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hey folks. here's a new FAQ on the community, since the currently pinned thread is a bit haphazard and crammed now, and we've had more time to go over stuff.

What is Beehaw?

in summary, we're a community that wants to cultivate a sense of real belonging to something, to foster meaningful conversations, and to ensure everyone feels valued and respected in a way that isn't the case with other social media out there. we've thought and written a lot about this. if you'd like more than that summary, we strongly encourage you to read the following essays, which explain how this community is run, what we prioritize in running it, and why we've designed it this way generally:

• What is Beehaw?
• The spirit of the rules
• Beehaw is a Community

you can also read more on our Docs website

This sounds very cool! How do I join?

you can register here.

you don't need to write a whole essay, however: please answer the question fully, and try to engage with at least some of the content above/on the sidebar before you register.

this is not personal, but we've grown a lot and are primarily interested in users who really care for the philosophy of our community. if you don't answer the question fully, you will likely get denied or caught in registration limbo when we have a backlog of users.

How long should I expect to wait to be approved?

now that we have email working: anywhere from a few minutes to 48 hours. you should get notified if you've used an email to sign up either way. make sure to check your spam folder to be safe this may be an issue for some users. if you did not use an email to sign up, try logging in after about 24 hours, and then again after 48 hours.

if we receive an influx of users you may get caught in registration limbo by failing to answer the questions, and it may take longer to get back to you than the 48 hours listed here.

if you have issues with anything, please report them in the following thread!

I'm in! How can I keep Beehaw running, or otherwise contribute?

our instance is 100% user-funded. you can one-time donate or become a monthly donor here. you can donate anonymously both ways. as far as we're aware cryptocurrency is accepted by OpenCollective, it's just more laborious and you'll probably have to contact them to clear it.

if you have volunteer labor or advice you're willing to give us on how to keep the site running smoothly, we also generally appreciate that. our Matrix and Discord communities are the best way to offer that stuff to us.

How do I help keep the community running smoothly?

be considerate! think about the things you say and how you want to say them; be kind and charitable; don't assume the worst of people; but above all: Be(e) nice!

it might seem trite, but genuinely we've found there is no better distillation of what we want to accomplish here than that ethos. if something makes you feel like that ethos is being violated, err on the side of caution and report it (on desktop it's the flag button in the three dot menu on any post). it can't hurt. so far though we've found most people kind of know what we mean, and we're hopeful you'll be able to pick up on that too.

as for non-moderation ways you can keep things running: contribute to discussions! share stuff you find interesting! contribute your expertise and help out folks when they ask for it! it's okay—and very understandable—to lurk based on the toxicity commonplace on other social media, but we really do try to make this space as welcoming as possible to everyone here and we hope you'll find it a safer place to come out of your online shell.

What else should I know?

we always take feedback. while we can't promise any changes, you can provide thoughts and comments on just about anything on the site in Beehaw Support, or on Discord or Matrix (where we maintain real-time chat). we try to get a sense of what the community wants and needs all the time, so we'll frequently be asking for input from you to help inform our decisions.

downvotes are disabled on this instance and will probably always be. we find them unproductive. communities cannot be made by users on here. we do take feedback on what gets made and when to make communities, as a part of the above point. you can always find a running list of communities we have at this link, or under the Communities button on desktop.

we are all volunteers, and this is not a job for us. we would like to not have it be one, so we can just be members of the community with all of you. please help keep it that way!

in the very, very long term, we aspire to become a co-op or similar, as a part of fulfilling our ethos.

as with the last thread, feel free to sound off on other questions you have. i, other mods, and community members will try to get to them as able.

Improving Beehaw

> BLUF: The operations team at Beehaw has worked to increase site performance and uptime. This includes proactive monitoring to prevent problems from escalating and planning for future likely events.

---

Problem: Emails only sent to approved users, not denials; denied users can't reapply with the same username

• Solution: Made it so denied users get emails and their usernames freed up to re-use

Details:

• Disabled Docker postfix container; Lemmy runs on a Linux host that can use postfix itself, without any overhead

• Modified various postfix components to accept localhost (same system) email traffic only

• Created two different scripts to:

  • Check the Lemmy database once in while, for denied users, send them an email and delete the user from the database
    • User can use the same username to register again!
  • Send out emails to those users (and also, make the other Lemmy emails look nicer)

• Sending so many emails from our provider caused the emails to end up in spam!! We had to change a bit of the outgoing flow

  • DKIM and SPF setup
  • Changed outgoing emails to relay through Mailgun instead of through our VPS

• Configure Lemmy containers to use the host postfix as mail transport

All is well?

---

Problem: NO file level backups, only full image snapshots

• Solution: Procured backup storage (Backblaze B2) and setup system backups, tested restoration (successfully)

Details:

• Requested Funds from Beehaw org to be spent on purchase of cloud based storage, B2 - approved (thank you for the donations)

• Installed and configured restic encrypted backups of key system files -> b2 'offsite'. This means, even the data from Beehaw that is saved there, is encrypted and no one else can read that information

• Verified scheduled backups are being run every day, to b2. Important information such as the Lemmy volumes, pictures, configurations for various services, and a database dump are included in such

• Verified restoration works! Had a small issue with the pictrs migration to object storage (b2). Restored the entire pictrs volume from restic b2 backup successfully. Backups work!

sorry for that downtime, but hey.. it worked

---

Problem: No metrics/monitoring; what do we focus on to fix?

• Solution: Configured external system monitoring via external SNMP, internal monitoring for services/scripts

Details:

• Using an existing self-hosted Network Monitoring Solution (thus, no cost), established monitoring of Beehaw.org systems via SNMP
• This gives us important metrics such as network bandwidth usage, Memory, and CPU usage tracking down to which process are using the most, parsing system event logs and tracking disk IO/Usage
• Host based monitoring that is configured to perform actions for known error occurrences and attempts to automatically resolve them. Such as Lemmy app; crashing; again
• Alerting for unexpected events or prolonged outages. Spams the crap out of @admin and @Lionir. They love me
• Database level tracking for 'expensive' queries to know where the time and effort is spent for Lemmy. Helps us to report these issues to the developers and get it fixed.

With this information we've determined the areas to focus on are database performance and storage concerns. We'll be moving our image storage to a CDN if possible to help with bandwidth and storage costs.

Peace of mind, and let the poor admins sleep!

---

Problem: Lemmy is really slow and more resources for it are REALLY expensive

• Solution: Based on metrics (see above), tuned and configured various applications to improve performance and uptime

Details:

• I know it doesn't seem like it, but really, uptime has been better with a few exceptions
• Modified NGINX (web server) to cache items and load balance between UI instances (currently running 2 lemmy-ui containers)
• Setup frontend varnish cache to decrease backend (Lemmy/DB) load. Save images and other content before hitting the webserver; saves on CPU resources and connections, but no savings to bandwidth cost
• Artificially restricting resource usage (memory, CPU) to prove that Lemmy can run on less hardware without a ton of problems. Need to reduce the cost of running Beehaw

THE DATABASE

This gets it's own section. Look, the largest issue with Lemmy performance is currently the database. We've spent a lot of time attempting to track down why and what it is, and then fixing what we reliably can. However, none of us are rust developers or database admins. We know where Lemmy spends its time in the DB but not why and really don't know how to fix it in the code. If you've complained about why is Lemmy/Beehaw so slow this is it; this is the reason.

So since I can't code rust, what do we do? Fix it where we can! Postgresql server setting tuning and changes. Changed the following items in postgresql to give better performance based on our load and hardware:

huge_pages = on # requires sysctl.conf changes and a system reboot shared_buffers = 2GB max_connections = 150 work_mem = 3MB maintenance_work_mem = 256MB temp_file_limit = 4GB min_wal_size = 1GB max_wal_size = 4GB effective_cache_size = 3GB random_page_cost = 1.2 wal_buffers = 16MB bgwriter_delay = 100ms bgwriter_lru_maxpages = 150 effective_io_concurrency = 200 max_worker_processes = 4 max_parallel_workers_per_gather = 2 max_parallel_maintenance_workers = 2 max_parallel_workers = 6 synchronous_commit = off shared_preload_libraries = 'pg_stat_statements' pg_stat_statements.track = all ---

Now I'm not saying all of these had an affect, or even a cumulative affect; just the values we've changed. Be sure to use your own system values and not copy the above. The three largest changes I'd say are key to do are synchronous_commit = off, huge_pages = on and work_mem = 3MB. This article may help you understand a few of those changes.

With these changes, the database seems to be working a damn sight better even under heavier loads. There are still a lot of inefficiencies that can be fixed with the Lemmy app for these queries. A user phiresky has made some huge improvements there and we're hoping to see those pulled into main Lemmy on the next full release.

---

Problem: Lemmy errors aren't helpful and sometimes don't even reach the user (UI)

• Solution: Make our own UI with blackjack and hookers propagation for backend Lemmy errors. Some of these fixes have been merged into Lemmy main codebase

Details

• Yeah, we did that. Including some other UI niceties. Main thing is, you need to pull in the lemmy-ui code make your changes locally, and then use that custom image as your UI for docker
• Made some changes to a custom lemmy-ui image such as handling a few JSON parsed error better, improving feedback given to the user
• Remove and/or move some elements around, change the CSS spacing
• Change the node server to listen to system signals sent to it, such as a graceful docker restart
• Other minor changes to assist caching, changed the container image to Debian based instead of Alpine (reducing crashes)

---

 

The end?

No, not by far. But I am about to hit the character limit for Lemmy posts. There have been many other changes and additions to Beehaw operations, these are but a few of the key changes. Sharing with the broader community so those of you also running Lemmy, can see if these changes help you too. Ask questions and I'll discuss and answer what I can; no secret sauce or passwords though; I'm not ChatGPT.

Shout out to @[email protected] , @[email protected] and @[email protected] for continuing to work with me to keep Beehaw running smoothly.

Thanks all you Beeple, for being here and putting up with our growing pains!

our June 2023 financial update.

---

obligatory preface: we're 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us.

because of the unique circumstances of this month i won't report an expected yearly expense like i did last time. that'll probably come next month, when our finances are closer to a useful baseline.

---

overall expenses this month: $566.98

this is a mighty looking expense, but only $371.98 of it is infrastructure (and even less of that is actually site hosting).

$312.54 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into

• $241.47 for hosting the site itself
• $48.29 for backups
• $11.87 for site snapshots
• $10.91 for bandwidth overage (1091.10GB @ $0.01/GB)

$15.28 for Hive, an internal chat platform we're trying to set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean, but distinct enough to break out from overall DO hosting)

• $13.89 for hosting Hive
• $1.39 for backups

~$39.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into

• $35/mo for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam)
• ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)

$5/mo for 1TB of backup storage with BackBlaze (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)

the remaining $195 of this month's expenses have gone to paying @[email protected] for his community icons. we do so at a rate of $5 per icon and he's done 39 of them for us (36 of which are live so far).

overall: we definitely think we're able to downsize infrastructure costs going forward. we're already investigating how best to do that (both in terms of host and overall cost)--there's no ETA for a few reasons, but this month should not be representative of many more subsequent months.

overall contributions this month: $3,870.44

we also have an incredible amount of support, so that really helps things as far as "being able to take time to get everything right". according to OpenCollective, we currently have approximately:

• 97 monthly contributions, totaling $549.58
• 9 yearly contributions, totaling $254.99
• 149 one-time donations, totaling $3,065.87

between monthly and yearly contributions, this means we are still more-or-less breaking even and sustainable overall with this month's costs. obviously, we would like to be substantially moreso though, through either lower costs, more donations, or a combination of both.

total end of month balance: $3,591.33

• yes yes, this is already out of date by a bunch. expect it to be like that, i use UTC for our reports lol.

---

expense runway, assuming no further donations

• assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about 6 months and 10 days of runway
• assuming just expenses like our infrastructure this month: we have 10 and a half months of runway

if you'd like to make the runway longer (and reward us for even having this site up today after yesterday's complete fiasco), now is a good time to donate :)

you know the drill i'm sure, let's not waste time. many of you have already noticed we've created the first batch of our six new communities, which are:

• AskBeehaw: a community which is exactly what it says it is, asking the Beehaw community stuff! this was our most popular community on the survey, and it's also inclusive of AMAs or stuff like out of the loop (which overlaps somewhat with Chat--we're fine with that).
• Tabletop Gaming: after some delay, the tabletop and boardgaming communities have their own section! this community is, as noted, inclusive of boardgames and similar things to them--we've already got a mod in the section looking out for that side of the community, so that's nice :)
• US News: we've converted !news into World News (see here for why in brief) to accommodate that popular demand, which means that US News now gets its own community! in conjunction with us the community there is being cultivated by @[email protected], who has quite a lot of news experience and has a pretty clear vision of what that community will hopefully bring to the community table. we hope you'll like that vision.

other three communities should drop about next week, so be on the lookout for those.

as noted in the other announcement we're also taking mod applications. we're taking them for both new and old communities, so please feel free to apply over there if you're interested. thanks

Compiling this data was not as hard as I expected, let's go through the data and the shiny graphs!

Age of Beeple

!

Most are above 24! Seems we got an older average age compared to a lot of social media. It would be interesting to see how many came here with experiences from independent forums before Reddit.

Where Beeple reside

! !

This one's a big graph. Though we can notice most people are from the US. Would be nice to see more countries represented though a big part of it likely has to do with language. (You will need to open the big graph in another tab, it's too big to show properly.)

Gender identity of Beeple

!

So, as expected, mostly men. However, less than expected which is nice to see. There should be outreach to at least equalize this.

Sexual orientation of Beeple

!

This is kinda surprising. It seems we managed to get a lot more LGBTQ+ people than expected considering most of you all come from Reddit - so this is nice to see. This is most likely because of our focus on a safe space.

Whiteness of Beeple

!

As expected, mostly white which is unfortunate. I think there's outreach to be done in that regard as well.

Neurodivergence of Beeple

!

We seem to have a really surprising amount of neurodivergent people! Definitely nice to see.

Beeple with disabilities

!

I.. have no idea how to interpret this data so I'll just say, shiny graph.

Beeple's awareness of the Fediverse

!

Most knew about the fediverse but still a good 20% had not heard about it so glad to see you all managed to find your way here!

How Beeple have been dealing with Beehaw

! !

It seems most people feel relatively confident in their ability to use Beehaw and most people seem to enjoy it. That makes me really happy to see. Feels rewarding, feels good.

Conclusion

I wanna thank everyone for the feedback about the survey and its questions - we'll do better next time! I'm glad we did this survey because it shows the areas to work on in terms of outreach! Thank you all for your participation!

quick dual announcement

New Communities

we've tabulated the easiest part of the survey (other results coming NOW) and we're pleased to announce that, in the future, we'll be creating six new communities. these six choices can be stratified as:

most popular, community picks

• World News
• AskBeehaw

hand picked, also popular with our community

• Tabletop Gaming
• Anime and Manga

hand picked, base exists in our community for it and distinct enough to take a chance on

• Vegan and Vegetarian[^1]
• Parenting

in the specific case of World News, the [email protected] community will be converted into the "World News" section, and a separate !usnews community will be spun off for US-centric news.

these communities will be created in batches of three. you'll see WN+US news conversion/AB/TG first, then A&M/V&V/P about a week after that.

as for communities that didn't make it, these are best fits for now:

• School & Education: [email protected]
• Camping & Hiking: [email protected] or [email protected] or [email protected]
• Fitness: [email protected], occasionally [email protected]
• Photography: wherever it fits
• TIL: [email protected]
• Travel: [email protected]
• Spirituality: [email protected] and [email protected]
• Health: wherever it fits
• Sustainability: can mostly go in [email protected]
• AntiWork/WorkReform: [email protected]
• Retro: wherever it fits

Community Moderators

this also means we're taking on new Community moderators. as with last time: this is not a full time job and we don't want it to be, but this is also not a completely trivial commitment either, so please only apply if you're comfortable with making that commitment. (if you think it's becoming overwhelming or too much for you at a later point, that's different and we can discuss that then.) our community mods haven't had many issues though, so i doubt you will either.

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What is expected of community moderators?

I'm sure you can surmise, but to be specific:

• Encourage and promote respectful and constructive discussions, and address any behaviour that goes against our community's spirit to be(e) nice.
• Assist people by answering their questions, offering guidance, and helping them navigate the platform effectively, ensuring they feel heard.
• Where possible, give us and/or your fellow active mods concerns, improvements, or insights you have from your section of our community.

What powers do community moderators have?

You'd be expected to use these responsibly, obviously:

• The ability to remove or hide posts, comments, or other content that violate our community guidelines.
• The authority to issue warnings to users who breach our mantra, and in severe cases, temporarily suspend their accounts.

We generally encourage a compassionate approach to moderating, though. Unless someone is clearly unproductive, we encourage you as a mod to engage in constructive dialogue before banning. And if you don't have the energy for this, you can flag a post to bring it to our (or another mod's) attention.

Additionally: blatantly misusing these or using them maliciously will be instant grounds for demotion, and in the latter case likely permanent banning from the site. Do not do that, please and thank you.

If I'm selected, how can I report stuff to the admins?

On site, you can flag it and leave it for us to deliberate. You can also reach one of us by DM on here.

If you need to immediately contact us for mod stuff, our main hubs of operation are Discord (where we have a specific channel for community mod reports) and Matrix (which is pretty relaxed and easy to follow). You can also use a DM on Beehaw itself.

How will mods be selected?

Hand selection. In the future we may supplement hand picking mods with another method—any mods selected by that method would most likely serve on a temporary basis (and that would be made clear to them on appointing).

Applications can be made here.[^2]

[^1]: because i've already seen moderately concerning posts w/r/t to this: please do not make us regret this community. it is currently this grouping or nothing. [^2]: we are working on a non-Google platform here but our first alternative failed to materialize today and there are easily half a dozen other things we need to prioritize right now (including the big 0.18 update, which had its timing on here derailed by a crippling bug). we'll get to an alternative when we do. if you do not want to use the form, DM me and we can arrange something.

@support

Hey y'all! I got an email a week ago saying my account was approved, but I haven't been able to log in via Firefox on Debian or Android. The loading wheel just keeps spinning after I click the login button and doesn't stop. Does anybody here know it there's been issues with new accounts lately?

This message popped up after an upgrade but it's still working (⁠•⁠‿⁠•⁠)

!

!

The "sorting help" link/button is broken and gives me following page, that does not exist: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/01-getting-started.html/docs/en/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

When I delete the first docs part, then the link works correctly as: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

I just wanted to report a weird issue with specifically the web app for specifically beehaw and not other Lemmy instances: the notch bar at the top on my pixel 7 (and seemingly not other phones?) is forced white even on dark theme. this doesn't happen on the site through Firefox but only when I "install" the website as a PWA

!here's an example

hello folks!

with our backlog cleared and many new people around, now's a good time to do our first-ever Beehaw Community Survey--the first of what will likely be(e) many to come. this survey should take no more than 5 or 10 minutes to fill out, so we strongly encourage you to do so when you are able to. you can find it at the following link:

Beehaw Community Survey

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the survey is comprised of seven optional demographic questions to help us assess the overall identity of our community and three questions relating to Beehaw and the Fediverse. it also asks you about 17 possible communities we are considering and whether you would actively participate in them if made.

the survey will be open for approximately a week. we'll definitely close it before July 1, so please get your responses in before that date. it'll also be locally pinned for at least the next three days or so, so please mind that. thanks!

---

results will also be aggregated and posted on here in a summary sometime thereafter. no ETA on that though.

I'd upload a screenshot to Beehaw directly, but I can't so I'm using an Imgur screenshot.

We've defederated from :

lemmy.k6qw.com,lemmy.podycust.co.uk,waveform.social,bbs.darkwitch.net,cubing.social,lemmy.roombob.cat,lemmy.jtmn.dev,lemmy.juggler.jp,bolha.social,sffa.community,dot.surf,granitestate.social,veenk.help,lemmyunchained.net,wumbo.buzz,lemmy.sbs,lemmy.shwizard.chat,clatter.eu,mtgzone.com,oceanbreeze.earth,mindshare.space,lemmy.tedomum.net,voltage.vn,lemmy.fyi,demotheque.com,thediscussion.site,latte.isnot.coffee,news.deghg.org,lemmy.primboard.de,baomi.tv,marginalcuriosity.net,lemmy.cloudsecurityofficehours.com,lemmy.game-files.net,lemmy.fedi.bub.org,lemmy.blue,lemmy.easfrq.live,narod.city,lemmy.ninja,lemmy.reckless.dev,nlemmy.nl,lemmy.mb-server.com,rammy.site,fedit.io,diggit.xyz,slatepacks.com,theotter.social,lemmy.nexus,kleptonix.com,rabbitea.rs,zapad.nstr.no,feddi.no

based on the list of instances made by @[email protected] here - Thank you again for that work, it's highly appreciated.

This is a preventive measure against massive amounts of accounts being created for botting purposes. Most instances banned appear to be 1 user instances so we don't think this will have a great effect on anyone's usage of Beehaw. If you are an admin of one of those instances, feel free to contact us at [email protected]

When leaving home page up in Firefox tab after ~5 minutes the tab will crash. This started last night and initially thought a fluke however is continuing this morning. I've tried CTRL+F5 to clear cache in case some code change but that did not resolve the issue. Also checked console for error messages though did not see any. So far have not had an individual post page crash; only the home page. Any other steps I can take to help troubleshoot?

Edit: Seems to have been an issue with Firefox 114.0.1. Version 114.0.2 is available now and after updating the issue is gone.

I'm sorry if this is the wrong place to put this stuff 🤞but perhaps a parents channel where we can share tips, milestones and vent about life with chaotic tiny people in our lives. As an opening offer I bring my little one discovering grass for the first time. !

How come only the support community has a banner?

This one:

!"Beehaw Banner"

Shouldn't it be on each community? :) Since we have one after all!

Maybe you guys already know about the bot signup over lemmy.world. Now they are all over the lemmyverse. The top 20 fastest growing instances in the threadiverse are probably suffering from it. The top one, lemmy.podycust.co.uk, has 10k users with 7 total posts. The total user count of threadiverse is now 544k, compared to 270k on June 19. We may be facing 200k+ bots at this point. Also these instances are in the federation. If any admin of these instance abandons ship, this creates huge liabilities to the threadiverse.

Lemmyverse needs to figure out how to deal with this. But before that happens, do you guys think Beehaw should preemptively defederate these affected instances? Or could there be a better solution?

There are different opinions on Beehaw's registration process. I kind of see how some people would find it dissuasive, specially after most of us are coming from Reddit. But I still think it's very practical, at least for the time being.

Btw, this is only my opinion as a new user, I don't know any of the admins/mods. Link to my original comment.

So, recently some fediverse admins (mostly Mastodon) and the founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko (Gargron), where contacted by Meta/Facebook for an NDA meeting. We know nothing about it, but we're pretty sure that it was about this project92 thing that Meta/Facebook is creating to "compete" with Twitter.

So a lot of Mastodon admins already singed a pact to immediately block any Meta/Facebook activity in the fediverse as soon as it comes up. My Mastodon instance, fosstodon.org hasn't singed that pact and I'm pretty worried.

The following image is an screenshot of Gargron and dansup (creator of Pixelfed) talking about this. These posts were deleted, even from the wayback machine.

!

@support Hi I signed up without any error but I get an infinite loading screen when I try to log in.

Could I check if my application was received?

The user was https://beehaw.org/u/Skirmish

Thanks!