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 is very… anti-federation. They loved defederation immediately with the idea in hindsight that they would create a micro Reddit out of the exodus, capitalising on Reddit exodus to Lemmy. They realised the techies and discussion board enjoyers that migrated love the idea of federation, and never want again the Reddit mod/admin disease here again.
How do I know this? 3 years ago, someone sent me to help build Lemmy, later I got the whole r/piracy to migrate, then with other “core” people, we showed Redditors the way to Lemmy. Over the past few years, when not many people were here, we streamlined moderation and rules, squashed 4chan raids and whatnot, filled up a lot of content, and managed all the non-developer stuff, as the devs continued to do their job silently, and suggested them changes.
Also of course, as Catradora points out, they went after Lemmygrad, Hexbear and individuals who liked socialism/communism, which I did not find particularly welcoming in a time, especially when the exodus migration was going on.
Lemmyworld is a shittier instance that goes along these lines, which defederates lesser, but turns the dial to 11 with pro-Israel/NATO politics preferences.