There are a lot of tanky posts coming from lemmy.ml. Their whole purpose seems to be to troll and spread their bullshit far and wide. They are nearly as bad as the alt-right. They argue in bad faith and celebrate authoritarian oppression. The beehaw mods might want to consider defederating.

we discovered this set the other day by olivvybee (Liv Asch), and obviously these are delightfully thematic for our instance. you should be able to find them in our emoji picker as follows. the emoji icon, at least on desktop, is the fourth from left smiley face on comment/post UI:

!

!

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!

Hello, I've been receiving this notice from voyager and wanted to hesr your thoughts. I don't understand the tech side of this at all. But, I'm curious if you have plans to update, or if I should find a new client to view beehaw. Thanks!

https://lemmy.world/post/12479493

tl;dr: Beehaw has moved over to Open Collective Europe Foundation, please direct your donations there effective immediately.

---

In some good news, we've successfully moved over to Open Collective Europe Foundation as our new fiscal host. This process has been mercifully quick and fairly painless, for which we're thankful.

Going forward, please make all donations to the Beehaw Collective there instead of the previous Beehaw page affiliated with Open Collective Foundation. We'll be mothballing that one following this post going live and according to OCF should be able to merge the page back into our new one sometime after April.

Our balance of approximately $7,100 is in the process of being transferred and we do not expect issues there. OCF just submitted a transfer request today for us, and OCEF will let us know when that balance hits our new collective.

We would encourage you to manually restart your contribution as soon as possible just for sake of ease and because our financial schedule will be very different going forward. However, starting later this month—at least based on what Open Collective is saying—anybody still signed up to make contributions to the old page should receive an email with the following information:

• an invitation to renew your contributions on the new collective page
• direction to a page which will be pre-loaded with the amount and frequency of the contribution you made on the old collective, which you will then confirm

So, don't fret too much if you can't immediately and manually switch. Spaced email reminders should also go out until Open Collective Foundation shuts down at the end of the year. If any of this does not happen, please page us and we'll see what's up.

I remember watching this project as it was getting started. It was a replacement to all those PHP forums, like PHPBB & Simple Machines BB. This claimed to have more modern features. It's also open-source, and you can self-host or pay them for hosting. (I recommend the latter)

And since we're on the subject, has Beehaw considered using an old PHP forum, like I mentioned earlier? They're really basic and quite nice, IMHO.

Hello folks, this is an impromptu emergency announcement.

In short: Open Collective Foundation, the fiscal host we use for Beehaw, will no longer accept donations starting on March 15, 2024. They will shut down completely at the end of the year, December 31, 2024. This was an extremely sudden decision by them; we were only made aware of it last night through their email to us. The cause given is "Open Collective Foundation’s business model is not sustainable with the number of complex services we have offered and the fees we pay to the Open Collective Inc. tech platform;" they note that they froze accepting new collectives last year.

This obviously presents a lot of problems for Beehaw. Here are all the relevant dates given to us by Open Collective:

• Last day to accept funds/receive donations: March 15, 2024
• Last day collectives can have employees: June 30, 2024
• Last day to spend or transfer funds: September 30, 2024
• Day they formally dissolve: December 31, 2024

Because Open Collective holds our funds, based on our understanding it seems likely we will not be able to keep our existing funds unless we find a 501(c)(3) organization to be our new fiscal host or become one ourselves by September 30. (EDIT: Or, we just spend it all preemptively.)

Open Collective Foundation's also email writes that:

> We will be providing assistance and support to you, whether you choose to spend out and close down your collective or continue your work through another 501(c)(3) organization or fiscal sponsor.

and so we'll be contacting them as soon as possible to see if we can arrange a solution with just their help.

But: in the mean time (and in case they can't help us, given the suddenness of this announcement) we need your help to find solutions--and we will probably need them urgently. If you have any help you can provide us, any services you can recommend, or anything that might help us quickly (and as painlessly as possible, given the short notice) transition to another service, that would be greatly appreciated. Fair warning that this will also likely derail the March financial update until we have a clearer picture of what we'll do and if OCF can help us going forward.

Thanks, and hopefully we can resolve this situation without difficulty.

I don't want any lemmy.nsfw posts on my All tab. And there are so many instances

I posted an apparently off-topic post to !foss@beehaw.org. The moderator removed it from the timeline because discussion about software that should be FOSS was considered irrelevant to FOSS. Perhaps fair enough, but it’s an injustice that people in a discussion were cut off. The thread should continue even if it’s not linked in the community timeline. I received a reply that I could not reply to. What’s the point in blocking a discussion that’s no longer visible from the timeline?

It’s more than just an unwanted behavior because the UI is broken enough to render a dysfunctional reply mechanism. That is, I can click the reply button to a comment in an orphaned thread (via notifications) and the UI serves me with a blank form where I can then waste human time writing a msg, only to find that clicking submit causes it to go to lunch in an endless spinner loop. So time is wasted on the composition then time is wasted wondering what’s wrong with the network. When in fact the reply should simply go through.

(edit) this is similar to this issue. Slight difference though: @jarfil@beehaw.org merely expects to be able to reply to lingering notifications after a mod action. That’s good but I would go further and propose that the thread should still be reachable and functional (just not linked in the timeline where it was problematic).

This series of single word spam has 1 vote each:

https://beehaw.org/comment/2351412

Yet there are responses to the same comment with many more upvotes. Why don’t the higher valued comments rise above the comments with a score of 1?

obligatory preface: we're 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us. you can donate here.

---

overall expenses for January: $212.04

$139.16 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into

• $112.00 for hosting the site itself
• $22.40 for backups
• $4.76 for site snapshots

$28.80 for Hive, an internal chat platform we've set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)

• $24.00 for hosting Hive
• $4.80 for backups
• $0.00 for snapshots

~$39.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into

• $35/mo for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam)
• ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)

$4.92 for BackBlaze, (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)

• we internally flagged this because we don't have an explanation for why this is so low this month--but, as far as we can tell it lines up with what it "should" be, so...

overall contributions in the past month: $696.59

• we received a single $193.32 one-time donation, while the remaining $503.27 was monthly

total end of year balance: $6,781.73

expense runway, assuming no further donations

• assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about two years and seven months of runway

finance history

| | October | November | December | January | February | |---------------|---------|-----------|-----------|-----------|---------| | Contributions | $691.85 | $596.28 | $660.43 | $562.79 | $696.59 | | Expenses | $230.81 | $231.54 | $229.09 | $230.68 | $212.04 | | Difference | +$461.04 | +$364.74 | +$431.34 | +$332.11 | +$484.55 | | Balance | $5,198.47 | $5,470.13 | $5,926.29 | $6,290.06 | $6,781.73 |

Dude(ettes),

This community has dropped off fast in the now trending list on the sidebar. That is awesome. When I first started supporting Beehaw, it was a matter of minutes before the site crashed due to processing and load. Gone are the days of 3,4 or 10 posts in Beehaw Support about content issues, server instability and server errors. Here are the days of no support requested. We have improved the uptime and responsiveness of Beehaw for all users, in a short time. Extenstive work and efforts have been placed into not only keeping Beehaw running; but improving Beehaw.

Those efforts and support have paid off I think. I say this as a primary systems admin of Beeehaw:

---

Thank you

---

To all monetary supports and lurkers, your contributions are immensely appreciated. We hope you continue to find value in our presence on the internet and in the Fediverse.

obligatory preface: we're 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us. you can donate here.

this month is a double feature because i got sick last month and decided to just roll the December update into January's.

overall expenses for November and December: $229.09 (Nov) + $230.68 (Dec)

$459.77 between both months

both months had the same breakdown for everything besides BackBlaze, which was:

$134.40 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into

• $112.00 for hosting the site itself
• $22.40 for backups
• $0.00 for site snapshots

$28.80 for Hive, an internal chat platform we've set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)

• $24.00 for hosting Hive
• $4.80 for backups
• $0.00 for snapshots

~$39.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into

• $35/mo for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam)
• ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)

for BackBlaze, (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean), the difference in months was as follows:

• November: $26.73
• December: $28.32

overall contributions in the past two months: $1,223.22

• November: $660.43
  • $75.89 of this was in one-time donations, while the remaining $584.54 was monthly
• December: $562.79
  • $23.45 of this was in one-time donations, while the remaining $539.34 was monthly

total end of year balance: $6,290.06

expense runway, assuming no further donations

• assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about two years and three months of runway

finance history

| | September | October | November | December | January |---------------|---------|-----------|-----------|-----------|---------| | Contributions | $1,033.82 | $691.85 | $596.28 | $660.43 | $562.79 | Expenses | $264.50 | $230.81 | $231.54 | $229.09 | $230.68 | Difference | +$769.32 | +$461.04 | +$364.74 | +$431.34 | +$332.11 | Balance | $4,701.66 | $5,198.47 | $5,470.13 | $5,926.29 | $6,290.06

A couple days ago, a thing transpired between two users, namely Axolotling and DroneRights on this website. They were having a thing over intentions and empathy, but the important thing is that DroneRights expressed the fact not everyone should speculate on someone’s intentions, which I’d say is a fair thing to say. The mods, seeing that DroneRights laid out all of their intentions and what Axolotling could do to hopefully understand its POV, decided to call it “pompous”. That, I think, breaks the whole principles that Beehaw stands for, mainly those of acknowledging good faith when it happens and not randomly banning a user because an admin felt the way they word themselves is “pompous”, which I don’t think it was to begin with.

Now, I actually do believe in the principles of this federation and I’m not here to start a shitstorm or to stoke the fire more; I’m here to understand how was it possible for a moderation team to see someone who was willing to help someone else understand their point of view and be met with moderators jumping in out of nowhere without truly understanding what had happened.

I'm trying to enable 2FA, the link generated does not work.

I'm out of the loop. Are we federating with Threads or not?

EDIT: The answer is no, we are not federating with Threads. Thank you. That's the answer I was hoping for.

When trying to access https://beehaw.org/c/finance it gives a 502 bad gateway -- “Worker Bees are busy updating the website”.

Hey folks! Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere but I did a search around the site and I just couldn't find the information I was looking for.

I remember reading a while back that the folks at beehaw were considering moving to a new platform and I was just curious if anything came of that?

Thanks for all you do!

obligatory preface: we're 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us. you can donate here.

overall expenses this month: $230.81

$134.40 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into

• $112.00 for hosting the site itself
• $22.40 for backups
• $0.00 for site snapshots

$28.80 for Hive, an internal chat platform we've set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)

• $24.00 for hosting Hive
• $4.80 for backups
• $0.00 for snapshots

~$39.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into

• $35/mo for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam)
• ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)

$29.18 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)

overall contributions this month: $596.28

• all contributions this month were monthly donations.

total end of month balance: $5,470.13

expense runway, assuming no further donations

• assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about two years of runway

finance history

| | July | August | September | October | November |---------------|---------|-----------|-----------|-----------|---------| | Contributions | $3,870.44 | $1,310.90 | $1,033.82 | $691.85 | $596.28 | Expenses | $566.98 | $523.79 | $264.50 | $230.81 | $231.54 | Difference | +$3,303.46 | +$787.11 | +$769.32 | +$461.04 | +$364.74 | Balance | $3,591.33 | $4,347.79 | $4,701.66 | $5,198.47 | $5,470.13

The community can be found at !opencourselectures@slrpnk.net. Are there any appropriate places under the beehaw umbrella?

I just tried to enable 2FA on my account, it said to save and refresh to get the setup code etc but it just logged me out.

Now I can’t login without a 2FA code that I don’t have. Any chance I can get a bit of help resetting it so I can log back in again?

I’m still logged in on this device (via the voyager app) so hopefully this post works!

Is there anything in the works that will allow us to hide posts? Report isn't necessary in a lot of cases which just leaves the block option. It works but it's also overkill.

Hi beeautiful people.

On certain posts, reply chains seem to be hidden by a "x more replies" button. When I try to click to expand these replies, however, I'm met with an eternally-spinning wheel. I've tried this in both Chrome and Firefox, with extensions enabled and disabled, all to the same effect. Any help is appreciated.

Browser: Chrome 118.0.5993.88 (Also reproduced on the latest Firefox)

Platform: Fedora 38

Thanks. :)

Sloppy video recording of the behavior in question: https://youtu.be/rWbZc3wdVC4

The thread I used as an example: https://beehaw.org/comment/1433678

Update: I finally figured out that this happens on threads where I have one of the participants blocked. Everyone can look away now.

Is creating a new community at will not an option on Beehaw?

obligatory preface: we're 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us. you can donate here.

overall expenses this month: $230.81

$134.66 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into

• $108.00 for hosting the site itself
• $21.60 for backups
• $5.06 for site snapshots

$27.81 for Hive, an internal chat platform we've set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)

• $23.14 for hosting Hive
• $4.63 for backups
• $0.04 for snapshots

~$39.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into

• $35/mo for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam)
• ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)

$29.18 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)

overall contributions this month: $691.85

support still more than covers our expenses; interestingly, our donation composition is now almost exclusively monthly donations.

• 108 monthly contributions, totaling $668.33
• 2 one-time donations, totaling $23.52

total end of month balance: $5,198.47

expense runway, assuming no further donations

• assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about one year and seven months of runway.

finance history

| | June | July | August | September | October | |---------------|---------|-----------|-----------|-----------|---------| | Contributions | $705.00 | $3,870.44 | $1,310.90 | $1,033.82 | $691.85 | | Expenses | $54.00 | $566.98 | $523.79 | $264.50 | $230.81 | | Difference | +$651.00 | +$3,303.46 | +$787.11 | +$769.32 | +$461.04 | | Balance | $726.51 | $3,591.33 | $4,347.79 | $4,701.66 | $5,198.47 |

On Beehaw there are a few tldr bots from other instances. I present Beehaws own summarizing bot developed by yours truly. Based on feedback from moderators and community leaders, I don't just want to let this loose on the entire site. Might cause confusion and spam for a community instead of being useful. If you do like what that bot does, and are a moderator of a community on Beehaw that wants to use it; send a private messaged to AbstractifyBot stating Summarize articles on c/[communityname].

That's just one aspect, but I have a few more questions while I have your attention.

• What type of bots if any do you want to see on Beehaw to help things/your community?
• Which functions of the 'nice to have' should be built in and not reliant on a bot to do?
• What do you need for your communities to thrive here?

Permanently deleted

@support Yesterday I saw this post https://beehaw.org/post/7776438 where it used the non-propagation of deleted posts as an example of one of the problems of the Lemmy platform. Today, this post https://lemmy.world/post/5289864 says there's "a bug in kbin where moderation tasks are not federated to other instances".. i'm confused, isn't that a problem coming from the underlying software, Lemmy? Are they shifting blame?

I'm on Firefox on android on pixel 7. Just started seeing this today. It's not a big deal. But it's weird it started suddenly.

Anybody else having this issue (attached screenshot). Landscape mode is fine. I'm guessing this is an upstream issue. Text alignment is all over the place.

Eta: this is in Firefox on Android

Permanently deleted

Hello,

I have been accesing beehaw through Jerboa and Wefwef, recently due to the timezone issue I had to use the website. When I try to log in I'm asked to enter a 2FA token but I don't think I ever activated that. I'm able to access my account through wefwef now because my credentials were stored here and the issue has been fixed, but I can't access beehaw settings from here to disable 2fa. Would you be able to disable 2FA for my account?

Thanks in advance!

you might have noticed we lost a bunch of posts...

in short: we tried to fix a Lemmy issue that started on 9/13 and is causing or has caused problems with apps for the software. we're aware of basically all of them besides Sync exhibiting some sort of problematic behavior since this issue arose. however: attempting to fix this issue on our side of things did not go well.

i am not qualified to make a formal write-up of the exact mechanism of what went wrong here--and in this case the mechanism isn't really important for your informational purposes, although @Penguincoder@beehaw.org can elaborate as needed--but basically we made a fix that seemed fine in testing and was not fine when actually applied. when it became obvious something was wrong, we tried restoring literally everything but the database. that, unfortunately, did not work, so eventually we just pulled the trigger on restoring from a backup. this has lost at least some posts, but probably no more than 8 hours of them by our estimation.

hopefully this will not happen again, either upstream or on our side of things.

Has something happened? I made 3 posts and a few comments late yesterday and they're all gone today (but still appear on the federated instances I posted them to)

Its only beehaw that doesn't load. Can someone help?

Starting this morning Jerboa crashes and Connect for Lemmy shows a spinner when trying to access Beehaw. My accounts on other Lemmy instances are working fine.

Is anyone else having similar issues?

I find they make it harder to read and as I'm under data restrictions it would be nice to not load them.

Sorry if this has been asked before. I know the lemmy software has a lot of limitations too so maybe this is one of them.

Yesterday, you probably saw this informal post by one of our head admins (Chris Remington). This post lamented some of the difficulties we’re running into with the site at this point, and what the future might hold for us. This is a more formal post about those difficulties and the way we currently see things.

Up front: we aren't confident in the continued use of Lemmy. We are working through how best to make the website live up to the vision of our documents—and simply put, the vast majority of the limitations we're running into are Lemmy's at this point. An increasing amount of our time is spent trying to work around or against the software to achieve what we want rather than productively building this community. That leaves us with serious questions about our long-term ability to stay on this platform, especially with the lingering prospect of not having the people needed to navigate backend stuff.

Long-time users will no doubt be aware of our advocacy for moderator tools that we think the platform needs (and particularly that we need). Our belief in the importance and necessity of those tools has only hardened with time. Progress of those tools, however—and even organizing work on them—has been pretty much nonexistent outside of our efforts from what we can see.[^1] In the three months since we started seriously pushing the ideas we'd like to see, we’re not aware of any of them being seriously considered—much less taken up or on the way to being incorporated into Lemmy.

In fact: even within the framework of Lemmy's almost nonexistent roadmap and entirely nonexistent timetable on which to expect features it has been made clear to us that improving federation or moderation on the platform are not big priorities.[^2] We have implicitly been told that if this part of the software is to improve we will need to organize that from scratch. And we have tried that to be clear. Our proposal is (and has been) paying people bounties for their labor toward implementing these features, in line with paying all labor done on our behalf—but we've received mixed messages from the top on whether this would be acceptable. (Unclear guidance and general lack of communication is symptomatic of a lot of our relation with the Lemmy devs in the past few months.)

Things aren't much better on the non-moderator side of things. The problems with databases are almost too numerous to talk about and even Lemmy's most ardent supporters recognize this as the biggest issue with the software currently. A complete rewrite is likely the only solution. Technical issues with the codebase are also extensive; we've made numerous changes on our side because of that. Many of the things we're running into have been reported up the chain of command but continue to languish entirely unacknowledged. In some cases bugs, feature requests, and other requests to Lemmy devs have explicitly been blown off—and this is behavior that others have also run into with respect to the project. Only very recently have we seen any overtures at regular communication—and this communication has not hinted at any change in priorities.

All of what was just described has been difficult to get a handle on—and having fewer users, less activity, and more moderators has not done a whole lot to ease that. We honestly find that the more we dig and the more we work to straighten out issues that pop up, the more pop out and the more it feels like Lemmy is structurally unsound for our purposes. (One such example of what we’re working with is provided in the next section.)

In summary: we believe we can either continue to fight the software in basically every way possible, or we can prioritize building the community our documents preach. It is our shared belief that we cannot, in the long-term, do both; in any case, we're not interested in constantly having to fight for basic priorities—ones we consider extremely beneficial to the health of the overall Lemmy network—or having to unilaterally organize and recruit for their addition to the software. We are hobbyists trying to make a cool space first and foremost, and it's already a job enough to run the site. We cannot also be surrogates for fixing the software we use.

PenguinCoder: A brief sketch of the technical perspective

I've said a few words about this topic already, here and here. Other Beehaw admins have also brought some concerns to the Lemmy devs. Those issues still exist. To be clear: this is a volunteer operation and Lemmy is their software; they have a right to pick and choose what goes into it and what to put a priority on. But we have an obligation to keep users safe and secure, and their priorities increasingly stifle our own.

In the case of this happening for open source projects, the consensus is to make your own fork. But:

> The problem with forking Lemmy is in starting from all the bad that is inherently there, and trying to make it better. That is way more work than starting fresh with more developers. IE, not using Rust for a web app and UI, better database queries from the start, better logging/functions from the start; not adding on bandaids. A fork of Lemmy will have all of Lemmy's problems but now you're responsible for them instead.

We don't need a fork, we need a solution.

To give just one painful example of where an upstream solution is sorely needed: the federation, blocking, and/or removal of problem images.

1. You post an image to Beehaw.
2. Beehaw sends your content out to every other server it's federated with
3. Federated server accepts it (beehaw.org is on their allowlist), or rejects it (beehaw.org is on their denylist)
4. If the server accepts it, a copy of your post or comment including the images are now on that receiving server as well as on the server you posted it to. Federation at work.
5. Mod on beehaw.org sees your post doesn't follow the rules. Removes it from beehaw.org. The other instances Beehaw pushed this content to, do not get that notice to remove it. The copy of your content on Beehaw was removed. The copy of your content on other servers was not removed.
6. The receiving federated instance needs to manually remove/delete the content from their own server
7. For a text post or comment that's removed, this can be done via the admin/mod tools on that instance
8. For a post or comment including a thumbnail, uploaded images, etc; that media content is not removed. It's not tracked where in Lemmy that content was used at. Admin removal of media commences. This requires backend command line and database access, and takes about a dozen steps per image; sometimes more.

There are dozens of issues—some bigger, some smaller—like this that we have encountered and have either needed to patch ourselves or have reported up the chain without success.

Alternatives and the way forward

If possible the best solution here is to stay on Lemmy—but this is going to require the status quo changing, and we’re unsure of how realistic that is. If we stay on Lemmy, it is probable that we will have to do so by making use of a whitelist.

For the unfamiliar, we currently use a blacklist—by default, we federate with all current and newly-created nodes of the Fediverse unless we explicitly exclude them from interacting with our site. A switch to a whitelist would invert this dynamic: we would not federate with anybody unless we explicitly choose to do so. This has some benefits—maintaining federation in some form; staying on Lemmy; generally causing less entropy than other alternatives, etc. But the drawbacks are also obvious: nearly everything described in this post will continue, blacklist or whitelist, because a huge part of the problem is Lemmy.

Because of that we have discussed almost every conceivable alternative there is to Lemmy. We are interested in the thoughts of this community on platforms you have all used and what our eventual choice is going to be, but we are planning on having more surveys in the future to collect this feedback. We ask that you do not suggest anything to us at this time, and comments with suggestions in this thread will be removed.

As for alternatives we’re seriously considering right now: they’re basically all FOSS; would preserve most aspects of the current experience while giving us less to worry about on the backside of things (and/or lowering the bar for code participation); are pretty much all more mature and feature-rich than Lemmy; and generally seem to avoid the issues we’re talking about at length here. Downsides are varied but the main commonality is lack of federation; entropy in moving; questions of how sustainable they are with our current mod team; and more cosmetic things like customization and modification.

We’re currently investigating the most promising of them in greater depth—but we don’t want to list something and then have to strike it, hence the vagueness. If we make a jump, that will be an informed jump. In any case logistics mean that the timetable here is on the order of months. Don’t expect immediate changes. As things develop, we’ll engage the community on what the path forward is and how to make it as smooth as possible.

[^1]: Other administrators have probably vocally pushed for these things, but we’re not aware of any public examples we can point to of this taking place. Their advocacy has not produced results that we're aware of in any case, which is what matters. [^2]: Perhaps best illustrated by the recent Lemmy dev AMA. We’ll also emphasize that Beehaw’s admin team is not alone in the belief that Lemmy devs do not take mod tools or federation issues particularly seriously.

I filled out the form and clicked “create”. It turned into a spinner for a few seconds then just went back to the form. No error, but no action either. When I search for the new community, there are no results.