Beehaw Support

I probably wrote "too much" as I was thrilled to find a place which is working towards kindness and community :)

My general rule of thumb is that things tend to go better if every owner, admin or mod team utilises the approaches which work best for them. If an instance is functioning well, I'm going to start from a place of trust that what they've made a good choice for themselves and the existing community. It's up to me to decide if it's also a reasonable choice for myself or if somewhere else would be a better match.

A lot of comments from people with social anxiety; as someone with social anxiety and aspergers, figured I may as well throw my thoughts into the ring.

I've been through the "approval process" dance a few times now, both for Mastodon and Lemmy and honestly, I don't really find it that bad. The secret is internalizing that mods have so many applications to get through, so they won't really scrutinize your language or overanalyze it to too much. I know easier said than done, but really, the fact that you're putting any amount of thought into it is probably more than most people.

Honestly, I think approvals is a good system and should be the norm for social media sites; it slows down trolls/bots ability to make accounts, and IMO is better than all the alternatives. Email is problematic, capchas aren't really accessible, and screw Instagram requiring you to take a photo of yourself when you sign up. One site I signed up for actually wanted you to ask another user to "vouch" for you as not a troll which means talking to scary strangers.

I think there is a "cultural" miscommunication though. A lot of us are deeply ingrained in "fediverse culture" where this sort of thing is the norm, and so we intuitively understand that it should only be a sentence or two.

However, if you look at where non-fediverse people have seen this type of requirement before? Job applications, university applications, that sort of thing. I think this is why people think that they need to write long, intricately detailed posts saying why they deserve to join what feels like an exclusive club.

I think Beehaw could make it clearer that they are only looking for about three sentences demonstrating that you've read the documents (actually, do you need to fully read the documents? It's a bit unclear), and that you aren't being "graded". Out of interest though, would "I just want to lurk and read posts" be acceptable as an answer to the third question?

The registration process and their statement on wanting a community based on kindness, respect, etc is why I signed up on Beehaw in the first place. No trolls and such to deal with, dealt with that enough on R*ddit. So, I like it lol

I wasnt expecting it. But it made me think about my motivation for joining above and beyond "an alternative to Reddit". It took a couple of minutes thought while standing in the post office queue! Instead of mindlessly auto completeing another registration page, I actually spent a fraction of my day thinking about why i was doing it. I found it quite fulfilling.

Vetting users with a questionnaire is a good idea, allows admins to see who they should let in. What and how a person answers the questions tells a lot about the applicant.

I just went through the registration process and I really liked it. It didn't go smoothly because of technical problems (the spinning wheel of doom), but this can be fixed.

The fact that users have to read, think and write about the beehaw philosophy makes it far easier to avoid trolls.

I was just accepted yesterday. I have social anxiety, so a younger, less self-aware version of myself would never have even submitted it. But thank goodness I've gotten better at this type of thing. Instead of over-analyzing and writing a huge essay, I timeboxed my response. Thankfully, it seems to have worked.

From what I can tell, I really do align with what the admins are after, here. I hope that it continues to work well.

I'm really glad they ask a screening question. It takes like max 30 seconds of your time to form coherent thoughts and add them to the form. I want to have discussions with folks who are capable of doing that.

Leaving Reddit made me realize that being a part of a truly affirming & thoughtful space is still possible. I'm so used to taking all the racism and classism and transphobia for granted - like "oh I'm on the internet, of course people are complete garbage." What if we all had a stake in making spaces that actually serve us? What if we were ALL a little more invested in contributing? Seeing all the folks coming from Reddit complaining about how the Fediverse is just infuriating & and impossible to understand kinda shook me, too. I was like that for the first like 3 hours of trying to figure out what the Fediverse is - "why isn't there just one fucking website and I can search all the fucking communities and see them all in one gd place holy shit I hate this, way to make it unnecessarily complicated" - and then I went and read about it and figured it out (somewhat). I put in a little effort. Realized, holy shit, I'm so fucking apathetic after years of companies spoon-feeding me shit in exchange for my personal data. Like "just make it easy whiiine yes accept all cookies yes you can read all my messages and contacts whatever just open the damn app" and it's like. Fuck it doesn't need to BE like this. We don't NEED to just put up with this shit.

Life is always kicking my ass and sometimes writing 3 coherent sentences after a week of working and not enough sleep is just too much. Like I'm constantly burnt out and sometimes, it really is too much. But if we all did even .5% more, if we thought about what we were doing and put even that .5% more effort, if we committed to thinking and contributing just .5% more, maybe we could really make shit happen. I think it's worth a try.

So yeah, I wrote a few lines on my application. Come on y'all, we can do this.

I enjoyed it, I was able to share myself and what I expect of myself as a user. I do not get to be expressive very often being mostly a lurker.

In some sense the ends justify the means here, I think. There was no way of really knowing when they created this process whether it would work, but here we are. It seems to me the community is quite tolerant and generally on the same page, so I would say it works well enough.

I think registration is a good litmus test for Beehaw overall. We want and encourage thoughtful comments. If someone finds the registration process too much to deal with, then Beehaw isn’t right for them anyway.

In my experience, a community with even the most basic and rudimentary filter to join has consistently higher quality people in the community. Kinder, more active, and better posts. A bigger community does NOT mean a better one, often the inverse has been true ime but blah blah analogies aren't evidence.

I like that the mods are prioritizing healthy growth over just growth. It's easy to look at number go up and get excited, then to open the flood gates. And whenever a community does that, a bunch of people whom are not wholly interested in the point of the community swoop in and push out the invested crowd.

The only downside would be wanting to answer something more personal, but making a throwaway account isn't exactly easy with this system. That's, really, the only downside I can immediately point to.

I think it's good.

It's not like you have to write an essay. I just wrote a couple of sentences and was accepted almost immediately. Took me all of 1 minute total to apply and could post within the hour.

yeah I think a lot of people who haven't actually done it are misconstruing it as something far more than it was. I wrote 3 sentences for each but a commenter on another instance thought I needed to write "3 essays"

it didn’t bother me at all. The questions where simply, it took me maybe 2 minutes, and I was accepted pretty quickly.

Honestly, if you aren't prepared to fill out a simple text box to join the instance, I'd prefer you went somewhere else.

Beehaw's registration process is quite easy, asking you only to write a few words on why you want to join (which could just be "it seems like a nice instance"), in comparison to other registration processes I've seen and done.

I've been through registration process where to guarantee that you've read the rules and anything required would hide words in the post containing that essential content and then asked you questions of which the answers where those words. Sometimes with the addition on asking you why you wanted to join.

This (Beehaw's registration process) is nothing in comparison