lightly adapted from a cohost post i recently made:
Beehaw is a community i helped co-found and have been moderating for, at this point, almost a full one and a half years. from the beginning we had a whole plan for what the site is going to be, how it's going to work, what its future is, and how we can avoid the pitfalls of other communities. we spent months thinking about that stuff, putting it down on paper and reworking it, and then when we were finally satisfied we made the site. it was a big undertaking and it's cost us a lot of time and a fair amount of money to do. we had a false start of making our own go at it, which bluntly did not work and would not have worked if we'd stuck to it. we scrapped that. then we went to Lemmy, and we've been here ever since.
but for probably the first half year if not more it was literally about 10-15 of us. everything was being paid for out of pocket and we had very little idea what we were doing other than what we wanted to do. i'm sure this is quite obvious, but: it is hard to support a community of the same 10-15 people when you aggregate links. a good post got maybe five comments--most got literally zero. for like four months i burned out and basically didn't use the site, just popping in to catch up and moderate or approve users. it all felt nice but pretty pointless, honestly.
but then things started slowly picking up. we got new users (mostly through federation), and the users who churned out were eventually replaced at equal pace. one day, we started actively growing--not by a lot, maybe a few users a day if we were lucky, but something. we got made the top-featured instance on the main Lemmy website at some point, i guess because Lemmygrad was a bit too intimidating and we were not. people on Lemmy started adopting our instance as their instance and not just another nebulous, faceless Part Of The Federation.
but it was really in March of this year that things kicked off. we started really getting donations, and didn't have to pay for everything ourselves anymore, just most of the stuff. network effects started kicking in as people recommended the instance to their friends. in April, we got our biggest boost to that point when Reddit spooked people about its API--that added probably a dozen or more substantial contributors, a lot of whom are around and regulars. we briefly suffered a setback when we lost a week of content to a crash, but by this point the ball was rolling enough that this wasn't a setback.
and then, of course, last week Reddit dropped the nuke and many of its third-party app users are scrambling for something new. nonstop for the past week days i've been front-and-center in handling all of the new users, and we've had literally no problems with them. we have hundreds of new posts, everyone is meshing well, a lot of people love our vision--and critically, they're giving us money now!!! we have hundreds of dollars!!! we're actually self sufficient with their help!!! for the first time it feels like the thousands of hours and hundreds of dollars we've put in have gone somewhere and to something. it feels like there is an actual community, not just a hypothetical one that exists in cryptpad documents.
and what could be better than that, really?