the Second Beehaw Community Survey
the Second Beehaw Community Survey
welcome to the second-ever Beehaw Community Survey. it's been awhile because of everything going on; we last did one of these with the influx of people last June and we got 1,500 responses that time. we don't expect anywhere near that many this time, but that's fine.
this survey should take about 10 minutes to fill out, so we strongly encourage you to do so when you are able to. you can find it at the following link:
Beehaw Community Survey #2
the survey is comprised of eight optional demographic questions to help us assess the overall identity of our community and eight questions relating to Beehaw and the Fediverse. the survey will be open for at least three days but no longer than one week. it'll be locally pinned for the duration of that minimum three days, so please mind that. results will also be aggregated and posted on here/the Docs page in a summary like with the last survey. no ETA on that.
this is also a good time to remind everyone that Beehaw has moved over to Open Collective Europe Foundation, and we will be taking all donations from there going forward. please direct your donations there if you haven't switched from our old Open Collective Foundation page yet!
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Concerning (De)Federation:
I initially had a feddit.de Lemmy account, and used it for everything. But when my feddit.de home feed got really slow, I started to split up. Now I am using separate accounts for scoped themes - beehaw, programming.dev, ani.social, and feddit.de - the last still for "the rest"/general and German content.
I feel like the distinct goals of beehaw may make it more sensible to not federate as usual. Beehaw puts a guard on registrations, and defines specific guidelines and behavior and communication goals. If all the other platforms that do not have these safeguards in place participate, how well does this work?
So my current feeling is that I'm not opposed to defederation. Although of course federation can still be a promotional tool and an entry-point for additional people. And others may use other instances accounts to regularly participate, in a good way - like I did before splitting up/scoping my accounts too.
My personal opinion on this is that we should probably take an allowlist approach to federation to be able to be more proactive about instances that could be threats for Beehaw.
I think we've managed to keep our culture to some degree through stronger moderation when it comes to out-of-instance users and making use of defederations.
That said, I wish we had more flexible federation options, such as for example, letting our users interact with certain instances without letting people from those instances interact in ours.
My personal opinion on this is that we should probably take an allowlist approach to federation
Considering the mind-boggling amount of user-generated content on the internet and its average signal-to-noise ratio, this looks to me like the only even remotely feasible approach to federation. If restrictive federation is like building a dam with small controlled openings, an open federation policy is like letting the river flow freely through the valley and having five people with buckets try to keep dry as much of the land in its wake as possible.
A lack of federation won't stop people from being on Beehaw and on other non-federated sites with a different account, if they so choose.
That river analogy is somewhat flawed, in that there are several levels to federation on Lemmy/Mastodon/etc:
- Federation of messages
- Federation of communities/boosts
- Federation of the "default" feed
Fediverse's default, is every user building their own "whitelist" out of people they decide to follow. Aggregate feeds like "Local" or "All", or the search feature, are optional discovery tools. Lemmy also adds "curated users" in the form of communities, which are still optional.
There could be more (mod) tools to curate these feeds for those that want to shape them, but it seems to me like the "federation problem" is more one of personal education, of asking for "someone else", or "an algorithm", to curate a single feed that people can follow... which is inherently contrary to the freedom of a federated system.
That river analogy is somewhat flawed, in that there are several levels to federation on Lemmy/Mastodon/etc:
I agree, but my point wasn't a perfect analogy. I merely intended to point out the considerable difference in the workload of the two 'extreme' approaches.
User-defined filtering is also very nice to have, but I feel like instance-level filtering is what gives an instance its unique look-and-feel. And from what I've read, Beehaw has also defederated from certain instances 'only' because moderating all the undesirable stuff coming from there put too much of a strain on the mod team. Hence my river analogy.
My personal opinion is that federation is a wonderful concept, but it sometimes comes at a cost that may outweigh its benefits.
Beehaw needed to:
- stop some messages
- didn't need to stop communities
- maybe curate its "All" feed
...the only mod tool available, was defederation. This is a clear shortcoming of the tools, which right now only allow an "all or nothing" approach, not of the federation itself.
instance-level filtering is what gives an instance its unique look-and-feel
Not exactly; the rules and community of an instance, are what give that "unique look-and-feel".
In an alternative reality, with a slightly different approach to federation, an "instance" could be a curated preset the user imports into their client.
Actually, that could be done with the Fediverse, if someone decided to do it.
I'm not sure if that's what's expected, but I also prefer an allow list approach to federation, and I answered on the survey that federation is important to me (as opposed to none).
I hope that, if many people answered like me for the same reason, it won't give the impression that we want implicit federation.