I am one of the admins of Beehaw and I’m trying to get some feedback on our potential move.
Let’s start out with a little Beehaw history before judgements are passed, please.
A handful of us were beta testing Tildes when we decided to have discussions on a Discord server.
We decided that our ‘Northern Star’ or guiding principle would culminate as ‘Be Nice’ with purposefully vague/flexible interpretations. Our overall goal is to provide a safe space to disenfranchised persons.
We talked for a little over a year and some of our members became impatient. Then someone stepped in to suggest a couple of platforms that we could consider getting started with.
One of those platforms was Lemmy. None of us knew, at that time, anything about ActivityPub.
During the Reddit exodus (surrounding the API outcry and blackout), our instance exploded. We were, initially, crippled by the mass amounts of users seeking refuge.
Thankfully, someone stepped in and volunteered hundreds of hours of work to stabilize our instance and refine it further.
After many hours of talks, it became clear to us that our overall goal could be achieved outside of Lemmy/ActivityPub.
Right now, we feel that Lemmy and ActivityPub have downsides that are limiting us from achieving that goal.
That’s not even remotely true. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of old-school forums out there, some from the earlier days of the Internet, that still exist. And they’re not all huge. Tildes, the platform OP mentioned, only does limited invitations, and isn’t particularly large, yet is vibrant (reddit post-API certainly helped). You can see here that Tildes has about 25k registered users; I imagine the vast majority aren’t active or only lurk. The same goes for tons of small communities on Discord.
I would agree if Beehaw was just starting off as just another forum out on the web. That’s certainly a hard task to start on from literally nothing. But Beehaw isn’t starting from nothing. As one of the larger Lemmy instances, a userbase has already been established. Of course, not everyone will come over to a standalone site or stick around for very long if they do migrate, but it is entirely possible for a smaller community to exist in a standalone configuration over time. As long as community members find value in it, and as long as admins/mods are willing to help grow the community, even it if is slow, people will stick around.
Not everywhere needs to be reddit, and not everyone wants that anyway.