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.
Personally I feel like I use my beehaw mostly to interact with federation, but in part because scrolling through local I run out of posts. Sometimes I’m conversational, sometimes I’m not and just want content.
I do like that Beehaw is somewhat walled off though. My experience being on Kbin and Beehaw has been great with lots of poignant conversations. I recently created a slrpnk.net after some of these talks made me want to have a backup made just in case, plus it’s nice to see a different side of the fediverse.
Well, it’s federated with lemmy.world and I have found that 9/10 comments are bad takes, basic/shortsighted, and aren’t really responsive to actual discussion. Every once in a while there’s someone who speaks out against the absurdity but it feels so few in far between. I actually find it difficult to read through comments because it is disheartening to read people even of this sort of community defending corporate actions and completely ignoring any discussion about it. I’m not even talking about “this isn’t my opinion and I don’t want to read it” - I love discussion it’s why I’m here.
In part it’s why I’m against the threads federation if only because the flood of content seems so much more meaningless. I like that when I am looking through Microblogs on KBin (I think it’s the right name - the ability to see mastodon posts) it’s people and their hobbies and conversational questions - or just art with various themes. From what I’ve been promoted about Threads on Instagram it’s not like that at all. I know it’s less of an issue for lemmy but is it not the principle?
All this to say - if I don’t have to do anything on my end, I’ll likely continue using it as it is and it realistically won’t affect me too much outside of scope as I use multiple fediverse accounts already anyway. If it comes to be that I migrate or recreate an account I’ll probably stick around but I do definitely interact primarily with federation first I think.