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.
I already have another account I only use on beehaw, so I wouldn’t mind a compkete defederation or software change. Safer/nicer spaces are really hard to maintain without moderation control, and lemmy clearly isn’t there yet and might not be there for some time. If staying federated/on lemmy means beehaw administration/moderation ends up burnt out, I feel like it’s the right move to move.
As a personnal aside, the only thing that would prevent me from staying on beehaw is if you chose a closed-source platform (eg discord).
Anyway, thanks for the things you do and the way you do them !