In this post I am speaking as a Beehaw fanatic and not as an admin. That is why it is placed in the chat community. To be clear, I am not speaking on behalf of the Beehaw admin team nor the community as a whole.
Currently, we have $5,430 that is in our collective purse to be used to further this endeavor. When I take a step back, and look at that amount of money, I am humbled. That is hope…it is an expression of where we want to go and what we want to preserve.
You may be wondering where we are with the testing of alternative platforms and any other considerations.
The testing phase, as far as I can tell, is over. We are, I believe, in a stage of digesting all of it. And, I have a feeling, that we are holding out hope that there could be other options we haven’t encountered yet.
I appreciate the patience of everyone involved and I don’t want to make a hasty decision.
Thankfully, we have had persons such as PenguinCoder to rescue us from the huge Reddit exodus and all the technical problems associated with the Lemmy software platform that we rely on right now.
There have been whispers that PenguinCoder could be working on a new platform for the Beehaw project.
Thank you all for grabbing onto our northern star, be(e) nice, and running with it.
Speaking as someone who joined during the “Reddit Exodus,” when I left Reddit I was not anticipating (or actively searching out) a direct Reddit replacement. I was happy to look for forums that worked for me, but wound up stumbling on Lemmy first.
All this to say that I was already ready to face accounts on different sites (or at least browse different sites) and I don’t think not being federated would be a dealbreaker for me.
I would certainly be concerned about the level of discussion without federation, though. To me, as an individual who has not had to deal with the struggles of Lemmy mod tools (or lack thereof), the contributions from other instances definitely help get a conversation going. And with troublemaker instances blacklisted I find more often than not they are adding and not detracting.
Obviously that’s all with the added benefit of me not having to be a mod. I guess at the end of the day, my hope is that PenguinCoder’s developing platform will play nice with ActivityPub, so we can still work with other instances. I suppose if it worked really well, other instances may want to even migrate to it (assuming it was robust enough).