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.

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.

I think the fediverse would be better off without Beehaw, so yeah, get off Lemmy and go build your own platform by yourself. I wish you the absolute best of luck, and thank you in advance for taking all the worst kind of people off the fediverse with you.

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

I always got death-cult vibes from beehaw. I expected their flame-out to be a lot more dramatig than this, though.

Late Reply: This is going to sound harsh but it’s true. I wouldn’t miss it. If Beehaw disappeared tomorrow I probably wouldn’t even notice, and I’m sure that would be the case for many other people here. The problem is that because Beehaw has defederated so aggressively from the largest instances and shut its doors to new users, and people just moved on, or didn’t notice or care. I spent most of my first days on Lemmy.world and consequently didn’t see a majority of the content from Beehaw, but I did see many upset users who had to Migrate from Beehaw due to the defederations since most of the content and communities they wanted access to wasn’t available to them on Beehaw.

Since Beehaw didn’t (and still doesn’t) have community creation enabled it never really had niche communities like other instances did, it is rather forgettable because of that, what most people will remember it for though is the defederations and having to migrate accounts to not be cut off from the rest of the fediverse.

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.

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.

Oh look, someone failed to absorb one of the lessons of Letter from Birmingham jail

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

I don’t think lemm.ee is federating correctly, but I’ll give my take here if some one can sees it.

Beehaw will go the way of every other reddit alternatives, because the existing community is not enough to sustain the critical mass of activity needed. In fact, with the current instance policy, Beehaw is struggling to sustain itself as is with federation, which will only get worse if you defederate.

I’m not sure why Beehaw refuse to use Lemmy’s white-list federation feature and selectively pick and choose who to federate with instead of going full scorched earth.

It’s ultimately up to the admins at Beehaw to make this choice, but I would like to say, grass is not always greener on the other side, defederation will harm Beehaw more than it helps.

the only thing of substance are links to your websites and discord

Ah okay so this is what this is about. Very creative way to peddle your shit.

Beehaw has already chosen not to be a part of the fediverse. There’s no real purpose in asking us; only you can resolve Beehaw’s identity crisis.

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

I would not like it.

I understand the issues for the people running Beehaw and they are totally real and understandable. That being said you have to appreciate that Beehaw is setting an example as one of the most popular instances on the Fediverse. What y’all are doing is not just limited to what you directly control but is also influencing this new and developing sphere that is the Fediverse. I understand that some people are resentful of how Beehaw enforces the rules of its own community, and I understand how a barrage of that can be extremely demotivating and tiresome. I have also heard about the absolutely despicable content that some mods have had to deal with which is extremely traumatizing which ideally shouldn’t have to be experienced by anyone. I would understand anyone who would want to never have to deal with that again since that would probably be my reaction.

In terms of ideas, I really appreciate that Beehaw is making a firm stand in the interest of free expression without being bogged down by prejudice and economic interests. The success of Beehaw compared to other instances demonstrates that the project y’all are working on is desired not only by Beehaw denizens such as myself but also those from general instances. This is despite what I assume is a barrage of negativity, complaints, trolling, and legitimately criminal behavior by those who do not support the kind of place which Beehaw is. I know it’s a big and unfair ask to want you guys to continue experiencing the things that cause you to want to make you abandon the fediverse, and honestly I wouldn’t blame you if you do, but it is very clear to me that the existence of Beehaw as it is is a huge draw to the fediverse and is establishing norms which can’t be accommodated outside of what we have here. Reddit sure as hell can’t offer what I’ve been experiencing on the fediverse, and I think that Beehaw is a huge reason for why that is.

You’re doing Truth social but with nice people. Very few people want to hang out in an echo chamber.

The foundation of your instance is a handful of sand, so I don’t think it matters if you stay or go.