There is a lot of discussion happening in the background of our project here. We could not anticipate all of the challenges that we were going to face a few years ago. One of the reasons for this was because we had no idea what our choice of a platform would bring.

Specifically, we chose Lemmy as the software that we would use to launch our endeavor to attempt a safe space for marginalized persons online.

In the first year or so, this choice was completely successful for a very small number of users. And then we all experienced an enormous influx of users when Reddit announced/implemented their shutting down of third party apps.

Since then there has been a huge number of people that have joined the Beehaw project. This tsunami of users initiated technical problems, and otherwise, that we could not foresee.

Thankfully and fortunately, we have had a couple of incredibly knowledgeable persons that have swooped in to ’save the day’ and keep this site running.

Unfortunately, these persons will NOT be able to continue to support the Beehaw project much further. They have life commitments and other factors, including careers and family life, that will prevent them from contributing to our project in an ongoing fashion.

All that being said, Lemmy (the software that Beehaw runs on) development is incredibly slow and is riddled with problems that makes administration/moderation very painful.

Therefore, we are left with some options that may feel uncomfortable to us. For example, we may want to consider leaving the Fediverse for another software platform that does NOT include ActivityPub. To explain, Fediverse/ActivityPub are very positive concepts on the foundational level. However, the Beehaw project is struggling to include this because most of our moderation/content/ethos is being jeopardized from OTHER federated instances (i.e. it, mostly, is NOT coming from within our own Beehaw registered user base).

The aforementioned persons, that have ’swooped in to save the day’, have been discussing/working with us to come up with the best solutions that would enable the Beehaw project to continue while NOT needing incredibly experienced/technically adept persons around.

Right now, we are testing alternative software platforms and evaluating them based on everything that we want Beehaw to become in the future.

Thank you all for your continued support of the Beehaw project and entrusting us to make this happen.

  • Renacles
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    1 year ago

    I don’t have much of a stake in this but isolation is probably not the way forward.

    • M500@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I completely agree, I had a beehaw account and it was my main server until they defederated with Lemmy.ml

      Too many communities were blocked, so I just switched to make my alt my main account.

          • XPost3000@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Another .ml user here, and yeah it looks like it

            It’d honestly suck to lose beehaw again, it’s such a standout server with a really lovely community

            But if the devs and the technology just can’t keep up, then I guess there isn’t much that we can do

            We still can’t even block instances yet, as far as I’m aware

            • flatbield@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              Might be wrong, but my understanding is that we have never defenerated with Lemmy.ml. I think there may have been or are technical issues. Not tried recently but I am on Behaw since June and lemmy.ml has never accepted any of my subscriptions which is a huge issue.

        • M500@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          They may have refederated already. But I noticed I was missing a lot of communities that I followed and then saw that they stopped federating.

          It seems each week there is another community they dropped, and for the most part it didn’t affect the communities I followed, but when it did o decided to drop it.

      • Renacles
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        1 year ago

        Same here, I started out in Beehaw but left to a smaller instance because of all the defedersting. This way I have a feed with all the instances I like mixed together.