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.
As a lemmy.world user, I’m already essentially banned from there, so I wouldn’t notice either.
In the earlier days of lemmy.world, I really enjoyed participating in many of the Beehaw communities. It soured my taste from them when they banned us all without warning when 99% of us didn’t even do anything.
I don’t know that Lemmy is necessarily suitable for what Beehaw is trying to achieve with their walked garden.
Look, I get it…making a safe space is admirable and can be tricky. But initially putting Beehaw out as an open instance didn’t end up being the right move. Going to a different platform entirely like Discord or Tildes seems to make more sense for the intent.