It’s crazy to think that when I joined, Beehaw had <2k users, and now it has about 6 times that. So many server upgrades happened in just one weekend, many new moderators (a dream team, one might say), and many new servers to federate with as well.

Love being part of this ❤️

My personal opinion is that federation doesn’t have to take any particular form, and the shape of the fediverse - or, rather, your particular fediverse or your pocket of federated space - depends on how communities decide to federate, informed by various factors including software implementation, community culture and values, moderation policies, etc. It could look like a lot of different things, and there’s not really any “correct” policy with respect to federation; it’s all subjective and values-based.

Now, as a manner of my preference, I do like envisioning the fediverse as a ball-and-stick model. I don’t really like the idea of having ‘main’ or ‘central’ instances where everyone congregates, with smaller communities left on the fringe. To me, the kind of fediverse (or section of it) that I would most like to participate in is one where people are scattered across a diverse variety of instances - a wide range of stances on how they wish to federate: instances who federate with nobody and exist as isolated nodes, instances who federate with everybody and act like bridges or hubs, instances who federate with certain instances based on similar interests or values, constellations of instances which only touch in certain parts, etc. Each of varying size and user composition.

A lot of Mastodon, Calckey, Pleroma, etc. instances and a couple of Lemmy instances have already gotten to work on creating instances which are closely related to particular regions or locales. There’s pnw.zone for the US Pacific Northwest, I follow the founder of alaskan.social (for Alaskans, obviously), mastodon.com.pl for Poland, calckey.nz for New Zealand, mastodon.ph for Filipinos, lemmy.pt for Portugal and Portuguese speakers, baraza.africa (Lemmy) for Africans and the African diaspora, etc. etc. On that aspect of your post, I’m highly supportive, and I think you should definitely give it a shot and seek out like-minded people in and around Tucson.

The fediverse may not/probably won’t fully embrace the form of a locally-focused web (I know for some, local politics suck and they seek the internet as an escape from that), but something like that can and should exist in parallel with the interest-based and general purpose instances which already exist, and I would like to see things be further enmeshed through that.

On Beehaw:

I’m really appreciative of the community for sticking to more positive values and being passionate about making Beehaw a welcoming place. Love seeing people happy about releasing their inhibitions, jumping into whatever conversations are going on, and finding a community of support here. Also thankful for the other mods, just for being cool to talk to and being actively present all over the site, and for the admins - alyaza, Gaywallet, and Lionir for being transparent about how Beehaw is administered, and Remington and Penguincoder for keeping the site up and also being positive presences.

In real life:

IRL, I’m glad to not be sick anymore and finally have time for cleaning and job-hunting. It’s been rough in the way of money for the past few months, so I’m happy to have my partner and my parents’ support and to be working through slowly unfucking my life. I’m also grateful that my creative juice has really been pumping lately and that I’ve been much more prolific in my various writing projects.

I switched from Firefox to LibreWolf around the same time as I joined Lemmy, so I made Beehaw one of my homepage tabs to help reinforce my habit of coming here. Of course, it didn’t need that much help reinforcing since I already feel way more engaged on this site than I did with Reddit. But hey, beehaw 🐝🤠

Mods cannot purge comments, no. Site admins might be able to, but I don’t think it’s easy to do and not every federated social media platform respects deletion requests.

I use Posts > New and Comments > New, and I also alternate between Subscribed and Local, so that I can get a diverse stream of content without necessarily being subscribed to every single community on Beehaw.

For anyone about to comment here, I just want to direct you to the megathread which @Gaywallet@beehaw.org has set up here in !tech for any Reddit-related discourse.

I admit I haven’t spent as much time in the woods in my life so far as I would’ve liked, but I’ve heard it’s really good for the human psyche to spend time deep in nature.

Definitely couldn’t agree more - Beehaw is so much more friendly and engaging than Reddit ever was for me. I don’t know which aspect of the platform does it most for me, but I feel way more inclined to comment and post when I can trust that I’m not going to get ripped to shreds in the replies.

I’m so exhausted from last week, just finally recovering from a sickness that felt endless. But I’m starting off this week with a lot of ‘spring cleaning,’ and I’m going to treat myself later to a nice meal if all goes well. Really enjoying the switch from Dendron to Logseq for my personal knowledge management system.

Hang in there! Y’all have done a great job with the site so far, and hopefully everything will calm down soon. 💛

We have a Discord but it’s private for the time being, I’m sure it will return to the front page sidebar as soon as things settle more with the instance itself.

I hope you know this emoji has made it to the Discord 🤭 Welcome to Beehaw!

At first I read “would not like to see replicated” and I almost got upset, haha.

For me:

• Fountain pens
• Communities for different countries/regions or different language-speakers - on Reddit, I often lurked /r/de, /r/Philippines, etc.
• Mechanical keyboards
• Woodworking
• Oddly satisfying
• Star Trek
• Battlestations

I definitely second BIFL, Antiwork, and different communities for U.S. states, as I don’t often get to connect with other people from Texas on the Fediverse.

I agree - I would probably recommend even using archive.ph or the Wayback Machine to archive/permalink anything like top posts, if they’re really important. Copying all of the contents of a subreddit to a Lemmy instance just seems like overkill.

I appreciate you for posting this - I just read your post and the post you linked. I mainly want to concur with what’s been expressed so far, but I also have some personal reflections to share from things I’ve experienced.

One really solid strategy I’ve noticed this community employ to keep the jerk-o-meter down is simply frequently having critical discussions about behavior and user culture. You and the other stewards of this community for holding space for these discussions goes very far; to begin with, it’s difficult to get even a small community to reach a consensus on moderation if conversations like this rarely, or never, take place. Having that consensus is crucial to building a cohesive culture, especially doing it in a way which is inclusive. I think a lot of people who try to build communities, including online, erroneously believe that a healthy community is one where there is no arguing, but really, without dialogues like these, it’s so much easier to disagree on, or forget, what the standard of acceptable behavior even is. We have to keep talking about complex problems in our community together and hashing out our differences constructively - controversy with civility, calling people in, recognizing positive behaviors - if we want to build an inclusive culture and have a sustainable, welcoming online community. Publicly discussing our behavioral standards and our community values (and, thus, arriving at a better collective understanding of what those are) definitely helps a lot.

I also want to agree with what @setsneedtofeed said:

Not itemizing specific rulebreaking behavior I think can work with a cohesive instance culture. I think that is a good move. […] Itemizing rules can lead to ruleslawyer minded people finding things to do which are against the spirit of the rules but not the letter. [link]

Here in particular, I think the mods have been really helpful. Keeping the list of rules limited and broad, but also emphasizing positive examples of behavior rather than simply focusing on the “do-not” rules, has shaped the instance culture in a mostly positive way. Like you said, it’s important that we be mindful in our discourse, “so as not to alienate people who are tolerant but do not share the same characteristics be it political leaning, gender, hobbies, or anything else” - this is even more important than remembering not to be a jerk. It goes a long way that users on Beehaw are strongly focused on being inclusive in an online setting to foster the kind of community we want, rather than only worrying about how to deal with the jerks. Overall, I’d like for people here to continue practicing perspective-taking, not only when it comes to how our words might be received from a marginalized perspective but also when it comes to the effects our language may have on people whom we have other differences with (opinions, political leanings, etc.) but who are generally nice.

This is turning into a bit of a confused ramble, but that’s all I really had to say.

Thank you so much for holding this space 💖