A few days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their Chat community about the challenges of content moderation and the possibility of leaving Lemmy. That post was eventually locked.
Then, about two days ago, Beehaw posted an announcement in their support community that they aren’t confident about the long-term use of Lemmy, due to so-called concerns about Lemmy.
If you currently use Beehaw and want to stay on the federated Lemmy network, consider migrating your account to another instance like lemm.ee.
I read it and it sounded like general frustration while trying to be civilized. They laid out the reasons why the platform was failing them while noting things that were within and outside their control. For things outside their control, they listed the thought processes in how to overcome them. I thought they did a good job in communicating their issues.
But my response was to your reaction. You can’t write a critical piece like they wrote without coming off as whiny to a part of the user base.
That’s fair, and I appreciate you engaging with me.
The technical explanation of issues was definitely well done and presented the issues rather plainly. I don’t want to diminish the importance of the moderation issues. It just strikes me as a bit weird the replication compliants.
That’s kinda the entire point of federation, it could be better but until the lemmy devs figure out how to make all of the lemmy instances a kind of CDN on top of everything else files being put everywhere is the next best step.
Should moderation of those images be replicated just like the images themselves? Yes.
The commentary on forking lemmy felt unnecessary. Yes, once you fork it you own it. That’s how code works. But I’m also biased since I’m in IT.
So maybe it’s my profession or just me scrolling while at work dealing with developers who try to avoid doing work, planning work properly and don’t think through what they are asking but it came across as valid issues with a tinge of whine.
I don’t think that Lemmy provides everything that Beehaw wants in a platform, but I also don’t think Lemmy devs have planned out what a federated platform should look like.
But then I don’t see the Beehaw team trying to get around work. They have effectively been told by the dev team to build the resources they want to see on Lemmy, and so they are evaluating whether to put those dev hours into the existing platform or a new one.
That’s a kind of odd situation then.
Per beehaw, they are willing to pay a bounty to get things they want fixed/deved. I read that from one of the admin posts, can’t remember if it’s the first one linked in the post or second.
If lemmy has effectively said “go dev it” why hasn’t beehaw paid developers to handle the requests?
Maybe my radar is off but something seems a little weird between those two statements
Because Beehaw is evaluating whether doing so is a good idea or not, and a lot of that goes into whether Beehaw believes that Lemmy is a platform that can continue to fit its needs. So Beehaw is evaluating several options:
Based on what was written, Beehaw admins seem to be leaning towards option 3 given the current quality of the existing code and lack of confidence in Lemmy devs.
And this kind of high level concept development is typical of organizations when choosing to spend money. It isn’t just a choice between spending money to fund development or not.
I appreciate the breakdown.
Definitely helps to contextualize things a bit but I’m still left wondering if option 3 actually helps drive beehaw’s end goal.
The way I first read it suggested to me that they were going to code something from scratch which I’d argue takes time away from building a community.
But rereading it, you might be meaning building something from new on a different tech stack. Which would make much more sense.
Does Beehaw have the experience and money needed to develop a new platform?
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Maybe it’s because I’m not a native speaker, but I always understood “whine” as to mean: “complaining in an annoying way about something unimportant”. So I’m replying on that basis.
I get that the “replication compliants” touch on a fundamental design choice in the way how the federation is typically working through ActivityPub. But that doesn’t make their problem “unimportant”. The conclusion I’d take from that is that either there’s a need (for them, though perhaps for others too) to redesign Lemmy so it can fit that purpose or they made a wrong choice by using lemmy to build their platform.
I think at the moment they are debating which one it is.
As for whether the way in which they complain is annoying… well, given that it’s a written text that can’t transmit non-verbal cues, I’d suggest not making too many assumptions or reading too much into it. Any complaint would sound annoying if you make the assumption that it comes from a position of entitlement, try to second guess or recontextualize it in a way that makes it no favors.
Just to establish common ground, we’re using different definitions.
“Speaking of complaining in a mildly annoying way” is a common definition we can agree on. I’ve never attached a level of importance to the definition and that may be due to me being a native English speaker.