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.
Didn’t you defederate from a lot of instances anyways? And recreate every major community to have yet another copy talking about the same subject and splitting the readership/people?
If I were you, I’d pull the plug and do it properly. All I’ve seen is beehaw causing confusion with (new) users on other instances and I alone have explained like 5 times why people can’t see some posts or their posts can’t be seen by other people because of defereration and that it’s a complicated 3-way triangle how Lemmy handles that (with the originating instance of the community, the home instance of the user and the instance the other user is on.) And you’re confusing your own users by letting them believe they’re on the fediverse and part of Lemmy, while they’re in fact part of maybe 10% of the Fediverse. It adds to the confusion that every community exists twice or more times and users have to handle that. Your own admins complain a lot. And it causes you pain.
I think you were better off with a discord server or a closed forum. And it’d spare you and everyone being constantly annoyed with each other.
In theory connecting people is always a good thing. But I don’t see how that would work out here.