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.
I like the policy of “Be Nice” even when I get annoyed that I can’t down vote. Tho a ultimatum like this would make me switch to another server. Why? Well first of all Lemmy is supposed to be federated imagine if Google did this with gmail, it would not end well. Secondly even if I like content from Beehaw communities I do enjoy and contribute to other instances, and would not follow BeeHaw if it where to defederate. The reason I chose and have stayed on BeeHaw is that ultimately it was my choice to use this instance and follow the rules, defederation would not allow me the freedom to be anywhere but on BeeHaw, and that sounds like the walled garden that I left behind. And those platforms end up hurting people allot. I would hate for BeeHaw to end up like it, and would way less be there to see it happen.
TLDR: I want the freedom to chose the rules I want to abide by and would not support this. And would migrate to another instance if this where to go forward.
If you want to be able to choose the rules of your instance, why are you on Beehaw? Beehaw doesn’t have any rules and its admins are explicitly and openly against having rules.