to start: after some consideration, we've altered our entry question a little bit so that entry is not guaranteed. during the daytime you can basically expect waits of 30 minutes or less when it comes to approval/disapproval, but overnight it'll be anywhere from 6-12 hours. just FYI
if you'd like to introduce yourself without it getting lost in all the posts already made, i just made a thread for that over here
our sidebar should give you most of the information you're looking for about us, but to reiterate some: we are pretty relaxed here, but we have a well carved out understanding of what we want to be. if you would like more elaboration on that, you can find elaboration on that at length in the following two posts:
for some less lengthy and more relaxed elaboration, see the discussion in the comments of this post.
as for funding: we are 100% user-funded. if you would like to contribute to our ability to keep the website up, you can donate on OpenCollective, which supports both one-time donations or monthly donations.
a few other questions occasionally pop up like "why do we have the set of communities we do?" and "why can't people make their own?" (the latter is a feature of lemmy). for elaboration on that, you can see the following post and the discussions here. we are open to suggestions and creating communities as demand sees fit; see also discussion here.
downvotes are disabled on this instance and that's a thing we're not liable to change. if you'd like elaboration for why that is, see this comment. this may be a point of friction for some coming from reddit, but i hope you'll understand why we're doing it even if you don't necessarily agree with it.
if you're interested in our governance to this point and a brief idea of our long term goals, see the comment here.
feel free to sound off on other questions you have; i'll try to update the OP with those and our ability to answer them as time goes on.
it was nice of reddit to drop this mid-day when i have nothing going on, so i can just camp all the new registrations and approve them in a few minutes. we're hopeful that there won't be too many difficulties incorporating all the new people, because this is already by far the most people we've added in one day lol
Reading through "what is Beehaw" resonated with me because besides the API cost changes, the other catalyst that caused me to say enough is enough was a recent post on /r/baseball where I noticed people said they were afraid of saying any normal, average banter because one of their friends had their account banned by reddits "AEO (anti-evil operations) bot", which I had never heard of before.
That led me to a post complaining about AEO by an /r/baseball mod saying how strict it was, not allowing people to engage in normal, regular baseball banter. That modpost was from over a year ago and the issue has gotten worse, not better. Seeing proof from a mod of a large subreddit, combined with some of the insane communities I've seen been allowed to fester on reddit was very eye-opening.
Apologies for coming to your site and immediately linking back to Reddit. Just thought I'd explain more about my personal reasons for wanting to leave a website I've used since the beginning (does the narwhal bacon after midnight?), especially after reading some of your personal philosophies that seem to align with why I've become so frustrated with Reddit.
oh yeah no even as a lurker on reddit, it just feels... i dunno, sanitized? homogeneous? uninteresting? to browse a lot of the time. and not even in a way where it's protecting marginalized users from abuse, or just people from other users being extremely unpleasant to interact with. i would at least feel better--if not content--about the site if it was doing that, but a lot of the time honestly engaging with reddit is socially punished and that sucks!