DarbyDear

This picture illustrates the difference between the different dragon and dragon-adjacent creatures! My partner is also pretty adamant about this subject, so I’ve wound up developing the same pedantry.

Completely agree! Beehaw fills the time left open by my dropping Reddit, but it isn’t a replacement for Reddit in my mind. Instead, I see it as it’s own thing, primarily centered around socializing, and that’s reflected in the fact that I’ve already posted here in a couple of weeks than I did in my decade or so of using Reddit. It’s a lot more interaction and active use instead of passive consumption and lurking, and I really like that. Seeing all the people trying to file bug reports for Lemmy/Jerboa and making demands in Beehaw Support bugs me since (as far as I’m concerned) the admins have already gone above and beyond what I think they’re responsible for, and I appreciate every bit of it.

I think you’ve hit on a good point - you want enough users for there to be engagement, but you also don’t want so many users that people feel like they’re a face in a sea of people that gets crowded out. What the appropriate number of people is depends on the culture and aim of the site more than being a static number to reach. Beehaw, for example, is trying to focus on creating a sense of community and connection rather than growth at all costs. That means Beehaw’s “critical mass” is going to be lower than something like Reddit, where it’s more of a free-for-all that seems to be trying to appeal by being a “loud” public square type space. Meanwhile, the tiny forum in the corner of the internet about a niche subject is going to have an even smaller goal because it’s safe for users to assume that there won’t be as many people and, if they’re seeking out a forum for a niche subject, it’s also safe to assume there won’t be as many lurkers.

Just letting you know that, even if you weren’t looking for it, you’re seen and felt. Some of the things you talk about really hit close to home for me - I’m stuck working to support the life I actually want. I bought a house not long ago in the middle of the country, which is exactly what I want now even though I wanted a swanky place in the city when I was younger. No time or energy for the things I love, and not enough money to drop out of my job and just enjoy life with my family and animals. I wish I had a secret to tell, but if I ever figure it out I’ll try to remember to pass it on to you. For now, I’m going to keep grinding.

On a tangentially-related note, do you have any of your music available online that you can link to? I love music, just never kept up with learning to play and create it, so I just try to appreciate it wherever I can find it until things change enough that I can settle a bit and pick up making it.

My understanding is that this is the plan - the only reason for defederation is because that is the only tool available at this time, and the admins for Beehaw find it most important to continue pursuing their goal to form a community rather than replacing Reddit or growing for the sake of growth.

Not trying to be a jerk or anything, but it’s generally not a great idea to give advice on someone’s situation when you haven’t gotten a full grasp on the background and relevant information, especially when it comes to mental/emotional stuff. For example, you’re correct that the general politics in the U.K. is more left-leaning than the U.S. but that’s not necessarily the case for trans rights - it’s picked up the moniker “TERF island” in some places. Elsewhere in this post, OP mentioned that their partner has been assaulted for wearing nail polish. Where they live could very well be the equivalent of the deeply-conservative part of Florida when it comes to feelings towards the trans community specifically.

I’ve mentioned my thoughts on this a few times now, but you’ve summed my opinions up nicely! I tend toward longer, overly-drawn-out comments and replies, so it was kind of pointless for me to comment on stuff on Reddit. It went entirely against what was promoted by the culture on Reddit, which developed as a result of turning comments into a popularity contest. If you didn’t have a gimmick (ShittyMorph, poem_for_your_sprog, shittywatercolor, etc.) then you were basically stuck using jokes, references, and acerbic jabs to try to get attention (as evidenced by karma). Even downvote farmers fell into this pattern, they just did the opposite of what the typical person would do, which resulted in even more toxicity.

This exactly - Lemmy is meant to allow community managers to focus on that portion while the developers facilitate their work. Speaking as a developer, there’s a very distinct difference in the skill sets needed for each field, and there should never be an expectation for one side to do work in the other - trust me, some of my past coworkers are last people you would want managing a community in any capacity. Why should it be different going the other direction?

Thank you all for all of the work you’ve put in to make Beehaw the amazing place it is! For the record, that last line is the extent of my desires from the admins/mods here, as long as it’s maintainable for y’all. I’ve hit burnout multiple times already throughout my life, so please listen to those of us who ask you to make sure you give yourselves time to decompress and not work on things - it’s so incredibly easy to fall into a mindset where you feel compelled to keep going until you have nothing left (especially when you care deeply about your work), but it’s not sustainable and it will cause you a wide variety of harm.

I also appreciate you beginning work on placing boundaries and managing expectations. I know there are tons of folks making all kinds of requests under the assumption that since you’re an admin, you make the software (since that’s often how it works elsewhere), but those people are going to have to realize that the federated nature of Lemmy means that you have no responsibility for bug and feature development, just getting the software to run, establishing and cultivating the culture, and keeping the lights on.

I wish I could devote time and energy to helping with bugs and feature requests, but my day job and the homestead that I’m working on getting set up with my wife take up more of those than I have available, to be entirely frank. Maybe when a couple of my bigger personal projects are done I can look at familiarizing myself with the codebase and contributing, but for now I will have to limit it to sending good vibes and supportive words wherever I can. You’ve all done a fantastic job setting up an honest-to-goodness community here, and I look forward to seeing it carry on! Don’t grind yourselves down trying to fulfill every request and expectation brought up to you; you have supporters here who see and appreciate you, and there’s only so much you can do.

I think you make a good point with the persistent karma score. Basically, Reddit is a site that has gamified popularity to the point where everyone is trying to make the quick, easy joke or reference as quickly as possible to score the highest number of points. The existence of sites to track the highest karma accounts only served to reinforce that behavior, which wound up having a bunch of knock-on effects like gimmick accounts that jammed themselves anywhere no matter how appropriate (which led to groupies that would try catching collateral karma), bots copying higher-scoring comments to try building a “trusted” account to then flip and sell to advertisers, and likely a bunch of other stuff that I’m not considering. In the end, there was a lot of shouting into the void and not much actual conversation. That’s how it felt to me outside of smaller subreddit, at least.

That’s exactly what I mean (/r/196 is the one I meant, with /r/19684 being the non-horny version). I’m bi, so I have no issues with the queer community at all - the issue is strictly how hard it was to not get constantly bombarded with horny garbage. Same reason it’s so hard for me to find anime and manga that I can enjoy. Fanservice in those is absolutely out of control.

This is actually a really good point that I hadn’t considered! My career dream as a kid was zoologist (which never quite panned out for me). My only concern with kids that want to be influencers is if they’re looking for love and attention they aren’t getting at home, and that’s entirely out of concern for their mental and emotional health. I don’t really think it’s bad for kids to want to be influencers though, as long as they understand what they’re getting into if they start putting serious effort into creating a career out of it.

Honestly, I agree entirely. I was a lurker for the most part, and it was so tiring wading through the random horny posting throughout Reddit. There was a subreddit I followed that was specifically the same as another well-known subreddit, but had an additional rule that no mentions of sex were allowed. Even the various subs satirizing other popular subs (like ShitpostXIV, which focused on Final Fantasy XIV) eventually became half cropped porn. It gets tiring, and I was actually relieved to see the lack of NSFW topics here.