good morning, Beehaw

this morning we have a survey for you, which will run for approximately three days. it contains three questions on site policy (plus an optional explanation field), and two questions about the site’s current vibe (plus another optional explanation field).

you can find the survey here.

some caveats to this survey

you likely have some priors for how this “should” work, and i would like you to leave those at the door. to be up front:

  • this is not a referendum—it is more like a Wikipedia vote if anything. we’re looking for a consensus or a synthesis of the community’s opinions with the practical limitations we’re working with, not a first-past-the-post winner.
  • this is not (currently) a democracy, and you should not expect public results from this. we talked this part over as an admin team and we don’t see much value in publicly releasing the results of a survey like this. if we do release the results publicly, we’ll be announcing that before it happens.
  • the same caveats just mentioned will apply to any surveys like this into the foreseeable future. i’m sure everyone understands that in online spaces it is very easy to manipulate surveys like this; accordingly, it is not a great idea to take them at complete face value until you can audit votes. since we don’t have a foolproof, private system for doing that yet, these caveats are necessary to make any kind of vote involving site policy work.

(we do eventually want to create a foolproof enough private system, but this is way on the backburner and i’m guessing most of you prefer having an imperfect way to chime in on the site’s direction than none at all until this system is created)

  • jarfil@beehaw.org
    13·
    1 year ago

    Lemmy.world is full of people who don’t want to “be nice”, and are happy to drag anyone “to the dark side”.

    If there was a unidirectional way of federating, like “let people from Beehaw participate on LW communities, but don’t allow LW users participate in Beehaw communities”, then it could be a viable option.

    Otherwise, just the (hopefully small) portion of bad actors on LW, would be enough to drown out Beehaw’s communities and overload the mods. There are already signs of mod fatigue on Beehaw even without federating with large instances that used to be “free for all”.