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.
Hi! I’m excited to be a part of this community. Is it possible for users to create their own subforums on beehaw? (Not sure what the word on here for that is)
there is on lemmy as a software, but since it’s a binary toggle (there’s no way to limit who can and can’t outside of admins or all users), we have user creation disabled on here. but we’re really generous when it comes to community suggestions so as long as there’d be a relatively decent sized audience for something we’ll make it (this is why we have /c/DIY and /c/FOSS, for example–those were suggested).
incidentally, your post made me wonder if limitations more fine-toothed than all or nothing for a setting like this would be technically possible. might have to refer that one to lemmy devs
Currently no. We’re more than happy to create a new community if there’s enough interest and support, but we don’t want a lot of inactive communities either. For now, post in the most relevant place or let us know what you’d like to see.
Big thanks to you and /u/alyaza for the insightful responses, that’s understandable.
The only community I feel I’m missing on beehaw is the shitposting/circlejerk communities. It would be nice to have a shitposting forum for memes and stuff.