Beehaw Support

Hello fellow bees.

I'm exhausted of seeing US politics and world news creep into all the communities in trying to use. I have the vast majority of communities and instances about this blocked for a reason, but no matter how many communities I block it still happens.

I'm not trying to ignore what's going on. I am not feeling the wrath of the privileged at the acknowledge of the suffering of the weak. I devote a specific amount of time each week where I brace myself and gaze upon the horrors so that I can stay informed.

The problems I have with a lot of this is that it seems predominately to be regurgitating the news cycle uncritically. Many posts don't even rephrase the headlines that are purposefully designed to be upsetting.

What I would like is if before someone resposted this kind of thing that they would consider if it's:

Actionable, which is to say it has a clear call to action about the problems it presents.

Significant, which is to say it bears relevance on people's immediate well-being in a way that is not simply a restatement of extant problems.

Useful, which is to say it both represents a useful resource and is presented in a way that makes that easy.

I don't need to see news articles about how 7 out of 10 Republician senators would rather eat a baby than put out a trans person on fire. I know and I don't need to be reminded while trying to find something interesting to read at the bus stop.

If it doesn't do one of the above, I think posting it is contributing to information overload exhaustion that makes people feel so helpless.

At the very least, could we try to keep the stuff restrained to the relevant communities? I already have 10 of the current Beehaw communities blocked because they're either about political news, are dominated by it or represent an undue risk to being suddenly jumpscared by it.

What do you think? Please advise, because I enjoy Beehaw but this is so exhausting.

As of mid day, imgur (on mobile) no longer provides the direct image link to allow for mirroring on Beehaw using .

I always try to upload directly first, but tend to share pictures at the same quality I'm using for our business - which is to say at the highest quality image my device can capture. Those images rarely play nice with pictrs limitations so hosting elsewhere and mirroring are the best way for me to post plant and animal photos I take, and provide the best fidelity so others can enjoy them.

So, do folks have some suggestions for other image hosting that would let me accomplish this easily (I'm not particularly tech savvy)? Do I need to just spin up a pixelfed account and mirror/crosspost? I'd love for you to share your thoughts

this is a minor, super low-priority request!

I like using the built-in beemojis. On desktop, they are easy-to-use and they show up in-line like any other emoji. However, on mobile, the beemojis are impossible to access, and when i see them in comments, they expand to their actual size:

Now, the access to the beemojis may be specific to my lemmy app (Sync), so that might be an unsolvable problem. But the sizing issue seems like it is related to the way beehaw implements the custom emojis, so I am wondering if that is a quick fix. It seems like they are just a set of image files stored on the server, and so using the emojis is just pasting a link to one of these image files. Is there a way for beehaw admin to set like a "max width" or something that might make the beemojis look better on mobile?

I'm trying to edit my profile in settings by uploading an avatar, etc. but whenever I save it just does the little circle thing and then when I leave no changes were saved. Also when I go back to settings all my changes are gone. Any help is appreciated and I thank you a lot.

Whenever I try to upvote a comment, I get this warning and the upvote does not take effect.
When I try to upvote a post, I don't get a warning but the upvote also does not appear.
This happens both on the web interface (Firefox with extensions, also tried in stock Firefox and got the same result) and in the mobile app I use (Thunder).
AFAIK it started maybe three weeks ago? Not 100% sure cause I was off Lemmy for a bit of time.

A quick startpage search yielded no useful result... Any idea on what could be causing this behaviour?
Let me know if I need to provide more information for troubleshooting.

Hi all,

Very excited about the recent server upgrade! Just reporting some issues i'm seeing, no urgency or anything.

Recent thread for context

• When I enter text into the new "Alt text" box, it doesn't seem to show up in the image metadata for other users.
• Thumbnails seem to still be having issues, as stinky reported in the linked thread.

Ladies and gentlemen, Beeple of all creeds; I stand before you today amid a smattering litany of scripts and testing to say this:

Beehaw production (this site) will be going READ-ONLY at 10pm ET today, May 20th.

This is to finalize the data for migration and moving to the new Beehaw instance, which will be on the latest Lemmy release (0.19.9). There will still be some work to be done and quite possibly a few things not set right. But this is the next step in our migration process. https://status.beehaw.org/ will also be down and not reporting for this timeframe.

I expect the migration to be done within 24 hours; testing shows it should be less time ~ 6 hours but this timeframe gives me a bit more leeway to muck around. When the site is back up, you should easily be able to tell. You can also join the discord or matrix chat to talk amongst yourselves and periodic updates on the migration.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

It’s a problem for which I already found kind of a solution, but an open discussion is always appreciated. What happened was me wanting to share a tool to help with breaking down tasks and deciding to search for older posts because it was popular enough. Other people talked about it here long ago and I actually don’t have much more to add besides the desire to share it with those that are not aware of the tool. So, do I create a new publication or add a mostly empty comment to something old?

In this specific case, I could create a topic that’s more generic and more open to be reproduced regularly. I could ask for the tools everyone uses and offer mine, while also pointing to previous publications. This would be positive as it make sure the information is up to date and potentially more organized. And, more importantly, readily available to those that are not actively searching for it.

So what are your thoughts?

note: I’m talking about sharing https://goblin.tools/ if it helps with the context.

Hi,

I have a mastodon account on mas.to, which is one of beehaw's linked instances. When I search for my username on beehaw (@madeingermany@mas.to) or the profile link I don't find anything.

It does work the other way round :) https://mas.to/@marco@beehaw.org/

Should this work, or am I misunderstanding something? Thank you!

Around nine months ago the Beehaw admin team decided that we wanted to migrate to a Lemmy compatible software stack called Sublinks. Unfortunately, Sublinks is not yet Lemmy compatible—among other things the main dev recently had a child, and understandably that is taking priority currently. This means that plan to migrate is indefinitely on hold.

In addition, Lemmy has evolved and changed in a way that is simply not feasible for us to continue being behind on. In the upcoming 1.0 Lemmy release there are a number of breaking changes that would be problematic. This would be on top of existing third-party app issues with the older Lemmy version Beehaw runs, and bug-fixes and security improvements from later versions of Lemmy that we have to handle ourselves. We don't want our users to continue having friction or issues using Beehaw, or end up not able to federate with other instances. As such, within the next month or so, Beehaw admins will be working on upgrading Lemmy to the current/main release.

We're separately optimistic that with Lemmy API version 1.0 the Sublinks devs will have a good target to aim at and work towards, and though development is slowed we will continue assisting them toward an eventual Sublinks migration of Beehaw. We look forward to their first full operational release.

How does one report spam received from another user in private messages?

The screenshot shows the user is registered at Lemmy.cat. I received those messages twice, each time from a different user/instance mentionning the "fediverse chick", and it's coming out of the blue from someone I don't know.

I already blocked the user. But it's not clear if blocking also act as report mechanism.

Hello, so a few days ago now, a lot of Racism happened in FOSS and we were wondering what happened to those that were racist by defending the cultural appropriation which was pointed out, either directly or by ridicule.

Sadly the original post (and thus the comments) is gone, though we saved screenshots of all the offending people and posts.

We would like to know if anything was done about these people as we can see nothing in the modlog.

Thanks.

I believe I have read several months (possibly even an entire year) ago that Beehaw plans to switch its software from Lemmy to Sublinks, which is why Beehaw hasn't updated Lemmy past version 0.18.4. Is such a migration still planned, and what is the progress on it so far? (In particular, is there a rough estimate on when the switch to Sublinks will be done?) It's been a long time since I've seen any updates about either Beehaw's plans on this or on Sublinks's development, and I'd just like at least a general idea of how it's going.

Is it possible to have a "style guide" for posting YouTube links? Usually there is just the title of the video and the generic YouTube blurb, and most of the time the title only vaguely tells you what the video is about. It would nice if in the description we could have folks post the length, the name of the creator, and a brief description of the video. If the creator has one, great, use that. If not, just a quick 1 or 2 sentence synopsis. I think this would help engagement for those posts a lot and just create better quality posts for video content. I know I don't watch or comment on any video post that just has a title.

I logged in earlier and wrote out a reply to a message in my inbox but it wouldn't go through when I hit send. After waiting and retrying I investigated further and discovered that the thread had been locked. I then checked the Modlog to see if it had been locked whilst I was typing and discovered that it had been locked 12 hours earlier.

Why can I click on the reply button and open up the reply box on a locked thread when viewing a post in my inbox?

When viewing the thread directly the reply button and box are available but you cannot type in the text box so I suppose I'll be grateful that not everyone who attempts to interact with a locked thread will have their time wasted like mine was.

For the past four months beehaw has been unreachable to those of us on the Tor network. Glad to see access was finally restored. Was there an attack?

I could really use a way to periodically backup my posts to my local disk so if Tor is spontaneously blocked again I at least have my history. I’ve not found a Lemmy equivalent for Mastodon Archive.

(edit) For security, it would be a good idea to setup an onion instance. The Tor network has built-in DDoS protection for onion hosts.

Seriously why? Discuss.online has horrible moderation and open-signups, and Lemm.ee isn't very much better. If lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works were completely nuked to avoid the moderation headache or risks from two large open servers, why aren't lemm.ee and discuss.online banned as well?

Steps:

• Login to Beehaw.
• See your username in the account dropdown.
• Reload/Refresh the page.
• Account dropdown has become a Login link.

Notes

I’m running Latest Safari on iPadOS and iOS 18+ The problem has been happening for months so include 17 in that list of versions.

I do use AdGuard / uBlock, but I don’t have this issue with other web apps. I will test with it disabled and report back.

My Unread Messages is at 2 (it was at 1 for a month or so, but since weeks its at 2 now). Clicking it shows nothing. Maybe there are messages from people I blocked? When I get real new unread messages, then counter goes up and it works like always. Reading those messages (or clicking them as read) will decrease the number, up to 2.

We were wondering if the docs etc here could be rewritten in such a way so as to not call all of us human since some of us are not.

Much like being transgender, being otherkin, alter{human/being} or transspecies can have a lot of dysphoria attached to it and we have had to at least explicitly tell one person on lemmy that we are not human even though it is in our profile.

We think that being more inclusive is always a good thing and will gladly work with those who can edit the docs etc in order to find more inclusive ways to say what needs to be said without misspeciesing any{one/many}.

Thanks for reading this and we hope this finds y'all well.

obligatory preface: we're 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us. you can donate here.

after a few months, we're finally stable enough to put another one of these out. to make a long story short: getting our money out of the old collective and into the new one was actually much more of a mess than we thought—and very little of the functionality we expected came to fruition—so it's essentially taken us six months to re-establish our financial situation.

August's numbers are:

overall expenses this month: $183.58

$142.13 for hosting the site

• $112.00 for hosting the site itself
• $22.40 for backups
• $7.73 for site snapshots

$28.80 for Hive, an internal chat platform we've set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)

• $24.00 for hosting Hive
• $4.80 for backups

~$4.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into

• $0.00 for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam - we currently don't send enough emails to trigger the threshold for payment)
• ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)

$8.49 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)

overall contributions this month: $176.28

unsurprisingly, the mess of a switch-over, the several months it's taken to sort everything out, and our minimal encouragement of donations in the interim of sorting things out has resulted in a decrease in funding. for the first time in a long time, we're not breaking even—and without the one-time donation we'd be out about $100 this month.

breakdown:

• 15 monthly contributions, totaling $80.82
• 0 yearly contributions, totaling $0.00
• 1 one-time donation, totaling $95.46

total end of month balance: $6,849.83

expense runway, assuming no further donations: about 3 years

this dovetails into an announcement we need to make: we need your help to gradually rebuild our donation base. to be clear, we are obviously not in any danger of shutting down right now—but we have taken a very material hit in terms of finances[^1] and as a result we're now running off of the financial cushion you've given us. even though we have a long expense runway, we'd like to proactively return to breaking even and not having to think about how much we're losing per month.

our current monthly contributions are about $100 short of breaking even, so consider that our rough financial goal. please donate if you are able.

unfortunately—and as mentioned at the top—the tools to switch over any previous subscription you may have had on Open Collective Foundation don't appear to exist. this means you will have to manually resubmit your information on Open Collective Europe Foundation if you haven't already. (we may or may not send out a mass-email to our current/previous donors in the future to this effect.)

[^1]: The differential between what we would have had OCF stayed up and what we do have on OCEF now could be as high as $4,600. That is split between the six months of paused donations (likely $3,000-$3,600, averaging our financial reports previously) and the six months of hosting expenses we've covered with our cushion (likely around $1,000-$1,200 given our hosting costs have not changed). We're also now losing a slightly larger cut of what we take in. In sum: we've lost out on a lot of potential runway for the site.

I have looked through the app I use (mlem) and the web interface but I can't figure out how to give a link post an image, as when I try to put something into the image section it replaces the link.

So how is it done exactly? Is this some setting, special script or app feature I don't know about? Or have I missed something?

Just wondering but when is Beehaw planning to update the instance version?

Since it's currently stuck at 0.18.4 I think this might be causing some issues with updating profile bios

Is full instance blocking as a user unavaliable because it's not in the version this instance runs or has it been disabled?

If it's the latter could it be enabled? As there are some instances I'd like to block as a user that don't necessarily need to be to blocked from an instance perspective (though maybe they should be).

If it's the former, any idea how long before y'all will update to a version with it in? Thanks!