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.
That makes sense. Thanks for the detailed response.
I should mention that I used to be a developer on a forum system (SMF) nearly 20 years ago. I definitely agree that the moderation tools are better with traditional forum systems - even the moderation tools we had back then are better than what Lemmy has today.
There’s a few newer forum systems like Flarum, Discourse, NodeBB, etc that I think will eventually overtake the older forum systems. The design of those forums is getting more popular.
Having said that, I really think a single-node Lemmy with enhanced moderation tooling and more customizability would be able to replace many use bases of traditional forum systems though. Maybe a forum-focused fork or theme.