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.
Honestly, I think the “be nice” motto has hard Pleasentville vibes.
I understand the motivation behind it, but at the end, you’re just creating a pseudo progressive hive mentality. I’ve already seen instances of this in some comments on your instance. Dissent was immediately equated with “hate”. That is not helpful at all - you’re only helping the self-righteousness of your mods, not your users and not your cause.
Defederating, that is, effectively shielding yourself even more from the rest of the world, will accelerate this process even more.
Of course, there are lines to draw, and finding these lines is not always easy, but in my experience, your lines are extremely vague and way too close to an underlying “party line”.
