Compiling this data was not as hard as I expected, let’s go through the data and the shiny graphs!
Age of Beeple
Most are above 24! Seems we got an older average age compared to a lot of social media. It would be interesting to see how many came here with experiences from independent forums before Reddit.
Where Beeple reside
This one’s a big graph. Though we can notice most people are from the US. Would be nice to see more countries represented though a big part of it likely has to do with language. (You will need to open the big graph in another tab, it’s too big to show properly.)
Gender identity of Beeple
So, as expected, mostly men. However, less than expected which is nice to see. There should be outreach to at least equalize this.
Sexual orientation of Beeple
This is kinda surprising. It seems we managed to get a lot more LGBTQ+ people than expected considering most of you all come from Reddit - so this is nice to see. This is most likely because of our focus on a safe space.
Whiteness of Beeple
As expected, mostly white which is unfortunate. I think there’s outreach to be done in that regard as well.
Neurodivergence of Beeple
We seem to have a really surprising amount of neurodivergent people! Definitely nice to see.
Beeple with disabilities
I… have no idea how to interpret this data so I’ll just say, shiny graph.
Beeple’s awareness of the Fediverse
Most knew about the fediverse but still a good 20% had not heard about it so glad to see you all managed to find your way here!
How Beeple have been dealing with Beehaw
It seems most people feel relatively confident in their ability to use Beehaw and most people seem to enjoy it. That makes me really happy to see. Feels rewarding, feels good.
Conclusion
I wanna thank everyone for the feedback about the survey and its questions - we’ll do better next time! I’m glad we did this survey because it shows the areas to work on in terms of outreach! Thank you all for your participation!
The questions were :
I think I’ll try making a table with the data on docs.beehaw.org to see evolution over time and I wanted to have tables with the data but Lemmy doesn’t have markdown tables it seems.
I did separate genderfluid and non-binary. In my mind they were separate though I agree it falls under the non-binary umbrella. It’s just I’ve heard genderfluid much more than any other nonbinary identity so it’s the one I thought of adding. Maybe I shouldn’t though.
Yes, cis/trans is definitely a question we want to add! It’d likely be a separate question because I don’t think I want trans people to have to say “trans woman” when “woman” is there, it kind of implies that one isn’t the other.
I do wonder if asking the opposite question “Do you consider yourself to be a person of colour?” would really be better… I think I want an excerpt that we are going from a “white as purity” type of thing to make sure that people who are mixed understand. Do you think that would help?
Can I ask why you don’t ask a more indepth race/ethnicity question instead of pushing a specific race question? It seems a bit shortsighted. For instance, someone who is of Middle Eastern descent may not choose person of color because the color of their skin is white. Likewise, someone who is Hispanic may feel white for the same reason. Neither of these people receive the same social standing despite this, though, because their culture overwrites their skin color.
May I suggest reviewing this website? This person goes over the variety of ways this question can go awry and provides some great examples on how to be more inclusive with it. There’s actually a great survey example at the bottom from Project Include.
Essentially, the question was the reverse of asking if the person was a poc and it was made primarily by people living in NA and it passed review.
With that said - the reasoning was that we wanted to see how many people identified as white because we know that Reddit has a big white majority and it’s what we saw in other online surveys. We also wanted to avoid being too specific because then we would have to decide rather than the individual if they are white or not - definitely less than ideal. It’s less actionable and directly obvious if something is wrong. Further, being specific is very difficult to do on a global scale.
I’ll talk with others about your suggestion (on Discord) but we’ve already talked about it all day yesterday so I imagine some people probably feel burned out by this. I think it’s more likely that we’ll include both questions than only ethnicity.
Off the top of my head I feel like reframing as POC instead of white-identifying would ask the same question, but be less inflammatory to white people who are afraid of the word “white”.
Tbh though the reality is those who are focusing on the pedantic word instead of the intent are likely looking for a reason to be unhappy… But asking for POC identification is more in line with what I’m used to seeing in diversity reports (admittedly white VS non-white is a bit… Blunt).
(edit for adding that white vs non-white being off-putting for a biracial person with mixed feelings on their race actually makes a lot of sense)