Hot damn, in just over a week. Data from https://the-federation.info/node/details/25274. Made in GIMP.
Thank you Chris, alyaza, Gaywallet again for making such a nice place and managing this explosion in popularity, to the mods and other people keeping it operating, and lastly to everyone joining, contributing, posting and commenting and be(e)ing friendly!
as we've noted a couple times, an extreme option we can leverage is just not approving anyone and if it gets too crazy i'm pretty confident that's what we'll do (or we'll limit our approvals to a general number per day, and what happens happens. i think we might also be able to make the instance private, dunno.
I worry about how this is going to get handled. There are going to be a lot of people looking to check out Lemmy, and this could be a true pivotal moment for the platform. Like it or not, Beehaw is one of the instances that lots of people have been hearing about, and so you're going to play a part in that pivotal moment. Not allowing people to participate could drive them away. It's a tough situation. I don't envy you.
popping in to say: while we're sympathetic, this crudely speaking isn't really an obligation we signed up for, nor one which really should be incumbent on us to solve (not least because of the OP statistic). for what it's worth though in between keeping this place functional, we are trying to shoot things to the Lemmy devs and community as a whole to make the platform as good as it can, and to ensure instances can accommodate the many, many users we can't and won't take in.
i'll reiterate again that we have specific goals and we make it very clear—as clear as it can be, within the context of Lemmy's limitations—what we're looking for, why we're looking for that, and that this simply isn't a community for everyone. (we didn't even ask to be passed around by the Lemmy devs as an instance you should try to sign up for in the absence of being able to use lemmy.ml, lol). that's for federation reasons but also practical ones, and as much as i understand many people want a new place to go for a lot of people that place isn't necessarily going to be here.
I don’t know if your rejections currently do, but perhaps they could point to other instances. As gently as possible explaining beehaw is at max moderation capacity and suggesting the other instances.
Unfortunately rejections do not notify the end user of any reason. There's supposed to be a toast message when they try to log in, but that's not working. We've logged a bug on GitHub for Lemmy devs but we don't have an ETA for a fix
Fair enough, but beehaws the only instance I know of that defeds with lemmygrad. If I wanted to recommend a lemmy instance to a friend and didn't want them put off by the awfulness of that community I wouldn't know where else to point them to.
They will always be welcome to participate in our communities via federation, but we may not have the bandwidth to accommodate everyone in a way which does not compromise our ethos. If you haven't had a second to check out the philosophy posts in the sidebar, it will give you an idea of where we intend to take this place. This is an explicitly nice and safe space, and we are perfectly fine with driving traffic that isn't explicitly nice elsewhere.
Sorry if this was answered elsewhere, but does that mean Beehaw automatically federates with new instances and only the explicit Blocklist can't? I was toying with the idea of maintaining my own single user instance for stability but don't want to run the risk of being excluded if it goes private in the future.
i believe we automatically federate, yeah. federation here seems to explicitly work in a way where if you just leave the "Allowed Instances" section blank (as we do), you federate with all instances except the ones you have explicitly blacklisted.
Oh, that's an idea I hadn't thought of. I have a private server at home. I could set up an instance for myself as long as I can continue to interact with others.
Hopefully you don't have to make the community private, but shutting down approvals is a great option. They can always sign up for another instance and participate here
Recommending mastodon seems like a good idea too, because mastodon users can interact in lemmy communities.
They can? Just when I feel like I'm starting to understand this, I'm confused again 😂.
They can but it's a bit wonky. You can "subscribe" to lemmy communities by following the community as if it were a username, so for example you'd follow @chat@beehaw.org to follow !chat@beehaw.org. However, the result is that every single post and comment made in chat gets boosted ("retweeted") into your feed, which is... not ideal.
You can also respond to any lemmy post by pulling it up in mastadon and replying to it with your mastadon account. You can just search the link to a lemmy thread or post in the mastadon search bar to bring it up and reply from there.
That's fair. There's only so much you and the admin team can handle, you have my trust to do whatever must be done. There will be plenty of other instances for new users to go to.
In any case I hope it works out, as it sounds like you have a game plan if things get overwhelming. Cheers!
What would going private mean in this context (sorry, I'm new to this fediverse thing)? Does it mean invite only, or does it mean only members can view the discussions?
It means we wouldn't be allowing new accounts to be created on our instance. All of the communities here would still be federated with every instance we federate with. You'd still be able post and comment exactly as you can now.
I've got an idea. Since during the sign up phase we answer questions, so why not add a question that poses a hypothetical scenario where the prospective member can answer in their own words what they would do in that scenario.
The scenario can be crafted to gauge someone's kindness, even if there are no right or wrong answers. For example, we can have the question be:
"Can you share an example of a recent action you took to make someone's day better?"
Or:
"Tell me about a time when you offered assistance or support to someone in need."
Or:
"Could you describe a situation where you went out of your way to show empathy or understanding to someone?"
Trolls and ne'er-do-wells are not as likely to give detailed, thoughtful answers to these sorts of questions.
This way it provides an additional way to screen applications so nice people migrate here.
While it will tend to exclude them, it's also highly likely to exclude others as well. As an example, I have ADHD, so often it is difficult to amass enough spoons to provide detailed answers to things like this.