Thank you for writing this up, and all work you've been putting in!
Beehaw Support
Support and meta community for Beehaw. Ask your questions about the community, technical issues, and other such things here.
A brief FAQ for lurkers and new users can be found here.
Our July 2023 financial update is here.
For a refresher on our philosophy, see also What is Beehaw?, The spirit of the rules, and Beehaw is a Community
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
I really like the policy of no downvotes. Honestly, even on Reddit I think downvoting had long ceased to serve any useful purpose, and turned into a harmful tool. Anything that truly is bad content can just be reported instead.
I’m coming around to like the policy, too. I was skeptical for a while before joining, but I think I figured out why I had that skepticism.
I think I’m used to larger communities/platforms not having a reliable moderation, and I’ve seen dislikes and downvotes as a directly user controlled means for a place to self-police its content. That’s not to say I’d think moderation would act in bad faith; I’ve had occasional points when I found myself in a moderator role, and I’ve always had the impression that we were trying our best. It’s more that I’d think larger platforms like YouTube and busy communities lend its moderation force to being spread too thin and having to make judgements quickly and with less nuance. Downvotes definitely can, and have, been used in bad faith by users, but I think I felt like their intended use case made their issues a necessary evil.
I think Beehaw is actively striving to be different in that way. I don’t think that means I should say this place is invulnerable to something like Mod Decay or Apathy—I’d think something as potentially impactful like this warrants a degree of vigilance. But the vibe I get so far is encouraging. I think that if Beehaw’s moderation stays the course, I’ll continue to see the downvotes absence not just as a non-issue here, but a benefit to how we do things.
Where my reddit escapees at
yo yo! i've been waiting for a FOSS reddit since forever. i'm hoping this gets traction!
Everywhere. For better and worse. Whichever federated instance holds up during the subreddit blackout wins?
I'm here, hopped over a few days ago! It's a good time, though I do still switch between here and reddit (there's a few niche subreddits I can't quite let go of haha)
I'm so glad to have found a reddit alternative that I actually want to use. I just joined yesterday, but I'm really liking it so far. And I love the general air of friendliness y'all seem to have cultivated here!
really liking it here too - and love the no downvotes button, that's so kick ass.
Major long term lurker from Reddit here, like 10+ years lurking. Lemmy / Beehaw actually gets me to post however and I love it! Not sure where the motivation has come from. A desire for a proper community perhaps? I've watched Reddit go through highs and lows over the years but weirdly I feel like I belong here. Hello and welcome to all other Lemmy / Beehaw users! :D
I think a lots of us are feeling almost the same :) I hope we can sustain this feeling on time and create more close and human interactions on the internet.
Brand new user here. Big thanks to those that stood up this community. I was approved within minutes! I was shocked. I am excited to be a small part of this friendly project.
"You don't need to write a whole essay" Yea, sorry for that. I got carried away.
Wait we wasn't supposed to give a day to day run through since the day we were born? Shit..
Can I swear, fuck piss poo shit
Really fast registration approval, it's nice to see an admin who cares for their community. Still kinda lost with Lemmy but so far so good and I look forward to interacting with everyone.
Sweet, I'm finally in!
Been trying to sign up for the last few days without luck. Then I saw the thread about the big regarding declined users and thought that was it. Turns out it was another bug! Found it on github, apparently if you try to sign up with a username that's too long it just won't let you but it won't give you an error message either. You just get the spinning icon on the button.
So. Here I am with a shorter username!
Turns out I couldn't set my desired display name either (NorthernLightMountain) since it seems to be configured to the same length limit.
But at least i snagged a short and simple user name instead!
Like so many others I found my way here after reddit started acting like Facebook and I really wanted to join this instance in particular. A corner of the net actively trying to keep the toxicity at bay? Sign me up!
Going to take a little bit if getting used to the whole federated bit but it looks promising.
Anyways, hi fellow bees!
Thank you to all of you who put the work in to make Beehaw what it is ❤️
The co-op / democratic governance idea sounds fascinating. I'm Finnish and we're big on co-ops (or were, at any rate), and I'd definitely love to see that particular ethos spread to site governance.
Oh and random hosting tech question, do you have an autoscaling setup at the moment?
It is not autoscaling. We had to scramble a lot in the first 48 hours after API changes were finalized to ensure we had hardware to support all the users and fine tune some settings for lemmy. Luckily we have some wonderfully tech literate people with time on their hands who've chipped in to help.
I honestly didn't notice that downvotes were disabled on this. I love yall. Reddit gave me so much anxiety with downvotes, ugh.
Yeah I like not having downvotes! I’ve been downvoted before on some art, they could at least tell me what they didn’t like lol. Takes off a lot of pressure and chance.
I’m very grateful to be here. I love building community online. It’s a shame so many spaces become toxic places. This feels like friends hanging out in a “third place” - not home, not work, but communal. :)
I just wanted to say thanks for approving me. This thread and the linked site philosophy posts made signing up here a no-brainer for me. I'm really excited to be a part of the growth of Beehaw!
Thanks for this! I'm new here and was approved pretty quickly. Looking forward to engaging with the different communities out there!
Thank you for accepting me so quickly! I’m a Reddit escapee so I’m excited to get started here.
Cheers for accepting my account. Looking forward to learning more about how it all works.
Glad to be here! I'll lurk a bit more before commenting too much. Here's to hoping the best instances get funding to get more server capacity~
Excited to be part of the community here! ((: Really appreciate how deliberate and intentional beehaw is about how it does things and I'm enjoying exploring Lemmy a lot more than my dabbling with Mastodon in the past (which gave me some reference for the fediverse but never really stuck with me since twitter style microblogging was just never my style).
Not sure I agree with the downvoting. Its essential to identify false claims and information and holds posters accountable.
That's a good aspirational summary of how downvoting should be used, but in practice it's used as "I don't like this," not "this is against the core of what the site stands for," or "this is factually incorrect."
Thank you for accepting me! Excited to be here.
I’m curious how Beehaw and other instances are protected against spam and other types of automated abuse. When someone eventually tries to flood the community with “how I made $100,000 in one week working from home: spammy-link-yall.com,” is it handled manually or are there protections in place?
When someone eventually tries to flood the community with “how I made $100,000 in one week working from home: spammy-link-yall.com,” is it handled manually or are there protections in place?
as of now: manually. in the future i'm sure it can be automated but since we need to approve people's accounts before they can post that alone has basically rendered spam and self-promotion stuff like that a non-issue. genuinely can't remember when we last had to deal with it, even from a federated instance.
That's honestly refreshing to hear. I'm eager for something that feels like interacting on the early days of reddit as a 15-year veteran, so thanks for that.
Newly registered, thank you for the kind introduction. I will probably lurk for a bit until I find my feet. However already has a very nice feel.
Happy to have been accepted in here! Hope we can all build something cool up in here! Curious to see how itll morph over time
our instance is 100% user-funded. you can one-time donate or become a monthly donor here.
Can the details of costs vs donations be published? It would be good to be able to see what everything costs to run, what the donations are, where is it being spent etc
There's a financials post here: https://beehaw.org/post/416496
And near the bottom of this page you can see the donations made, the money actually spent, and their current balance: https://opencollective.com/beehaw
Worth noting that our costs have risen quite a bit since that last post as the exodus is putting a lot of strain. We're currently on a 96$ tier now.
hello and thank you for accepting me :) A refugee from reddit