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.
Beehaw seemed too fast and heavyhanded with defederating a while back. IMO, defederation is really a “last resort” style of option, not a “first response,” so Beehaw using it essentially as a “first response” to some of the bigger instances kinda told me that Beehaw wanted to be off on an island by itself. Like it wanted to be a private forum instead of a Lemmy instance.
I don’t miss Beehaw, and Beehaw disappearing from Lemmy wouldn’t matter to me, because as far as I am concerned it kinda already did that.
The purpose of Lemmy is to be open and connected, not a private walled garden. If it doesn’t fit what you want, then use something else.
Basically, what is there for 90% of Lemmy users to miss, if you effectively banned 90% of Lemmy users by defederating the biggest instances in the first place? They already dont interact or see your content, unless they’re using multiple accounts, which would be no different if Beehaw wasnt a Lemmy instance at all.