hey folks, here's another meta-post. this one isn't specifically in response to the massive surge of users, but the surge is fortuitously timed because i've been intending to give a good idea of what our financial stability is like. as a reminder, we're 100%-user funded. everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us. thanks to your generous support, we're *pretty* confident we have passed our current break-even point for this month, at which we wouldn't eventually need to pay out of our own pockets to keep the site running. that point in our estimation is about **$26 a month** or **$312 a year**. (please ignore OC's estimated yearly budget--we don't determine it lol) our expenses are currently: - $18/mo toward our host, Digital Ocean. (yesterday we upgraded from DO's $12 tier to its $18 tier to mitigate traffic issues and lag, and it's really worked out!) - $2/mo for weekly backups - $4/mo for daily snapshots of the website, which would allow us to restore the website in between the weekly backups if need be. for a total of at least **$26/mo** in expenses. this may vary from month to month though, so we're baking in a bit of uncertainty with our estimation. we currently have, for the month of June: - $70/mo in recurring donations (at least for June) - $200 this month in one-time donations for a total of **$270** this month. our total balance now stands at **$331.31**. that balance means we now have about a year months of reserves currently, if we received no other donations and have no unexpected expenses.[^1] the recurring donations put us well into the green at this point. this is good! everything past our break-even point each month is, to be clear, money we can save and put toward scaling up our infrastructure. there is no downside to donating after we've already met our "goal" of basic financial stability. doing so will have pretty straightforward practical implications for you: fewer 500s, 503s, better image support (this takes a *lot* of space!), and the website generally being run on more than potato hardware.[^2] if you'd like to do so in light of this information, our OpenCollective page is this post's link. thanks folks! [^1]: we will have at least one upcoming expense but its size is TBD, and so is how we'll pay for it [^2]: especially during times like now, where we've likely been getting thousands or tens of thousands of hits an hour

If you haven't had a chance to review the two posts on the sidebar and can find time to do it, please do. In as short a message as possible, the guiding principle here is to be(e) nice to each other. This is explicitly a safe space for all, a kind space for all, and a nice space for all. If you see behavior that is not nice to you or doesn't seem in line with this ethos, please let us know by hitting the report button! I expect the next few weeks there will be some level of adjustment to all the new activity and that there will be a decent number of people here that just don't fit in well to our community. A little bit of patience and a little bit of help will go a long way to making sure we keep this place a nice little refuge from the rest of the internet.

First off, I wanted to say hi to all the new members we've had join in the past month. Thank you for joining us here at Beehaw. A community doesn't exist without its members, and it's exciting watching this instance grow. I've always been a proponent of keeping explanations as simple as possible and allowing discussions to clarify the finer points, but I've noticed that I've been repeating myself a lot recently with the influx of new users and lot of fantastic questions about what we are, what we're doing, and why we're different. This is to be the first post of a series in which I'm going to share my own thoughts on the vision of Beehaw and how I hope it can be brought to fruition. It's also a place for me to share my thoughts on what's wrong with other social media platforms, such as some of the major pitfalls of most moderation systems. To be clear, I don't speak on behalf of everyone who's been involved in starting this instance and I certainly don't speak on behalf of everyone here, so this isn't meant to be a manifesto, or a set of rules etched into stone tablets for you to obey. I will try to frame ideas that I hold through my own eyes (I), and ideas which I believe the establishing community holds through the lens of our eyes (we). # A condensed history of the formation of Beehaw --- The group of users who created Beehaw used to exist on another platform. Many of us came to that platform from many other platforms before it. We were sold on the idea that it was a different platform, where discussion would be encouraged, and things would be different. While the platform was still small, there was a much higher feeling of cohesion and community and users being aggressive or hateful to each other was incredibly rare. When they were mean, it was often over emotionally charged issues and typically resolved itself with apologies or slight changes in who interacted with who. Over time this platform, like many others before it, got infested with a group of people I like to refer to as rationalists. I'm simplifying their mindset to that of the rationalist, because rationalism touts itself as a belief that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge, rather than belief or emotional response, and they often touted such ideals. While I agree that beliefs and emotional responses can get in the way of important work, the kind of rationalist that I take qualms with is someone who doesn't understand that their own beliefs or emotions are clouding their judgement. At times they repeat racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted narratives because they are not as learned as they think. They often end up causing a lot of harm to minority individuals who already struggle to get society to listen to them because bigoted notions dominate the common narratives found in society. On this platform I attempted to address this emerging problem of rationalism. To be clear I do not view these people as bad people. I simply think they are misled or unintentionally ignorant. When I was younger, I found myself in possession of many of the thoughts they discuss because I was also taught them through the lens of a colonial oppressive system. It took a lot of work to undo some of the brainwashing that I had gone through and to realize the harm that I was causing by 'debating' these issues online. Unfortunately for me my attempts to address this problem on said platform were met with ire by the creator of said website, and I was told in no uncertain terms that I should cease these meta-discussions altogether. That message and that final thread that I had created on the matter lead to a discussion on an informal community for the website where likeminded individuals began to lay the groundwork for what we felt was wrong with this system of moderation and the problems we saw in modern social media platforms. # The spirit of Beehaw --- The issue as I see it with modern social media is the way in which rules are enforced. There are many good reasons to itemize specific behavior which is not allowed, but the downside is that extremely specific rules are easy to maneuver around. We've all experienced someone who's a real jerk on the internet but manages to never get banned because they never explicitly violate any rules. I'm not sexist, they'll claim, but happen to post a lot of articles calling into question modern feminism or criticize the wage gap. I think many people today would agree that someone 'debating' the benefits of phrenology in the open would constitute racist behavior, but there was a time and place in the world where it was considered real science, despite many scientists distancing themselves from this field very early on and critics writing scathing commentaries on this emerging field. This same guise of civility is frequently exercised by bigots, with modern examples of sexism, homophobia and transphobia being easily found on nearly any major social media platform. Humans are pretty good at figuring out when someone is being a dick online, even if they are acting within the defined rules, and one solution to this problem is to recenter humans in our online social platforms. The idea of not having a ton of explicit rules, and instead having simple rules like "Be(e) nice" is a startling one for most, because it upends what we've come to know and expect from the internet. However, by keeping the rules simple and instead attempting to enforce the spirit _behind the rules_, we're able to deal more effectively with problematic individuals and create a space in which you aren't worried about whether you're going to have explain to someone why you're a human and why you shouldn't be subject to incessant bigotry online. # What is (and isn't) Beehaw --- That brings us to the fundamental question of what Beehaw is and isn't. Beehaw is a social media platform. So, we do want you coming here and sharing links to news articles, websites you find, starting discussions, connecting with others, and in general doing what you see on other social media websites. We want you to do this while being nice to each other. If you aren't nice, we'll remind you to be nice. If you continue to be problematic, we'll escalate from there, but it's going to be on a case-by-case basis. If your first reply when we ask you to be nice to each other is to fuck off, I'm going to respond in kind. I also understand that being emotional is a normal part of being a human and that some of us struggle with anger more than others, and I'd like for this to be a community which is open to the idea of reversing actions, such as bans, if you're willing to talk with the community about why you think it should be reversed. Of note, we simply do not tolerate intolerant behavior. Being explicitly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or bigoted in any other fashion is not tolerated here. But how might one determine when it's okay to be intolerant towards people you _believe_ are being intolerant or who are being intolerant but doing so because they are uneducated or have not spent time deconstructing their own privilege? Many philosophers have written extensively about this subject, and I simply don't have time to write an entire manifesto. In simple terms, I am not advocating for tone policing. I believe that being outraged and angry at people who are destroying our society is a good thing to do. When the supreme court removes protections for abortion, it's okay to be outraged and to take action into your own hands - they have done something intolerant. When someone advocates online that you don't have the right to your own body, it's okay to tell them to fuck off. In fact, I greatly encourage it. This is being intolerant to the intolerant. However, when someone online shares an opinion and it feels like they might be intolerant and you jump to the conclusion that they are intolerant and you launch into a tirade at them, this is not nice behavior. You didn't check if they have the opinion you think they have, and that's simply not nice to someone which you don't know. It gets even more complicated when you consider someone who is sharing an opinion they have which is actively harmful to many individuals in the world, but it's due to their ignorance. I personally believe that so long as this person is not actively spreading this intolerant viewpoint and are **working on themselves to become a better person**, that it would not be particularly productive to launch into a tirade against them. I understand, however, how someone could be quite rude in response to such intolerance and I agree that this person may desperately need to be educated appropriately, but there is no way for that discussion to happen on this platform in a productive manner while lobbing insults at each other. I can understand why, at first brush, some might consider this tone policing. However, I disapprove of the intolerant viewpoint, and I approve of it being corrected, but I also approve of the intolerant person attempting to become a better person. The only way for a platform which is hoping to exist as an explicitly nice place online to avoid taking sides in a situation like this is to withdraw from the quandary entirely. This kind of nuanced political and philosophical discussion is just simply not meant for Beehaw. I'd like to think that I'm aware and learned enough to avoid 'debating' things like phrenology, which are obviously racist, but I'm also smart enough to realize that there's likely some ideas which I've internalized or been taught by a colonialist western society which are _harmful_ to other minorities. I want to be able to learn about how everything I was taught was wrong, and to be corrected, and that space can only exist when we don't let users berate each other over ideas they project on others (whether that projection happens to be correct or not).

Hello flesh Creatures that inhabit this app and or website instance, due to me threatening the developers at gunpoint (aka politely asking), I asked if I could be a pseudo community manager of some kind, due to wanting to take the stress off of them constantly answering questions. due to me being on my phone 24/7 (download Jerboa! It's great and the developer could use help if they're interested, not managed by us) this means generally speaking, I can answer questions newer people might have, or just a general inquiry. Now what does this mean? Well my little homosapians, that means that whenever you have an issue, you can comment on this post or mention me somewhere if you have a general inquiry about something. If it's something I can't personally answer (i.e code stuff, because while I am an intelligent 19 year old, I'm not intelligent enough to understand coding!), I think that's a good idea personally. Thank you everyone for also making us surpass over 600$ in total donations!!, You can donate here to support the developers of this instance more here. https://opencollective.com/beehaw (it also supports crypto through this method, if it's still up to date!) https://opencollective.com/foundation/updates/ocf-can-now-receive-cryptocurrency If you have any questions, I'm willing to answer them whenever I'm available.

Hi guys - I keep getting 500 Server Error. Is this because the server is getting overwhelmed? Too many new users?

@support@beehaw.org Have you considered moving your instance from #Lemmy to #Kbin? The latter seems to be better in terms of resource usage, plus there's the whole issue with the main Lemmy developers that comes all the way since 2021

##### update: we have a pretty good idea of what we'll add to start, probably tomorrow. i'm unpinning this post and beginning to reply to posts in here with specifics. thank you for your suggestions to this point no promises on any *specific* additions from me or the other mods, but now is a good time to gauge this.[^1] for reference, our current 18 non-support communities are:[^2] - Chat - Creative - Do It Yourself - Entertainment - Environment - Feminism - Finance - Free and Open Source Software - Gaming - Humanities - LGBTQ+ - Music - News - Politics - Science - Space - Sports - Technology try to be a *little* broad in your suggestions--this is still a site of just 1,000 people, so it simply can't be as granular as reddit--but it's fine if your suggestion is a specific subset of an already existing community or overlaps with one. Space and FOSS are some obvious examples of already existing overlap, and those communities work fine. [^1]: and even if we don't add a suggestion *in the immediate term*, knowing that there's interest makes it easier to do so later [^2]: these communities can always be found [at this link](https://beehaw.org/communities) (or under the "communities" button), if you weren't aware

these came a little earlier than anticipated—i was expecting them tomorrow—but based on the [feedback in the thread](https://beehaw.org/post/413919) we decided to quickly round these specific bases - [City Life](https://beehaw.org/c/citylife), for all things urban; urban planning; municipal; public transit; FuckCars; stuff like that. also a good place for automobile-posting in lieu of a more centralized alternative. - [Jokes and Humor](https://beehaw.org/c/humor), which is pretty self-explanatory. *please* read the sidebar disclaimer, though - [Literature](https://beehaw.org/c/literature), also very self-explanatory. - [Nature and Gardening](https://beehaw.org/c/greenspace), our outdoorsy space in contrast to the more... climate change, public policy, and generally global [Environment](https://beehaw.org/c/environment). all things nature, hiking, climbing, gardening, and things like that can be posted here. - and [Programming](https://beehaw.org/c/programming), which has been split off from the rest of Tech. see also its cousin [FOSS](https://beehaw.org/c/foss), if you weren't aware that one existed. if your suggestion was not taken: i *hopefully* replied clarifying where it should go in the meantime, or it's just intuitive if i missed a comment. as i said to a few people in the thread, another round of community creations is somewhere down the road--and probably not far--so don't be too distressed! thanks for using the website; hopefully this is my last big post of the day, lol. i'll be trying to check out after this since most of the past two days have been spent keeping the site orderly

Whenever I try to comment on random threads, it pops up with this and then the whole page freezes, making me have to retype the beehaw URL to get back to the frontpage. Back doesn't do anything, nor clicking anything on the page when this occurs.

I think having an app to use this site easily on mobile will obviously be incredibly useful and can help this place grow even further. It may still be too early but if no such app exists so far are there any plans for one? Edit: Guys, looks like Jerboa started acting funny, I keep logging in but the app insists that I'm not logged in. I'm on the mobile site for now until I figure it out.

##### to start: we're going to start staggering when we approve people a little more--at this point, we've literally doubled our existing userbase. registrations today will be processed at a slower pace while we talk over how much further we want to let things go, and at what pace we want to continue letting people in so things don't become truly overwhelming. if you'd like to introduce yourself without it getting lost in all the posts already made, i just made a thread for that ***[over here](https://beehaw.org/post/415703)*** our sidebar should give you most of the information you're looking for about us, but to reiterate some: we are pretty relaxed here, but we have a well carved out understanding of what we want to be. if you would like more elaboration on that, you can find elaboration on that at length in the following two posts: - [What is Beehaw?](https://beehaw.org/post/107014) - [Beehaw is a Community](https://beehaw.org/post/140733) for some less lengthy and more relaxed elaboration, see the discussion in the [comments of this post](https://beehaw.org/post/392262?scrollToComments=true). as for funding: we are 100% user-funded. if you would like to contribute to our ability to keep the website up, you can donate [on OpenCollective](https://opencollective.com/beehaw/donate), which supports both one-time donations or monthly donations. a few questions occasionally pop up like "why do we have the set of communities we do?" and "why can't people make their own?" (the latter is a feature of lemmy). for elaboration on that, you can [see the following post](https://beehaw.org/post/140733) and the discussions [here](https://beehaw.org/post/352915?scrollToComments=true). we are open to suggestions and creating communities as demand sees fit; see also [discussion here](https://beehaw.org/post/401346?scrollToComments=true). downvotes are disabled on this instance and that's a thing we're not liable to change. if you'd like elaboration for why that is, see [this comment](https://beehaw.org/comment/29314). this may be a point of friction for some coming from reddit, but i hope you'll understand *why* we're doing it even if you don't necessarily agree with it. if you're interested in our governance to this point and a brief idea of our long term goals, see [the comment here](https://beehaw.org/comment/67350). feel free to sound off on other questions you have; i'll try to update the OP with those and our ability to answer them as time goes on.

ff on mobile allows you to "install" a website and pretend to be an app. cool idea for a site like this. they only problem is that it makes the name and icon for this site "Lemmy" instead of "Beehaw". and I'm new here so I'm using both. I'm assuming that there's just some customisation to be changed on the Beehaw side to make the one for this site unique

Hi! I would like to subscribe to https://lemmy.ml/c/baduk but I don't know how to do it. When I try to open it in Beehaw (https://beehaw.org/c/baduk@lemmy.ml), I get "404: couldnt_find_community". It's a new community, so perhaps I should just wait. Or is there anything else I can do? thanks!

Maybe I'm missing something but there doesn't seem to be support for saving a draft of a comment. Also, if a comment fails to post, everything is lost. Is there anything that can be done about this? I guess the same could be said for new posts as well.

Tried to make a post, wrote the whole thing on mobile then it failed and I got a "connection closed" error (yay mobile lol). Been confused about if Lemmy on Jerboa is repeatedly logging me out or what. Is it just me or is the influx of users causing a lot of issues with other people too?

I dunno if this is more a Lemmy thing, but is it possible to add Ctrl + Enter to submit a comment? (same functionality as most modern websites, reddit, fb, etc.) I tried to make it myself using a user-script, but couldn't get it working x__x https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/467688-beehaw-org-ctrl-enter-to-submit-comment/versions version history, I got Ctrl+Enter working, but 'current-comment's-form' - I can't rely on using the element ID, and nothing I tried was working.. (edit, ooh, you can edit titles of posts, cool~)

Looks like you should be able to copy/paste the URL of the community in your Masto search bar, such as https://beehaw.org/c/politics, but this seems to only work with the Beehaw technology community (https://beehaw.org/c/technology). A nondescript 500 server error is returned when I try any others. Is this expected? Is there some kind of toggle for each community that allows/disallows following from other Federated instances?

I created my account on this instance, but when I go to posts on other instances where downvoting should be enabled the downvote button still is missing. Is there a way to change this or do I have to create a new account on another instance?

See title. It would be nice to be able to see deeper into threads, but I don't think it's literally ever worked for me. I'm on Firefox, if that helps.

Multiple times lately I've gotten `502 Bad Gateway` when trying to access the instance. It is then back to normal after a minute. There's the influx of users, like myself, but those are only in the few hundreds from the numbers that is displayed.

With *interface language* set to **browser default** the site keeps rendering in Spanish even though my system default is US English. And every time I come back to the site, the setting is reverted back to **browser default** and I have to set it back to English. I'm on ChromeOS and US English is set as my default language 

Not sure how easy it would be to just do that and be able to sign in through a regular beehaw account but it would be cool to see.

Was thinking it might look nice if  was automatically hidden if there's no picture associated with the post, or else in its place display a user-uploaded picture (like with HAL here: https://beehaw.org/post/414269)? Also maybe just a bit more spacing/padding between trending communities?  Like I said, *fussy*. Any thoughts?

I noticed on comments there are these two icons that seem link a permalink to the comment. They seem to both always point to the same URL. What's the difference supposed to be? I looked around but searching for "link" and/or "icon" brings up an awful lot.

Undetermined routinely insists it isn't English and that I can't post it. And, to be fair, while english is my only language, that doesn't mean I'm Neil Gaiman or something with it. Maybe it just has exceedingly high standards? Anyway, I was curious if there was a way in which I could set the Language default on posts and comments to English.

in short: our server crashed the other day and we're not really sure why, so we had to restore a backup it went down at about 1:40 pm yesterday and we gave it until early this morning to diagnose what the problem was ourselves and get feedback from our server host (Digital Ocean) on what the problem might be. unfortunately we couldn't do that and none of their suggestions helped, so this morning we pulled the trigger on restoring the backup. as a consequence a few days of posts and registrations are now lost. so: **if you registered some time in the past 7 days, you will need to re-register**. (as a registration aside, we approve registrations very quickly so if you *have* registered your account should be approved within 24 hours of joining the site) it's unfortunate to lose all the posts and registrations of a week but we don't pretend to have 100% uptime (nor do we really have the funding to guarantee that, lol) so it is what it is. thanks for using the site, folks, hopefully this won't happen again anytime soon

Is there a way that the user can change the dark mode in Beehaw to a white background?

Going to a few different servers to ask this. I think I'm going to make my own lemmy instance.

Hello and welcome to miner numero uno post it. I was a bit confused by **language** as I often speak fluent gibberish. However I do provide my own virtual phish/fish … witch I 'ave [nom nom **yabyum**] … scoffed. I am weaning myself off gmail and my almost instant joining was hidden in the gmail bin … pah! Not beehaw fault … some blocking nonsense that I have noticed against the fediverse from various moneterised *services* Also: -bees are my fav mantra, logo and furries … bzzzzz -I will be posting about **Meditation** and vibes -I am kind of kind … of an unfamiliar kind Thank you for your attention and excellent efforts ***Live, long or short and prospect***

Lately when trying to comment I'm getting the message Language_not_allowed even if I type something like 'test'. Any idea what's happening here?

Mostly just curious, How come people can't create their own communities here? What was the reasoning behind this? I'd love it if people could create their own communities and appeal to tiny niches. (i know I can find most of them via federation but some I can't)

Comments are broken pretty bad right now-I think we all know that. Is there progress being made on fixing this? Does the dev team know and are working on it?

I'd really like to be able to follow [Linux Mint](https://lemmy.ml/c/linuxmint) and [LibreOffice](https://lemmy.ml/c/libreoffice) communities on lemmy.ml from Beehaw, but looks like I can't do that . . . ?

Earlier accidentally opened [a post i had answered to](https://beehaw.org/post/379066), not located on Beehaw, on the original instance. To my surprise [it has a lot of comments on the original instance](https://lemmy.ml/post/1002117?scrollToComments=true) that don't show up here. Is it that i'm doing something wrong, or is this some kind of actual bug or tech issue?

when trying to post in the chat community I consistently get the message language_not_allowed even with a simple text like 'test'. How can this be solved?

First off, I want to say that I love what the people here are doing but I do have a problem. There is never any conversation about posts. There are tons and tons of links shared but most of the time they're just articles that someone found interesting. I never see any true, meaningful discussion the way I do on reddit. Does anyone else have a problem with this or am I just shouting at the clouds? Is there anything we can do about it?

posting on behalf of a user who is currently testing this on Beehaw: > I'm not quite sure which platform is at fault here. Lemmy interop with Mastodon needs work. Only replies from users I interact with through Mastodon get sent back to me. (Unless the user doing it is also interacting through Mastodon.) It's workable for top-level comments and replying to the OP, but if anyone else on Lemmy asks you questions then you won't see it and can't reply. Seems like a big oversight. > > I also think comment threading could stand to be more visually distinguished. It's kind of irritating to follow currently. i am decidedly not technologically versed enough to comment significantly on this, so i'm interested if people in the broader community have thoughts on these observations