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Thinking about the direction of Beehaw (beehaw.org)

submitted 10 months ago by admin@beehaw.org to c/chat@beehaw.org

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Over the years I’ve been trying to encapsulate, as simply as possible, what Beehaw interactions would look like ideally.

I kept coming back to all of my personal memories having holiday meals (Thanksgiving and Christmas for example) with very close family and friends.

Thinking back through decades of these meetings, I cannot remember anything but everyone being kind and charitable in action as well as speech.

Many pages of very thoughtful and reasonable philosophic explanations have been written, on our sidebar, about the behavioral expectations of Beehaw.

Let’s go back to the holiday meals for a moment and imagine having an open invitation for anyone to join. What do you think the outcomes would be?

This is the problem that our endeavor is experiencing. The open nature of ActivityPub (allowing anyone to join our table) is defeating our purpose.

The administrators, moderators and community members have been thinking about this for several months.

I, personally, believe that we all will come to a comfortable consensus moving forward.

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[–] johnjamesautobahn@beehaw.org 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I’m new to the fediverse and chose to join Beehaw because the community interactions feel positive like an active private forum that I’m on, but with the structural flexibility of a federated platform.

There is definitely a tone change between local communities and the outside federated feed, but I worry that secession and isolation will lead to community atrophy— it’s already a small instance and without the cross-pollination of outside users and content it may not have enough momentum to succeed

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I don't think the goal of Beehaw is momentum or growth, or at least that's the way it's seemed to me

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think the worry is less about growth, and more about dying out. Too much external input can drown out the local conversation, but also too little external input can put too much pressure on the members to generate content, leading to burnout and also killing conversations.

It's a precarious balance between "so much that it gets out of control" and "so little that there is nothing left out".

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 1 points 10 months ago

See my other comment on this thread, I think it applies to your comment too

[–] Reil@beehaw.org 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Without substantial growth after being cut off from the activity of the fediverse, Beehaw would not be large enough to stave off serious atrophy. The lemmy/kbin end of the fediverse is already very slow to begin with.

[–] interolivary@beehaw.org 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Beehaw was around much before the current "population explosion" of the Fediverse, though, and by all accounts was doing just fine. Naturally it didn't have as much content as it currently does, but the sort of reddit-esque content flood that some people seem to need really isn't a requisite for sites to thrive.

I'm on a small lemmy/reddit -like content aggregator / forum that has maybe a few hundred users, and while it's certainly quiet compared to Lemmy nowadays, it's got a small active community and nobody feels like it would need more "volume" to be a nice place to be.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 6 points 10 months ago

Yea for sure ...

I've said it a few times in similar conversations before ... the big-corp mega social media era (~2008-2023, Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Instagram) has had huge cultural effects on the internet that go way beyond whether you're on one of the platforms or not and which will ripple into the future for a long while.

We'd all do well to consider what parts of that culture we carry in our expectations and behaviours ... and the whole doom-scrolling through an all-encompassing feed as a form of entertainment expectation is a big one. Social media always needs to be a big place ... is another one.

These aren't all necessarily evil ... but as universal expectations they certainly aren't good either, IMO.