once again speaking for myself here, except where these sentiments have already been expressed by other admins. this is not a moderator document or anything, and it will not be stickied.
we have a ton of new people thanks to clearing a lot of our queue and i’m already seeing a bunch of the same issues we had to quash a week/two weeks ago with the first big influx. so, to reiterate:
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. running this instance is not–and cannot be–a full time job for any of us and our insistence is that it doesn’t become one. full-time working on this site would be financially and socially ruinous. if just us four admins were being paid a fair wage for the work we do, our Open Collective would barely cover the last two weeks. in any case we are not the only people working on this site and worthy of being paid.
we 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 is moderationally, federationally, and technically. neither i nor the other admins have the requisite experience with coding to contribute to the site, and we already have a ton of bug fixes to wrangle that have given our volunteer sysops fits. most of your issues are probably caused by and better referred to Lemmy itself than to Beehaw itself. i would strongly encourage you also post them to either !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml or the software’s GitHub if you think it’s a general functionality problem. in general: we cannot refer your issues elsewhere right now, you will need to do that yourself.
Lemmy, i want to stress again, has very limited base functionalities, many of which our admins and sysops are trying to work around. those 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 have had to hack around a lot of these while waiting on permanent solutions in Lemmy itself. this is our current list of moderator functionalities we’d like to see.
we also cannot be perfect, and if you’re expecting perfect then i don’t know what to tell you. you are on what is basically beta software, being hosted and supported by volunteers. right now, we absolutely and simply cannot promise much of anything past “the site is online and moderated in accordance with our values.” if you can’t hang with that caveat i would strongly encourage you to please go somewhere else, for your own sake.
I’m so glad I choose Beehaw as my first Lemmy experience, and if I load up the site and it’s not working, oh well, it probably will shortly. I don’t need instant satisfaction all the time, this is a social place, not a work place. These features and forums are fun, and it sucks people want to take advantage of a volunteers time, Or expect premium features on a passion project many have contributed their free time to.
Totally agree! Everyone is doing a great job and I like it here. I have contributed a couple PRs to Lemmy. Time and honestly mental energy makes it hard to consistently contribute to the code base.
Completely agree! Beehaw fills the time left open by my dropping Reddit, but it isn’t a replacement for Reddit in my mind. Instead, I see it as it’s own thing, primarily centered around socializing, and that’s reflected in the fact that I’ve already posted here in a couple of weeks than I did in my decade or so of using Reddit. It’s a lot more interaction and active use instead of passive consumption and lurking, and I really like that. Seeing all the people trying to file bug reports for Lemmy/Jerboa and making demands in Beehaw Support bugs me since (as far as I’m concerned) the admins have already gone above and beyond what I think they’re responsible for, and I appreciate every bit of it.
I LOVE this sentiment. I wish everybody thought the way you did.