There is a lot of discussion happening in the background of our project here. We could not anticipate all of the challenges that we were going to face a few years ago. One of the reasons for this was because we had no idea what our choice of a platform would bring.
Specifically, we chose Lemmy as the software that we would use to launch our endeavor to attempt a safe space for marginalized persons online.
In the first year or so, this choice was completely successful for a very small number of users. And then we all experienced an enormous influx of users when Reddit announced/implemented their shutting down of third party apps.
Since then there has been a huge number of people that have joined the Beehaw project. This tsunami of users initiated technical problems, and otherwise, that we could not foresee.
Thankfully and fortunately, we have had a couple of incredibly knowledgeable persons that have swooped in to ’save the day’ and keep this site running.
Unfortunately, these persons will NOT be able to continue to support the Beehaw project much further. They have life commitments and other factors, including careers and family life, that will prevent them from contributing to our project in an ongoing fashion.
All that being said, Lemmy (the software that Beehaw runs on) development is incredibly slow and is riddled with problems that makes administration/moderation very painful.
Therefore, we are left with some options that may feel uncomfortable to us. For example, we may want to consider leaving the Fediverse for another software platform that does NOT include ActivityPub. To explain, Fediverse/ActivityPub are very positive concepts on the foundational level. However, the Beehaw project is struggling to include this because most of our moderation/content/ethos is being jeopardized from OTHER federated instances (i.e. it, mostly, is NOT coming from within our own Beehaw registered user base).
The aforementioned persons, that have ’swooped in to save the day’, have been discussing/working with us to come up with the best solutions that would enable the Beehaw project to continue while NOT needing incredibly experienced/technically adept persons around.
Right now, we are testing alternative software platforms and evaluating them based on everything that we want Beehaw to become in the future.
Thank you all for your continued support of the Beehaw project and entrusting us to make this happen.
Is a forum site a possibility? I honestly miss internet forums. It does kind of sound like what you're looking for beehaw to be.
Beehaw without federating would be essentially that, of course other software options are available.
The Reddit style ranking system is a bit silly for a forum with lower activity. In fact it could make marginalized peoples feel more marginalized if their past simply gets buried.
And Beehaw doesn't have a huge amount of activity, so the prioritization provided by a Reddit-style ranking system is less useful. I think going to a typical forum/messageboard system just makes sense.
There's a front-end for Lemmy that basically turns it into a php forum.
The issue here isn't the front-end and can't be fixed with a new coat of wax.
What would be the main issues? I can think of some, and it pains me to not be able to help fix them, but maybe others could.
The Reddit-style presentation of topics and ranking comments isn't really conducive to lengthy, quality discussions that persist over a period of time. The Reddit-style works for following current events and posting links to new things etc, but as a result, old topics - topics even a couple of days old - falls off the engagement radar. Once it's gone from the front page, it's gone from people's consciousness. This is bad for a small community with few posts that value quality of discussions over blind sharing of links. For instance, say I create a topic called "share your favorite vegan recipes" - I may get some replies in the first couple of days, but then the topic will fall off the frontpage and completely die. This is further exacerbated by the voting system. On Reddit/Lemmy, topics and comments which have a higher number of votes get more visibility, and this creates two issues - one is it encourages group think and creates an echo chamber, the other is that it drowns out less popular topics or comments. This sort of intentional drowning of posts and comments actually may be a good thing - and even necessary - on high-userbase systems like Reddit, where a single thread could have thousands of comments - but it works against low-traffic communities like Beehaw, where every comment is valuable (unless it's off-topic/spam etc of course).
Whereas in a traditional forum:
With all the above reasons, forums are therefore more conducive for encouraging discussions, over a place which simply acts like a feed aggregator. Traditional forums are the solution to the doomscrolling issues that plague modern social media. Plus, they offer better moderation tools, with better granular permissions granted to mods, so you could grant various levels of access. Also, you can place several restrictions on users to reduce spam, for instance, you could grant a user rights to post a topic only after they've read all the rules, and maybe participated in a quiz or something. You could grant additional rights to people who've gotten a certain number posts in their bag. You could have a "trusted poster" system where a user could have mod-like abilities. There's so many ways a forum is a lot more flexible than a system like Lemmy.
So overall, I think Beehaw's ethos and vision would align better with a traditional forum, over a feed-aggregator style forum like Lemmy.
I don't know whether @Penguincoder@beehaw.org had all these in mind, but as far as lengthy & quality discussions go, everything you wrote to support this sentece, in my experience, seems 100% correct. There was a time, when forums when used more, during which a discussion on a subject would carry on for weeks, even months, between different individuals. Taking the time, thinking over the subject and coming back with a response after days was not at all uncommon.
Reddit grew to a point that the focus became constant refreshes and the most recent 6 hours of postings... and reposts became the normal means of revisiting a topic. And when a topic gets more than 1500 comments, a repost resets that. It's just a machine that rolls the clock constantly in favor of "new".
Tracking on this; I am not alone on the team or community here, but I agree with everything you said. I don't like nor want that in your face, featured, hot ranking content. I want to go view the content that I want and sometimes that is reviewing the discussion I had 3 weeks ago with new eyes and information. I prefer a community like that, but I also really enjoy something like HackerNews. No clutter, presents quality information that's relevant, and only a few flamewars.
After reading your post, I'm more on the side of following beehaw to the format that suits them best. I couldn't figure out why I wasn't finding those quality posts here after a while, and what you said about them being quickly pushed out in favor of new content makes a lot of sense.
Although I came here through the rexodus, I agree that the Reddit style format still carries a lot of problems that I'd rather not keep, and it's important to have a quality space I can post (also because I'm trans and need those spaces too)
I do still feel a need for the dopamine rush of cat pics and memes, so I'm not sure if there's a way to hybridize that with a forum? If not, there's always burner Lemmy accounts (or Tumblr lol) for that
Wholeheartedly agree. Beehaw's vibe always felt more like a forum than a feed aggregator. I think that format would fit it better.
Lemmy and Kbin both lack a lot in moderation and anti-spam measures. Both apps are taking about having features to specifically throttle new local members. And anti-spam in terms of server to server doesn't really exist at all.