Beehaw Support

I think it would be inline with Beehaw's values to create one. In fact, I can't seem to find an instance that has one. :|

I just noticed my private instance, https://derp.foo/, was recently defederated by Beehaw. Thing is, I have no idea why. Was my instance accidentally included in some bulk defederation to get rid of spammers, or is there something specific to my instance?

Returning "operation timed out" right away. Thought you would want to know. Take care.

Given the approach/philosophy of Beehaw, I'm kind of confused and surprised by the choice of Lemmy for building this community space. Not that I disagree with it, but it undeniably complicates administration/moderation in a variety of ways thanks to federation (as has become apparent with new Lemmy instances & the population surge) and its modest development only compounds those complications through lack of sufficient tools.

Was this something of a hindsight is 20/20 situation, wherein with more consideration, something else may have been adopted? Or has it been banking on some optimism in federated communities becoming the new norm?

I've read over some of the philosophy/thinking posts regarding Beehaw, but so far as I recall this technical choice wasn't a focal point in them. Sorry if I overlooked some explanations, though!

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.

overall expenses this month: $523.79

as expected, a full month of running on last month's setup has come in pretty high. luckily, we expect downsizing to begin this month (and we have a pretty good idea of what we're going to do) so this will be our last month of costs at this scale. our initial estimation is that we can halve or better what we're paying now on a monthly basis.

$428.73 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into

• $336.00 for hosting the site itself
• $67.20 for backups
• $25.53 for site snapshots

$28.87 for Hive, an internal chat platform we've set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)

• $24.07 for hosting Hive
• $4.80 for backups

~$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)

$22.87 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)

overall contributions this month: $1,310.90

support still more than covers our expenses, and particularly with our upcoming downsizing we don't believe this will be a problem. breakdown is:

• 100 monthly contributions, totaling $624.95
• 2 yearly contributions, totaling $67.10
• 36 one-time donations, totaling $618.85

between monthly and yearly contributions we are still sustainable overall—but now that the Reddit bump has ebbed most of our savings will come in the form of lowering costs and not "sheer amount of money being thrown our way."

total end of month balance: $4,347.79

expense runway, assuming no further donations

• assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about 8 months and one week of runway

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!

UPDATE: RESULTS HAVE CLOSED! thank you for your participation—we've received over 1,500 responses which is quite a lot more than we expected. aggregated results and community creation decisions should hopefully come in due time.

hello folks!

with our backlog cleared and many new people around, now's a good time to do our first-ever Beehaw Community Survey--the first of what will likely be(e) many to come. this survey should take no more than 5 or 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

the survey is comprised of seven optional demographic questions to help us assess the overall identity of our community and three questions relating to Beehaw and the Fediverse. it also asks you about 17 possible communities we are considering and whether you would actively participate in them if made.

the survey will be open for approximately a week. we'll definitely close it before July 1, so please get your responses in before that date. it'll also be locally pinned for at least the next three days or so, so please mind that. thanks!

results will also be aggregated and posted on here in a summary sometime thereafter. no ETA on that though.

I've tried flipping it 180 as well. No luck so far. :|

hey folks, here's a quick update on our decision to defederate from sh.itjust.works! (and here's sh.itjust.works's side of this update)

we got in touch with the head admin over there, The Dude, and we had a pretty good chat about our concerns and reason for defederating. while immediate re-federation is just bluntly off the table with the rudimentary state of Lemmy's moderation tools, we now have a pretty good idea of the roadmap to refederating with them. we think we'll eventually be able to do this, although we don't have a timetable on when yet.

we're also now collaborating with him on how to move forward--and in the weeks and months to come we'll be pushing to expedite the process of developing some of the necessary tools. this decision has really helped us make connections that can hopefully realize those tools both on the desktop side and in apps being developed for Lemmy. we're also hoping to collaborate with other Lemmy administrators who have needs like our own, or just generally want more granular tools at their disposal.

we did also get in touch with the lemmy.world owner prior to defederating to share the concerns that prompted us to defederate[^1]--but we have not received any communication from him since it was levied, so there's no roadmap at all there as of now. we're always open to reconsidering and collaborating to end the defederation with him, but for now the earliest i can give you is "when mod tools are in a better state".

that's all for now folks. if any new significant developments take place we'll announce them as needed.

[^1]: we're only bringing this up now because it was just not useful information in the context of our announcement. it almost certainly would have been interpreted as some sort of callousness and/or brought unnecessary sectarianism and grief to him. at the end of the day he has his reasons and desires for running lemmy.world how he does, and we have ours for running Beehaw as we do. because of social and technological circumstances those are just incompatible right now, and that's fine.

Hi, I recently encountered this issue when trying to access the instance (both in the browser and Jerboa) while using a VPN. I don't know if this is just an issue with the one I'm using (Surfshark) but I didn't have this issue before.
I imagine this security layer was implemented recently, and that's why it didn't happen before.
Is this intended, or is it just the filter wrongly taking the VPNs IP as a malicious one?

hey folks, we'll be quick and to the point with this one:

we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.

we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is--particularly with federation in mind--basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we're being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).

an unfortunate reality we've also found is we just don't have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don't scale well. we have a list of improvements we'd like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible--but we're unanimous in the belief that we can't wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.

aside from/complementary to what's mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:

• these two instances' open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
• the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
• our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
• and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don't care about what our instance stands for

as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:

There's a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it's not just that, there's a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it's really hard to trust and support who's around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there's more hostility around them. They'll even shut themselves off when there's fake nice behavior around. There's a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it's not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can't even assess that for people who aren't from our instance, so we're walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn't sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.

Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren't open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.

and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it's in effect. but we hope you can understand why we're doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.

this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community's owner, i should add--we just have differing interests here and that's fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we'll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.

thanks for using our site folks.

Hello Beehaw! I understand lemmy.ml is overloaded, but I wanted to see if there was a different explanation for why this is the case. Am I in a moderation queue? Is something on Beehaw backed up? Or something else?

It's not a major inconvenience, this is just pure curiosity.

Need an app better than Jerboa? Go to Beehaw as normal in Chrome, then click the ... menu on the top right of Chrome. Look down and you'll see "Install App". (Edit: this option is normally not there for 99.9% of websites, I'm not taking about Add To Home Page) If you've got a free spot in your launcher a Lemmy icon will show up, otherwise look in your app drawer thing or whatever new apps show up.

This tech is called a "progressive web app" and it's not just a shortcut, because it then behaves like you'd expect an app to behave like.

Anyway, give it a try. A few other sites have this feature, but it's fairly rare and unfortunately underutilized.

hello folks! some additional suggestions have been made to round out Beehaw's current set of communities, so we've gone ahead and done that. we have four new communities accordingly, which are:

Disability and Accessibility! i think this one is pretty self-explanatory, but for anyone ambiguous on its intent, @xuxxun@beehaw.org puts it like this:

Feel free to post anything health, chronic illness, disability or accessibility related. If you need a space for support or sharing your experiences regarding all of the above topics, this is the right place as well :)

People of Color! this is a community specifically devoted to ethnic minority groups and their issues, and for discussions and connections relating to those minority groups. we're also hopeful it'll be a good space for minorities who are migrating to Lemmy, since i'm not aware of very many communities on here to this point like that. there's an already existing introduction thread in the community by @kalanggam@beehaw.org if you'd like to drop by.

Betterment and Praxis! i'll let @Wigglet@beehaw.org speak for the idea behind this one, because i think it really gets at some of the stuff we're trying to help build here:

Even if it’s just growing a little bit extra in the garden for the local food bank, picking up rubbish on the side of the road, or just making an effort to use the bus, having a supportive community encouraging you makes those little choices a bit easier. Maybe you’ve always wanted to do a little bit more for your community but don’t know where to start. Maybe you already do some of these things and want to help others get started. Maybe you’re just really proud of how something is done in your community. We might not be able to solve all the problems but we can at least try to make a few small things a little bit nicer.

and, finally: Socialism! there's no shortage of communities like this on Lemmy but a commonality many people have experienced is they're... not very welcoming, in general. luckily, a left-wing subreddit got in touch with us about moving (pre-boom, even) and we think their community on Reddit fit the ethos of the site pretty well, so we've helped move them over here. as the sidebar states, this community is:

A place for all leftist and labor news and discussion, as long as you’re nice about it. [...] Non-socialists are welcome to come to learn, though it’s hard to get to in-depth discussions if the community is constantly fighting over the basics. We ask that non-socialists please be respectful and try not to turn this into a “left vs right” debate forum by asking leading questions or by trying to draw others into a fight.

we hope you'll find each of these four new communities a useful space to discuss in.

now, as for the subject of new community creations: we're definitely slowing down on batches of communities after this set. this isn't a total stop--as our existing communities grow, we'll split off new ones as needed--but we're going to try and keep additions to a minimum until the Reddit wave crests. tentatively, our next batch of community creations will probably be after July 1, and any we create before then will be on an individual as-needed basis.

we think the current set of communities covers most things adequately enough for our purposes right now. some imperfections exist but to reiterate: we aren't trying to be Reddit, so some overlap and imperfection in coverage is fine with us.

this also doesn't mean we're done taking public opinion checks. we're not sure when this will be sent out yet (it's being worked on today), but we're drafting a community survey where among other things we'll gauge interest in the suggestions i've seen that haven't already been added. be on the lookout for that.

thanks folks!

Such as the instances that beehaw filters out? I want my feed filled up with all sorts of diversity.

How can I subscribe to a community on another Lemmy instance using the Beehaw account? I feel a bit embarrassed asking this question because it seems like a basic task, and I may have overlooked something obvious. However, I did make an effort to search the internet before coming here.

Here are the steps I've tried, which don't seem to be working:

1. On Beehaw, I navigated to the "Communities" section.

2. In the search bar, I attempted several searches:

   • https://programming.dev/c/meta

     => Result: The search page appears empty, without explicitly stating "No results." However, I can click the "next" button an infinite number of times.

   • I tried entering meta@programming.dev

     => Result: It displays "No results."

Been just linked to this post, that claims that on Lenny:

• Messages are never deleted, only hidden, a GDPR violation
• Deleted usernames are also not deleted, only hidden, same thing
• Stuff remains on federated servers even if you delete it
• There's no way to delete yourself from the network if you choose to do so

Gut feeling says none of this is true or is only half truths, but want to be sure before i invest myself heavily on this platform.

I seem to be having an issue logging in to Beehaw from a browser. I've tried Firefox and Chrome on Android and Windows, and Safari on an ipad. I either get a spinning circle or no change on the login button. I've tried disabling all of my extensions, but it doesn't make a difference.

I'm able to access it through Jerboa, but Jerboa's still pretty buggy for me.

Has anyone else run into this? Could this just be an issue with the influx of new users?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understood so far about the fediverse, someone can host an instance with only one community (or create a community in an existing server) not allowing posting, but allowing commenting and use it as a personal blog. Correct?

That way, Beehaw/Lemmy would be an aggregator of communities and personal blogs which conveniently one could see in the same feed (like in RSS).

Is it doable or is there another recommended way to keep your blog connected with the fediverse?

Between 19:45 UTC and 19:50 UTC, there was a mistake in how information was stored temporarily (cached) on Beehaw. This mistake could have allowed some people to see and use other people's accounts without permission.

If you were using the website during that time, please check that your account settings and email address are still correct. Also, make sure that any posts or actions you made during that time are still connected to your account.

It's important to note that we don't have any proof that this error was actually used by anyone to do anything bad during the short time it happened.

Hello friends, this is my first post here so apologies if I missed a similar post to this. I recently made my account on this instance and have been enjoying Beehaw since. However I do want to explore other instances at some point so I tried logging into some other ones. I read the FAQ and it seems that I should be able to log in with my same user/pass to any other federated instances, no? But when I do I just get stuck on an endless loop and it never seems to let me log in. I've tried this on instances such as https://lemmy.ml/login and https://lemmy.one/login, but no dice.

Am I doing something wrong? Any advice is appreciated.

Will there be votes, based on what people want, or will it just be up the admins to create new communities on this instance?

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