hey folks. here’s a new FAQ on the community, since the currently pinned thread is a bit haphazard and crammed now, and we’ve had more time to go over stuff.
What is Beehaw?
in summary, we’re a community that wants to cultivate a sense of real belonging to something, to foster meaningful conversations, and to ensure everyone feels valued and respected in a way that isn’t the case with other social media out there. we’ve thought and written a lot about this. if you’d like more than that summary, we strongly encourage you to read the following three essays, which explain how this community is run, what we priortize in running it, and why we’ve designed it this way generally:
This sounds very cool! How do I join?
you don’t need to write a whole essay, however: please answer the question fully, and try to engage with at least some of the content above/on the sidebar before you register.
this is not personal, but we’ve grown a lot in the past week and are primarily interested in users who really care for the philosophy of our community. if you don’t answer the question fully, you will likely get caught in registration limbo (see below), and you might waste the username you want.
How long should I expect to wait to be approved?
anywhere from a few minutes to a day. in general, try logging in after about 24 hours. if you haven’t been approved within 24 hours your application is almost certainly in limbo because you didn’t answer our entry question to our satisfaction. this doesn’t mean we’re rejecting you, per se, but it generally means we didn’t think you engaged with the content above/on the sidebar. this is inelegant, but Lemmy doesn’t make it reliably possible to tell you to reapply, so this is a shortcoming we have to make do with.
if you have been approved and you used an email to sign up you should receive an email for that, although it might be marked as spam. we’re still trying to get Gmail to consistently take our emails, so again the 24 hour rule is best if you’re unsure or haven’t received one.
if you have issues of this sort, please report them in the following thread!
I’m in! How can I keep Beehaw running, or otherwise contribute?
our instance is 100% user-funded. you can one-time donate or become a monthly donor here. you can donate anonymously both ways. as far as we’re aware cryptocurrency is accepted by OpenCollective, it’s just more laborious and you’ll probably have to contact them to clear it.
if you have volunteer labor or advice you’re willing to give us on how to keep the site running smoothly, we also generally appreciate that. our Matrix and Discord communities are the best way to offer that stuff to us.
How do I help keep the community running smoothly?
be considerate! think about the things you say and how you want to say them; be kind and charitable; don’t assume the worst of people; but above all: Be(e) nice!
it might seem trite, but genuinely we’ve found there is no better distillation of what we want to accomplish here than that ethos. if something makes you feel like that ethos is being violated, err on the side of caution and report it (on desktop it’s the flag button in the three dot menu on any post). it can’t hurt. so far though we’ve found most people kind of know what we mean, and we’re hopeful you’ll be able to pick up on that too.
as for non-moderation ways you can keep things running: contribute to discussions! share stuff you find interesting! contribute your expertise and help out folks when they ask for it! it’s okay—and very understandable—to lurk based on the toxicity commonplace on other social media, but we really do try to make this space as welcoming as possible to everyone here and we hope you’ll find it a safer place to come out of your online shell.
What else should I know?
we always take feedback. while we can’t promise any changes, you can provide thoughts and comments on just about anything on the site in Beehaw Support, or on Discord or Matrix (where we maintain real-time chat). we try to get a sense of what the community wants and needs all the time, so we’ll frequently be asking for input from you to help inform our decisions.
downvotes are disabled on this instance and will probably always be. we find them unproductive. communities cannot be made by users on here. we do take feedback on what gets made and when to make communities, as a part of the above point. you can always find a running list of communities we have at this link, or under the Communities button on desktop.
we are all volunteers, and this is not a job for us. we would like to not have it be one, so we can just be members of the community with all of you. please help keep it that way!
in the very, very long term, we aspire to become a co-op or similar, as a part of fulfilling our ethos.
as with the last thread, feel free to sound off on other questions you have. i, other mods, and community members will try to get to them as able.
Thanks for approving me! I was looking for an art community on Lemmy as a replacement of Reddit and as far as I know, Beehaw has the biggest art community on Lemmy!
deleted by creator
Hello to all! I just wanted to introduce myself and say hi!
Hii. Just got here as well!
nice, hello!
OK - just checking in - picked up on Beehaw from Lemmy a couple of days ago and what a breath of fresh air!
To that end I’ve just wiped and deleted my two accounts at the R place after ten and a bit years. It turned into a pile of toxic garbage - bots and trolls in all of the subs I was in.
Hopefully this will different.
I really like the policy of no downvotes. Honestly, even on Reddit I think downvoting had long ceased to serve any useful purpose, and turned into a harmful tool. Anything that truly is bad content can just be reported instead.
I think no downvotes for something like Beehaw is great. But for anything that tries to push “open” above “moderated”, downvoting is critical. Otherwise you get bad-faith contributors that are propped up.
Hi everyone. This is an interesting place. I like that good behaving is part of the community philosophy. I can also understand why the creating a community is not allowed. Overall I have the feeling this is a place of quality.
However, disabling the down vote button leaves me with an uncomfortable taste in the mouth. I understand why this is done. This is my first post here, so I will see myself how its going to work out and decide at later time if this is a good idea or not. At least down voting unpopular opinions is such a bad thing in other communities, which would be solved here. And it still is self regulating, where top or hot comments have the most likes and comments. While writing my own comment here, I start to like disabling the dislike button.
Oh and thank god there is a Preview mode (like Github). I just wish there would be a realtime preview mode on the side.
Thanks for approving my account, I like the feel of the place and look forward to becoming more active as I get more familiar with things. One question… While I was waiting for my account to be approved I opened an account on the startrek.website lemmy instance with the same user name. Is this going to cause any problems?
Happy to be(e) here!
I am really happy that this space here exists and I can be here. I already created an account at another instance, but noticed that the people there are already trying to create a new Reddit, including the downsides. So having a more controlled instance focused on being nice to each other sounds really wonderful.
Brand new user here. Big thanks to those that stood up this community. I was approved within minutes! I was shocked. I am excited to be a small part of this friendly project.
Hi guys, new here, how does this: “communities cannot be made by users on here. we do take feedback on what gets made and when to make communities” work in practice? is there a space to request a thing be created? Like for example i like to talk about wrassling shows but there’s only a sports community.
Is there a wrasslin community? I can’t seem to find one
Hi, quick question: Would you consider adding a community for content creators/streamers? Having a small positive community like this is ideal for small creators.
If no, could you recommend where I should try to foster such a community?
Thank you for your time
Where my reddit escapees at
yo yo! i’ve been waiting for a FOSS reddit since forever. i’m hoping this gets traction!
Thank you to all of you who put the work in to make Beehaw what it is ❤️
The co-op / democratic governance idea sounds fascinating. I’m Finnish and we’re big on co-ops (or were, at any rate), and I’d definitely love to see that particular ethos spread to site governance.
Oh and random hosting tech question, do you have an autoscaling setup at the moment?
It is not autoscaling. We had to scramble a lot in the first 48 hours after API changes were finalized to ensure we had hardware to support all the users and fine tune some settings for lemmy. Luckily we have some wonderfully tech literate people with time on their hands who’ve chipped in to help.
I can't create an account on Beehaw, I'm posting from infosec.pub.
When I try to create an account or to login, I just get a spinny, and it leaves me hanging there.
What do I need to do to create an account?
I also got the spinny. I think it was a timeout issue with the form. I copied my essay, refreshed, and pasted it in and it worked fine.
