welcome to the second-ever Beehaw Community Survey. it’s been awhile because of everything going on; we last did one of these with the influx of people last June and we got 1,500 responses that time. we don’t expect anywhere near that many this time, but that’s fine.
this survey should take about 10 minutes to fill out, so we strongly encourage you to do so when you are able to. you can find it at the following link:
Beehaw Community Survey #2
the survey is comprised of eight optional demographic questions to help us assess the overall identity of our community and eight questions relating to Beehaw and the Fediverse. the survey will be open for at least three days but no longer than one week. it’ll be locally pinned for the duration of that minimum three days, so please mind that. results will also be aggregated and posted on here/the Docs page in a summary like with the last survey. no ETA on that.
this is also a good time to remind everyone that Beehaw has moved over to Open Collective Europe Foundation, and we will be taking all donations from there going forward. please direct your donations there if you haven’t switched from our old Open Collective Foundation page yet!
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I think regarding the app question, the necessity of the app is dependent on how good the web interface is on mobile. If the web interface is strong/ customizable enough, an app would not be needed. If you can keep Beehaw compatible with the Lemmy apps, you could invest less energy into the mobile web interface, I think
It’s something I was wondering myself, do you really NEED an app for the fediverse, or you can just use a browser? Like are there additional features that you can’t have otherwise?
My personal opinion is, not everything needs to be an App. Beehaw is a website. I already have an app on my phone for websites, its called a Web Browser. Better to integrate well into that. We’re not doing anything on Beehaw that needs to be app specific, like siphoning up contacts or your location. Just a friendly web site.
Hear, hear!
Apps break the web. You shouldn’t need an app for a well-designed and optimised website.
Throwing the user face into competition does improve the quality.
I concur. I’d be sad to lose Jerboa (I’m slowly getting too old to get used to new stuff and the current web interface looks a bit cluttered on my phone), but if that’s the only thing keeping you from switching to Even More Awesome New Beehaw, then so be it.
Maintaining compatibility is not a good idea in the long run. Lemmy may change its API. Beehaw would become unusable, then.
It would be possible to keep up with Lemmy’s API changes though it would certainly help if Lemmy’s API was actually versioned.
It’s possible, but Lemmy’s APIs are designed for Lemmy’s goal (if they have any) and internals. Lemmy can change APIs to make their code development easier. Instead, Beehaw would follow the same APIs to make theirs harder.
So, IF there’ll be a few apps that respect Beehaw APIs that’ll save Beehaw devs’ time, and so they can focus more on their goals.
This.
Also if the site is well designed, you can use an app like “Hermit” to turn it into essentially an actual app.
I wish the 👍 had been 🐝 but that’s a minor quibble.
Thanks for running the survey!
The thumbs up made me think 3/5 is not average but halfway between a little good and great. Maybe that was intentional, but maybe other people interpret it as a 5-point rating scale instead of a 5-positive-point positive-scale?
That’s a good point, and how I approached it too. With bees, though, the scale could’ve been up to 30 bee’s knees =D
If a beehive can have 60k bees, I think it should be a 60k 🐝-scale :P
We’re not equipped to scale that high.
If there’s anything that’s not in the survey that you’d like to discuss, please leave a comment!
What comes closest to your opinion on discussions?
- I prefer lengthier and/or more thought out responses
- I prefer shorter and/or more casual responses
is missing an option for short but well-thought-out responses. :)
More thought and care may lead to longer responses, but making it concise and to the point has great value too. And I prefer that over long responses.
Between thought out and casual, I guess I like both styles of discussion though, depending on context.
Concerning (De)Federation:
I initially had a feddit.de Lemmy account, and used it for everything. But when my feddit.de home feed got really slow, I started to split up. Now I am using separate accounts for scoped themes - beehaw, programming.dev, ani.social, and feddit.de - the last still for “the rest”/general and German content.
I feel like the distinct goals of beehaw may make it more sensible to not federate as usual. Beehaw puts a guard on registrations, and defines specific guidelines and behavior and communication goals. If all the other platforms that do not have these safeguards in place participate, how well does this work?
So my current feeling is that I’m not opposed to defederation. Although of course federation can still be a promotional tool and an entry-point for additional people. And others may use other instances accounts to regularly participate, in a good way - like I did before splitting up/scoping my accounts too.
My personal opinion on this is that we should probably take an allowlist approach to federation to be able to be more proactive about instances that could be threats for Beehaw.
I think we’ve managed to keep our culture to some degree through stronger moderation when it comes to out-of-instance users and making use of defederations.
That said, I wish we had more flexible federation options, such as for example, letting our users interact with certain instances without letting people from those instances interact in ours.
My personal opinion on this is that we should probably take an allowlist approach to federation
Considering the mind-boggling amount of user-generated content on the internet and its average signal-to-noise ratio, this looks to me like the only even remotely feasible approach to federation. If restrictive federation is like building a dam with small controlled openings, an open federation policy is like letting the river flow freely through the valley and having five people with buckets try to keep dry as much of the land in its wake as possible.
A lack of federation won’t stop people from being on Beehaw and on other non-federated sites with a different account, if they so choose.
That river analogy is somewhat flawed, in that there are several levels to federation on Lemmy/Mastodon/etc:
- Federation of messages
- Federation of communities/boosts
- Federation of the “default” feed
Fediverse’s default, is every user building their own “whitelist” out of people they decide to follow. Aggregate feeds like “Local” or “All”, or the search feature, are optional discovery tools. Lemmy also adds “curated users” in the form of communities, which are still optional.
There could be more (mod) tools to curate these feeds for those that want to shape them, but it seems to me like the “federation problem” is more one of personal education, of asking for “someone else”, or “an algorithm”, to curate a single feed that people can follow… which is inherently contrary to the freedom of a federated system.
That river analogy is somewhat flawed, in that there are several levels to federation on Lemmy/Mastodon/etc:
I agree, but my point wasn’t a perfect analogy. I merely intended to point out the considerable difference in the workload of the two ‘extreme’ approaches.
User-defined filtering is also very nice to have, but I feel like instance-level filtering is what gives an instance its unique look-and-feel. And from what I’ve read, Beehaw has also defederated from certain instances ‘only’ because moderating all the undesirable stuff coming from there put too much of a strain on the mod team. Hence my river analogy.
My personal opinion is that federation is a wonderful concept, but it sometimes comes at a cost that may outweigh its benefits.
Beehaw needed to:
- stop some messages
- didn’t need to stop communities
- maybe curate its “All” feed
…the only mod tool available, was defederation. This is a clear shortcoming of the tools, which right now only allow an “all or nothing” approach, not of the federation itself.
instance-level filtering is what gives an instance its unique look-and-feel
Not exactly; the rules and community of an instance, are what give that “unique look-and-feel”.
In an alternative reality, with a slightly different approach to federation, an “instance” could be a curated preset the user imports into their client.
Actually, that could be done with the Fediverse, if someone decided to do it.
I’m not sure if that’s what’s expected, but I also prefer an allow list approach to federation, and I answered on the survey that federation is important to me (as opposed to none).
I hope that, if many people answered like me for the same reason, it won’t give the impression that we want implicit federation.
I will reply to the survey when I get home, the layout is a bit broken on mobile
Same here. I turned the phone 90 degrees (to landscape mode) to answer this question. It looked fine there (no wrapping). Probably a Baserow bug as already mentioned.
Edit - For reference, these are the answers (same order as in the form):
- I dislike federation, and do not consider it necessary
- I dislike federation, but consider it necessary
- I like federation, but do not consider it necessary
- I like federation, and consider it necessary
- I have no strong opinions on federation either way
Yeah… seems like a baserow bug. It renders fine on Firefox mobile. Not sure if it’d work in Desktop mode in Chromium browsers - worth a try for those with this issue.
I am using Firefox mobile :(
It breaks below
360px viewport width.I am using Waterfox on Android and it displayed like this, so I did still have to go into landscape to read the bullets.
By the way, I’m a bit annoyed at how the end of the survey asked what we like most, but there was no space to say what we like least. I wish there could be some way to create, like, subcommunities for topics like company brands (like certain car models and stuff). This is my biggest issue with this otherwise-nice place to the point of making me feel like leaving, since it prevents getting & sharing key, helpful information. Just my 2¢ (and I know that’s probably not the goal of Beehaw…).
Given that ~70% of US citizens are white, and Beehaw users are mostly US citizens, 75% users being white is very close to the expectation. I wouldn’t express this as “unfortunate” as you wrote in your June summary.
Do keep in mind that 11.6% of people chose to not answer that question so this 75% is not a very accurate metric. Not only that but ~35% of people declared to not come from the United States. I will also mention that our goal is not to reach an average that is close to a country’s demographics - we expect a bigger than average amount of people to be from a minorised group.
we expect a bigger than average amount of people to be from a minorised group.
I’m just going to note here that even asking for white vs non-white, you may not be capturing the full picture of minorised groups. Many European countries legally recognise the existence of a number of ethnic minority white groups, which have a racial/ethnic/cultural difference that has led to them being discriminated against within a larger white majority population. Those people will still consider themselves white, because they are, but they’re still part of a minorised group - and prejudice against them is often considered socially acceptable “because they’re white”. (I consider myself to be a member of such a group.)
Not the person you wrote to. I agree.
“We want more non-whites” is an oversimplification of what I thought diversity was supposed to be. I fear that it sounds unfair to white people, depending on the context.
I’m saying this as a non-white btw.
Absolutely agree! Diversity is really complicated, which makes it difficult to properly capture using a few poll questions, but I think the most important thing is that Beehaw should be safe for everyone (except for the intolerant), and that’s not really about how many people there are from each minority.
I’m 100% down with this point. Personally, I find surveys that ask “White or Non White” to be very confusing when not qualified by ethnicity.
Personally, I’m Hispanic (Nicaragüense) and my skin tone reflects that, but legally speaking I’d be white.
Our goal is not to reach an average that is close to a country’s demographics
Why? As we believe that race doesn’t contribute to anything, race distribution of US Beehaw users is going to reflect that of the US.
Unless we can see what the other 35% of users looks like, we Beehaw folks can’t understand what is meant by “more non-whites”. (Edit: checked the survey; it’s mostly from the west)
Edit: Anyway, what’s the goal here? More countries, more races, or something else?
My biggest complain about Threadiverse (Lemmy/Kbin pages) since I came is that there is too much content from US, both posts and comments, and almost no content from other countries, except for UK. But no content from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Poland, Germany (only in German on feddit.de), and so on.
Reddit had that problem too, but on r/europe at least I could read several news posts every day, even with translations in the comment section. Here everything is about Musk, Trump, DeSantis, FCC, Governor of Virginia, Governor of California, Governor of Iowa, SCOTUS, POTUS, CNN, Fox, Jon Stewart…
I have no other complains. But this one is getting me tired of Lemmy/Kbin, because I have almost no place to interact on.
Hello,
I’m trying to solve this issue with [email protected]. The sidebar has links to most of the European countries communities
Maybe we, or anyone, should create an instance called “lemmywithout.us” or “kbinwithout.us”, in a similar fashion to this magazine.
Interesting magazine, seems already to be a good start!
The contrast is really bad. The text is hardly readable.
so, irritatingly, we appear to have absolutely no control over this as far as i can tell–i just spent about 15 minutes investigating the options available to us in Baserow to double check.
Time to build a better form survey utility. Putting it on the list.
It was okay/workable after zooming in at least.
The diversity survey deserves a dedicated one. If you show answers split by diversity categories, that’s another matter.
We could, that was something I had personally looked at but it is quite a bit of effort for nothing if there is no big split.
Understandable. I appreciate your reply.
In the June survey summary, you wrote you had interest in knowing where users come from etc., but those don’t appear as questions in the current survey.
