmy - all (well-behaved) instances get to share their user base.
Unfortunately, I also understand why staying on Lemmy might not be an option. Same with forking or using another Fedi software. Either way - I trust y'all to consider all the options and make the best choice. 🐝💙
17I wrote a big ol post that didn't post apparently. Anyway, I assume you have been looking at Postmill. If beehaw move I'm likely going to follow. Tbh without the fediverse, I would likely engage more often. I find that I dislike conversing with federated users because they come from a place with a different ethos. As a result I still have to deal with crap.
16Good luck with whatever you decide to do, but I won't be following to a new platform
16There exists ActivityPub library implementations in golang, just sayin'. It's a big lift to start anew but at least the low end protocol is there and golang is a good mature language for productivity and security.
DB is going to be to bottleneck and I'd build on ScyllaDB (or Cassandra) in a heartbeat. ScyllaDB on a single node is quite well behaved and auto-tuning, but from there these two can scale globally with scaled writes everywhere. I always architect with active/active in mind because at some point for some reason you need multiple sites even for just disaster recovery.
16Computer Science student here.
Forking Lemmy does fork its bad habits but doing so would at least give us the option of making direct improvements to the mod tools.
From what I've read, causing deleted content to get deleted quickly is a smaller change. Advertising that shortened deletion delay and giving the admins a "these keep our shit, yeet their federation privileges but check again every day and notify me when that changes" script wouldn't be too hard to create.
We might even be better off ignoring the Lemmy codebase for mod tools altogether. If we outright ignore cross-platform compatibility, we can make a mod tools API independent of Lemmy-proper that does what's needed and a JavaScript-controlled interface to sit on top or a separate toolset altogether.
I'm pretty busy right now but I rely on Beehaw for decent social media. I'd be willing to put a bit of time into it.
15At first I thought this might be an overreaction to be perfectly honest. But I just read through some of the Dev responses in the AMA... what the fuck is the issue with removing exploding heads from join-lemmy??
The other questions on the development itself weren't awesome but wow that comment chain about join-lemmy is something else.
I could overlook the CCP support if they keep it on their instances but funneling people into an instance like that... I'm not sure how to feel about Lemmy either TBH.
15Alternatives or not, I think it’d be very beneficial to document concept of operation that you want. That way you can either take pieces of these conops and tell lemmy devs what you want, or if you have your own project this will be its conops and you can guide developers towards features you need.
14I've been enjoying my time on Beehaw and Lemmy at large. I'm astounded that removed content isn't also marked for removal on other instances. That moderators have to duplicate each others efforts is actually nuts. That opens up every Lemmy instance to an insane risk of abuse.
I will stick around to see whats next for Beehaw. I have to say though, the reason I enjoy Lemmy specifically is that it is so much more readable than Twitter or traditional forums ever were. The nested structure of comments is not something I'll easily give up.
14I'm in favor of either option, honestly. A whitelist or complete migration to something else.
When I joined, I wasn't looking for a drop-in reddit replacement. I'd actually deleted my reddit account a few weeks before all the craziness went down because reddit and social news in general has a very bad habit of becoming toxic as shit.
Now, I get that I'm in a minority here. People left reddit and wanted something to replace it, but I don't know if Beehaw was ever the right instance for that specifically.
While I don't particularly care one way or the other about federation or the "Fediverse", what does worry me is whether or not the platform Beehaw migrates to is better maintained than Lemmy.
If moving to something new and relatively untested, there's a big risk that other, equally as important, development issues might crop up, especially if the dev team is relatively small.
I'm also curious to find out whether UX will be similar (eg. content aggregation with voting and whatnot) or if it'll be something closer to older forums, though I'm aware you don't want to really say anything until you're decided, so I guess answers to that can wait.
Anyway, I'll be interested to see what happens. Take your time, figure it out, and we'll see what happens over the next few weeks.
14From the AMA you linked it sounds like the Lemmy maintainers are just two and are unable to deal with all the missing features. They made it sound like it might stabilise in the future and they are still trying to make it scale.
I read their reply as this : there are many things to implement and moderation is not a priority compared to other features. Do you know if someone made a PR about adding more moderation features? Was it accepted or turned down?
12Just a random data point. This is my first time logging back into my beehaw account in a long time. Beehaw was my original lemmy instance and I really enjoyed the foundational ideals and communities the founders envisioned. I logged back in today because even on my main account on another instance, I'm so tired of all the terrible bigotry that I see in my all feed.
I personally really like the Lemmy interface as a user especially in an app, mobile browsing or desktop with certain browser add-ons. I know as a someone with their own instance (not my main account ref earlier) that the mod,sysadmin and dev work to keep it running is a lot. I too have database issues that I am super frustrated by. The mod tools are pretty much non existent.
With that said, I think that the whitelist may a viable option. The content needing moderated is likely mostly from federated instances. If beehaw were to isolate it's community or whitelist to a few trusted instances one would imagine the mod work would be lesser even with the minimal tools available. Purge the old content and continue forward as a community isolated but together in their goal to create a kind and friendly community.
Just my thoughts. I appreciate you beehaw admins.
12I'm really sorry for the difficulties you're facing now. I totally understand the frustration of feeling you're fighting the platform when all you want to do is provide a good experience for your users
At the same time though, I don't think we could ask for a better team to be helping push the Threadiverse forward. Thank you for all the effort you're putting in
I also think I owe an apology for offering help in the past and then flaking, to put it mildly
Wishing you all the best, wherever this takes you
12If nothing else, I think it's healthy to have a variety of sites like this. Not just different admins and servers, but different developers and infrastructure. Don't let some people control it all.
11If you decide to move and leave all the cack behind, I'm in.
I'll probably be more involved and would even be willing to chip in with a small subscription. That or registered users may also keep a lot of the trolls away.
11FYI replace "blacklist" with "deny list" and "whitelist" with "allow list".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_(computing)#Controversy_over_use_of_the_term
11That all sounds reasonable. I'll likely come with you when you make the move.
10Permanently Deleted
9Wow, there really are serious moderation issues. I can see what that's a huge amount of work to deal with.
9I'm not in any way tied to Lemmy specifically. I like the concept of voting posts up (and down), threaded comments, etc. But just like many different types of social services reside on top of the ActivityPub protocol, I would like to see something still working with ActivityPub. That was not really mentioned. But for me its about the UI and not Lemmy itself.
9I am well aware of the post requesting moderation changes from a few months ago, and on the informal post I suggested the AutoMod tools people have began developing could help. However, hearing the myriad of other issues you're facing, it does sound as though my suggestion would be a band-aid solution at best to a system that need changes from almost the ground up, but perhaps it could buy time to get the other changes developed.
Whatever direction your team decides to take Beehaw, I will be(e) happy for you, even if I don't follow it to the new service.
9While this is all sad to hear, I understand.
@alyaza@beehaw.org if you need an extra set of developer hands, let me know. I am between jobs atm, so I have a lot of free time where I could help 😃
9Use an allow list and make federated moderation a required agreement.
Short term: If you take down a post from the origin, set it up so that it submits an email or whatever. Follow back with federated servers within a week.
Long term: Advocate for this in the project. Gather support and consider forking a long term solution, unless a better platform presents itself.
This is a hard as hell problem but to be honest automated federation is not good in my book. I had so many problems with it in early mastodon to the point of building the first allow-list server, i'm not surprised to hear similar issues here.
9Thanks for giving such a comprehensive overview. I would definitely miss Beehaw if it went but I totally understand the rationale of it happens. Can't say I would 100% follow but only because I keep forgetting to browse all of the apps I have at the moment, without adding one more. Depends how much of a mess Lemmy becomes I guess.
8If the next platform won't be a fediverse/ActivityPub platform but an entirely new social network or another protocol, I hope there will be a way for existing beehaw.org users to migrate. I don't want to lose access to this community.
8I support any move, and would follow-- and probably be more active.
7So after some thinking about it, I assume you guys are probably looking at postmill as a possibility. I would absolutely come along for the ride. Absent the fediverse, I would probably post more often tbh.
7With the spam and garbage coming from the rest of the fediverse, I wouldn't blink if beehaw went fully private and refused to federate with anybody else. I'm on board with whatever the admins think will work.
6From a dev point of view, there's a relevant XKCD to this. And we all know it.
But at the same time, I've been thinking a lot of what you're saying here for quite a while regarding Lemmy in particular, and the modern Fediverse as a whole. I don't think the federation mechanisms used, even the federation strategy used, is scaleable to the type of userbase needed to get what many of the users are looking for from Lemmy.
Flipside, we all know that it's going to be pulling teeth to get people onto that new platform. That's why I never pulled the trigger on writing my take on it.
5I really enjoy the community here on Beehaw, even though I mostly lurk and rarely post/comment. I do support Beehaw and will stay even if the platform changes. That said - and I speak only for my own experience here - I don't subscribe to any categories outside of Beehaw itself, just because (a) I know how the fediverse can be, and (b) there's a LOT out there, and I like the simplicity of a smaller community. For those reasons, adopting a whitelist would not impact my experience on Beehaw much, if at all. Wanted to say this in case it resonates with other users. Thanks for all you do.
5Whatever your decision will be, I will be here experiencing it with you.
4I was on the fence when this post was made.
Now, not as much.
I think it might be a good idea. No. I think it is surely a good idea if the community wants to maintain the "nice place to be" feeling.
I have noticed multiple instances of unnecessary mudslinging that brought back feelings of Reddit over the past fortnight. Entire threads of users just telling eachother to fuck off and throwing insults out left and right. None of those users were local users.
I am not interested in having communities for everything. I don't want to ever need to report someone. If defederation is what it takes to avoid bots and trolls and crypto scammers and, most importantly, make things sane, safe, and healthy for moderators taking time out of their days to keep this service going...then so be it.
3I know I've ended up more of a lurker lately. That's not due to any particular ill feelings about beehaw or lemmy at large though. I think I just entered a bit more passive, consuming phase. Maybe falling back a bit to the old reddit habits? Mostly browsing for interesting new things.
Anyway.
This is probably due to me discovering Beehaw and Lemmy at the same time, but for me they're probably a lot more connected than I'm guessing they are for you old timers.
For me it's like.. the cozy corner of Lemmy you know? My home base while venturing out to other instances' communities. I'm definitely most likely to actually post or comment around here just because I like it here (though not exclusively however).
So.. now this place will most likely go dark in a while. What then?
This won't and can't be my home base by then and that's making me feel like.. should I start looking for a new home already?
Anything I produce with this account will either go go away or at least be locked down. Nor sure what happens to the federated copies of comments and posts on other communities when an instance shuts down.
So.. I don't know. It's starting to feel a bit like this account is nearing its end of life which makes it feel a bit odd to be actively using it.
A bit like chalk on the sidewalk while watching rain clouds come rolling in.
I.. don't know what my point is really.
I guess it feels a bit like it's time to start cultivating a new account, mirror my subscriptions and start using that instead, even for posting here. I don't know.
Anyone else feel something similar?
3Given the specifics of Beehaw's nature I'm surprised it's not whitelist driven already.
Perhaps there should be some set of common ground rules - an accord of sorts - that sites could sign on to and that would establish your white list.
2It is The Problem. Human Nature. If there ever was a solution it is too late. Vaya con Dios
1IDK if you saw it but 0.18.5 was released a while ago and it fixes federation of admin actions, which is one of the things you mentioned. https://lemmy.ml/post/5712032
I would hate to see you guys leave the Fediverse
1Fix for bug with federation of admin actions, does this help you?
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/commit/50589115e04a5d572627cfced97f41115df6e149
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3980
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3988
They seem to be taking it seriously, even considering making a hotfix for it despite v0.19.0 coming soon
edit: and now they've tagged a release candidate for 0.18.5 with this fix in it
1