hello! this is just a thing i’d like to personally note. it speaks for myself, and where it does not expresses sentiments we’ve already placed somewhere else. this is not a moderator document or anything, and it will not be stickied.
i’m infinitely grateful that all of you have decided to join us here, and the community has had very few issues with moderation or general unpleasantness to this point. i’m also been greatly appreciative of the support this community has already given us both financially and with your time and energy in keeping the site up and well tuned.
with that said: please temper your expectations of what is technically possible with the website and be patient about what is. there are literally thousands of you to accommodate now, and a finite number of hours to do it with.
more specifically: we (the Admins) are four people, only two of which have actual experience running or maintaining anything in the same universe of what we’re managing now. we’re more comfortable moderationally, but on the technical side we are flying this by the seat of our pants. none of us are big on coding, so we’re not really able to add to Lemmy’s base functionalities. Lemmy itself has very limited base functionalities, many of which we’re trying to work around or with and constrain us in what we can do or how. a lot of options we have at our disposal to make stuff run are binary, and a lot of the not-binary options are confusing.
we’re sure this will get better eventually, but from that point follows this reality: we simply cannot currently (and may not in the future either, to be honest with you) accommodate a lot of what you might think we’re able to do, or expect because Reddit had it either through an app or the base function of the site. this software hasn’t had 15 years to mature in functionality and community addons like Reddit–and while it’s their full time gig, the upstream software is still maintained by just two people who also run the flagship instance here. they have a lot of shit on their plate too; we’re lucky they can even take time to get to our notes!
and that last point also brings us to a final thing to emphasize: this is not a full time job for any of us and our insistence is that it doesn’t become one. i think doing this full time would be fucking miserable, personally, and i think i can speak for all of us in saying full-time working on this site is literally not something we can commit to. it has to be that way for this to be a solvent project.
if we split the balance of our donations equitably right now–all of which is site money, to be clear, we only use it for keeping the site online and paying for any labor we might source to someone else–that’d work out to just $500 per person, which is not even a week of compensation at a wage of $15/hr. collectively, we have probably put in well over full-time hours just to keep the site going this week, and we did that last week too. we expect we’ll be doing this all month. that splitting also wouldn’t account for our volunteers who do most of the technical stuff, who have probably put in even more hours than we have, and who i personally think would deserve compensation before we do. (our site would be kind of fucked without them right now.)
all this to say: please be mindful of whether what you’re asking of us is even possible. we are trying really hard here and it’s not like a lot of what is brought up is invalid (i generally agree theoretically with a lot of what people have been bringing to us), but at least during our influx we absolutely and simply cannot promise much of anything past “the site is online and moderated in accordance with our values”.
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Thank you to everyone :
- Admins for doing a brutal amount of work for something they believe in
- Mods for keeping their own areas humming along
- Financial contributors for keeping the lights on
- Everyone who posts and comments for making this a nice place to visit
There’s this odd dynamic that turns up in all sorts of communities where people someone equate “person who volunteers their own time” with “person who has to do anything I want them to do”. When stated that baldly it’s easy to see the nonsense and yet somehow it keeps happening. Hopefully folks here won’t fall into that trap.
I have nothing I feel is of substance to say except a huge THANK YOU!
Absolutely incredible work to not have a server spontaneously shit the bed and catch fire.
well, about that… it “catches fire” about once an hour and it’s been interesting to try to automate problem resolution with scripts and clever rate limits. More on our uptime/SLA plans here: 📢 Buzzworthy SLA Announcement 🐝 (in !support by me)
Be wary if burn out! Take breaks, step away when needed. Having you guys still around in the future is more important than trying to compete with Reddit’s resources.
You’re managing fine as is already!
I remember Reddit early days… it had its bumps along the way.
I don’t expect much this early in. Y’all do it at your pace… I can only promise that I respect you tons more than that Fuckface Apollo killer u/Spez!
I can only promise that I respect you tons more than that Fuckface Apollo killer u/Spez!
thank you, it means the world to us :)
To me, that’s the entire point of lemmy. You guys are doing what you want, and letting the rest of us play in your sandbox. It’s on us to play nicely, bring our own pails, and not poop in the sand.
You guys here, and at all of the instances I’ve run across, have gone out of your way to give us r/efugees a landing pad. I’ve received nothing but welcoming assistance at every turn, even when I’ve vented about the learning curve . What more could I ask for?
Funnily enough, you posted this to what appears to be one of the most understanding communities you could have lol
You and the rest of the team are doing a great job. Unfortunate I wasn’t able to make my account on the beehaw instance (just kept hanging on signup) but happy to still be able to interact with the great group you’ve help put together! Sending love from the PNW 😄
It’s highly possible that it just wasn’t approved because your application message didn’t provide enough information to make a judgement.
If you want to tell me your username, I’ll look for it and approve it.
I hope not as I wrote a small paragraph for each question asked lol
But it’s just Dee, like this lemmy.world one. I uh, submitted it quite a few times… sorry about that lol
You wrote one sentence for each question when you first submitted so that’s all we got. We are kinda harsh sometimes when it’s hard to gauge someone. Sorry about that.
It’s been approved!
Hey, don’t mean to pester you or anything but I haven’t received any emails from beehaw about whether the application was even received let alone approved. Checked spam/junk and all that. The sign up page just hangs after clicking “sign up” and when I tried the username/password I submitted to log in it also just infinitely hangs.
I’m working with lemmy.world atm so no need to rush but I do quite like the beehaw instance and would like to be apart of that if possible, thanks 😊
It should work… I can see that email was in fact sent to your email…
If your password is more than 60 characters long, you need to shorten it… This could also be some kind of bug… I’m not sure. We are updating Lemmy tomorrow morning so maybe that’ll fix it?
I’ll try again tomorrow afternoon I suppose, checked my emails again and still nothing on this end. I checked my mail tracing too and nothing in transit or getting caught up on this end, so don’t know what to say about the email tbh.
I’ll reach out to the mod team tomorrow if I still have issues, thanks for getting back to me though
Take care of yourselves. The beauty of this whole deal is its not “one” it’s “all” of us. All the servers, all the users. There really is no reason to jump on one instance and put strain on good people doing a good thing. So often, good folks tend to over extend themselves. I’ve seen it time and again.
Be well beehaw.org admins and thank you.
I think that it’s great what you’ve done here so far and I wish you all the best in your efforts!
Just a thought; If things ever calm down and you’re so inclined to share, I would love a “lessons learned” type post from you and the team. You’re possibly some of the foremost experts in the world at operating a Lemmy instance at this point and those of us with micro-instances running on random corners of the fediverse could certainly benefit from your hard-earned wisdom.
Thanks so much for everything!
I’m just grateful for what has already been done, there’s no rush :)
Thank you for your work !
Absolutely we’re just happy to be here. You mentioned you have some volunteers that help out on the technical stuff. With the influx of users are you looking for more volunteers? I am sure most of us are still getting used to how everything works but I would imagine that’s not the case for everyone.
technical expertise and ability to moderate are the two big areas of volunteer support we have in the very immediate term
I’m still figuring out how to properly navigate lemmy in general, so I’m a week or two from being ready to moderate more than the “emergency” sub me and an fellow user set up for edc. But once I get more settled in, I’ll volunteer :)
we’re more comfortable moderationally, but on the technical side we are flying this by the seat of our pants. none of us are big on coding, so we’re not really able to add to Lemmy’s base functionalities
This is how it is supposed to be fwiw, great to see that people are approaching this from the social perspective rather than technical. You should not feel pressured to be developers or programming experts to run a community, those are totally different disciplines. Hopefully the resources to manage instances improve so that becomes an easier task
This exactly - Lemmy is meant to allow community managers to focus on that portion while the developers facilitate their work. Speaking as a developer, there’s a very distinct difference in the skill sets needed for each field, and there should never be an expectation for one side to do work in the other - trust me, some of my past coworkers are last people you would want managing a community in any capacity. Why should it be different going the other direction?
I think the attempt to build a culture-first community is really cool and thank y’all for your time and energy! <3
I can only imagine that making this work at all can be a challenge. The recent Reddit API intrigue and the user influx couldn’t have done any favors. My moderating and community management experience is much smaller, and I already know that was a headache. I’d figure that the team here is working on all cylinders to keep things running as they are. I look forward to chipping in what I can when I can afford to. In the meantime, for what it’s hopefully worth, you and the team are Witnessed and Valued. I for one am willing to keep patient through the hiccups along the way. We’re on to something exciting here and I look forward to its continued success.
Best of luck, keep on as you are 🫡.
