welcome to the second-ever Beehaw Community Survey. it’s been awhile because of everything going on; we last did one of these with the influx of people last June and we got 1,500 responses that time. we don’t expect anywhere near that many this time, but that’s fine.

this survey should take about 10 minutes to fill out, so we strongly encourage you to do so when you are able to. you can find it at the following link:

Beehaw Community Survey #2


the survey is comprised of eight optional demographic questions to help us assess the overall identity of our community and eight questions relating to Beehaw and the Fediverse. the survey will be open for at least three days but no longer than one week. it’ll be locally pinned for the duration of that minimum three days, so please mind that. results will also be aggregated and posted on here/the Docs page in a summary like with the last survey. no ETA on that.


this is also a good time to remind everyone that Beehaw has moved over to Open Collective Europe Foundation, and we will be taking all donations from there going forward. please direct your donations there if you haven’t switched from our old Open Collective Foundation page yet!

  • Given that ~70% of US citizens are white, and Beehaw users are mostly US citizens, 75% users being white is very close to the expectation. I wouldn’t express this as “unfortunate” as you wrote in your June summary.

    • Do keep in mind that 11.6% of people chose to not answer that question so this 75% is not a very accurate metric. Not only that but ~35% of people declared to not come from the United States. I will also mention that our goal is not to reach an average that is close to a country’s demographics - we expect a bigger than average amount of people to be from a minorised group.

      •  frog 🐸   ( @frog@beehaw.org ) 
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        8 months ago

        we expect a bigger than average amount of people to be from a minorised group.

        I’m just going to note here that even asking for white vs non-white, you may not be capturing the full picture of minorised groups. Many European countries legally recognise the existence of a number of ethnic minority white groups, which have a racial/ethnic/cultural difference that has led to them being discriminated against within a larger white majority population. Those people will still consider themselves white, because they are, but they’re still part of a minorised group - and prejudice against them is often considered socially acceptable “because they’re white”. (I consider myself to be a member of such a group.)

        • Not the person you wrote to. I agree.

          “We want more non-whites” is an oversimplification of what I thought diversity was supposed to be. I fear that it sounds unfair to white people, depending on the context.

          I’m saying this as a non-white btw.

          •  frog 🐸   ( @frog@beehaw.org ) 
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            108 months ago

            Absolutely agree! Diversity is really complicated, which makes it difficult to properly capture using a few poll questions, but I think the most important thing is that Beehaw should be safe for everyone (except for the intolerant), and that’s not really about how many people there are from each minority.

        • I’m 100% down with this point. Personally, I find surveys that ask “White or Non White” to be very confusing when not qualified by ethnicity.

          Personally, I’m Hispanic (Nicaragüense) and my skin tone reflects that, but legally speaking I’d be white.

      • Our goal is not to reach an average that is close to a country’s demographics

        Why? As we believe that race doesn’t contribute to anything, race distribution of US Beehaw users is going to reflect that of the US.

        Unless we can see what the other 35% of users looks like, we Beehaw folks can’t understand what is meant by “more non-whites”. (Edit: checked the survey; it’s mostly from the west)

        Edit: Anyway, what’s the goal here? More countries, more races, or something else?