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 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.

I would be disappointed. I like the content from Beehaw and I enjoy being able to see it in my federated feed. I also think Beehaw fits a good niche in the Fediverse that would otherwise leave a hole if it was not there. I also think beehaw is a good influence on the Fediverse as a whole.

Have you considered that a part of your goal could be to make things better for disenfranchised people in a more general way? I think your presence in the Fediverse has a positive effect that goes beyond your own instance. And I think that’s worth preserving.

Good riddance, Beehaw is terrible. It was maybe the single biggest exporter of concern-trolling about lemmy.ml and to my knowledge still entertains absurdly reactionary comms for no reason (though I haven’t brushed up on my lore in a while). Go make your blue Raddle.

More constructively: Having your “Northern Star” be “intentionally vague” is not a good practice. Having clear rules is a much better way to avoid falling into “what did the mod who reviewed the report feel like doing at the time?” arbitration issues. If you want to serve disenfranchised communities well,* then have that be the foundation and clearly define what that means and why you are doing it.

*My experience with this was that Beehaw was more about first world radlibs patting themselves on the back, but I digress

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Lol. Lmao even.