Yep, I’m gradually shifting to S3 for my public direct file sharing as a bit of an exercise in learning AWS. It’s not free, but 99.99% of the time it’s remarkably cheap. If you’re willing to put up with learning AWS (or any other general-purpose platform really, cloud or self-hosted,) there’s a nice feeling that comes with having more leniency to do things your way and on your terms.

Now whether it works properly, however, let alone work at all, is an entirely different story. But that’s the double-edged sword with going out on your own: it’s more likely to be your fault, not someone else’s.

id be pretty psyched if my video embedding starts working one of these days 👨‍💻

Catbox is a robust looking option that I’ve experimented with. I’m a bit concerned that they’re blocked in a few countries, though.

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I’m not sure if that would be a massive issue for most Beehaw users, but personally I’m not a fan of having content potentially inaccessible or at least requiring additional tools to access.

Otherwise I couldn’t recommend Catbox enough, which is what really bums me out. Massive uncompressed file sizes, indefinite file retention, wide file support, direct file linking, the place has the works. If Catbox wasn’t already blocked to a mild degree in the mentioned countries, I would be all in on recommending them.

Related: If anyone is in one of the listed countries above, I’d appreciate it if you tried to access the site and some direct file links and reporting back if a VPN or public DNS is indeed required. There’s the catbox test Millions has below and I have a file of my own for good measure.

I definitely agree and feel with the arguments you have here. It’s a challenging issue to resolve. On one hand there’s the practical Rock of “transitioning to another asset and engaging in the practical burden that shifting gears brings,” and in this circumstance, that would come with the extra caveat of trying to commit to that transition during a busy period as is. On the other hand is the moral Hard Place of “you’re working with an asset actively developed by someone or something with known issues—are you willing to accept, and to some degree associate, with that?” I don’t feel like there’s a clear-cut path that’s both morally bright and practically realistic, and it’s not the kind of thing that makes me dance with joy.

If nothing else, it’s good to respect that we have a dilemma in our hands. Whichever way the community decides to collectively stand, both in the short and long term, I’m happy that we’re having this conversation at all. I think it’s important to acknowledge what we have and have a meaningful discussion around it. Putting our heads in the sand and pretending it’s a non-issue at best delays the issue and allows it to fester.

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navigating this shit is hard and even if you’re principled you’re probably only principled insofar as you’re aware.

That’s a great point I almost forgot to highlight. Even if I think I got my things sorted in such a way that I think my hands are clean in something, I typically end up finding out of nowhere that something down the line has some issues behind it that I need to resolve somehow. It’s a process that doesn’t seem to end, and it can feel exhausting sometimes.

I can only imagine that making this work at all can be a challenge. The recent Reddit API intrigue and the user influx couldn’t have done any favors. My moderating and community management experience is much smaller, and I already know that was a headache. I’d figure that the team here is working on all cylinders to keep things running as they are. I look forward to chipping in what I can when I can afford to. In the meantime, for what it’s hopefully worth, you and the team are Witnessed and Valued. I for one am willing to keep patient through the hiccups along the way. We’re on to something exciting here and I look forward to its continued success.

Best of luck, keep on as you are 🫡.

Pretty much—I’m in education for the trade, at least. I definitely agree with your sentiments here.

The services that Amazon et al. provide are a backbone for much of the internet and is just one example I can give off the cuff. A similar idea comes to mind when I hear about people disabling JavaScript on their browsers: sure, doing that would likely do good for your privacy and security, but a lot of the internet just doesn’t work, full stop.

It’s technically possible, and I can see why it may be the best choice depending on the lens. I have mad respect for people that pull it off, but I see it as practically unrealistic.

Hot (maybe not?) take that I suspect may be in line with your thinking here: Acknowledging a community’s political trends and Striving to build a community that includes people that may not align with the majority trends do not have to be mutually exclusive.

“Beehaw” as in the institution that maintains the community may not necessarily seek to brand itself as politically affiliated, but “Beehaw” as in the word and spirit of the law of the land will inevitably appeal to a particular audience, just as any community’s policies would whether intentionally or not, and “Beehaw” as in the people that make up the community are going to have political leanings within it—that’s just the plain and simple nature of people having opinions they bring along with them.

I can’t speak for @Gaywallet nor Beehaw leadership at large, but @alyaza slipped right in as I was about to say: it wouldn’t surprise me if “we do not know what the political leanings of most of our users are” is less speaking literally and more along the lines of “we’d rather allow the lay user describe their political leaning than we prescribe a political leaning on them.” I suppose a census is in order when the dust settles a bit more 🤓.

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Trends and Leanings aside, I think the most important role leadership can take here is to make sure this is a space that not only allows the lay user community to define itself, but allows users to also go against that grain. I suspect we’re making progress toward Door #2 rather than #1. It’s absolutely worth emphasizing that kind of conversation remains important, however. Not necessarily as something that’s prescriptive like guidelines, but at minimum as a conversation the likes of “This is what the community typically seems to value, this is what it typically seems to protest. This is what seems to average out as its strengths, and these are its blindspots. What are we doing right, and how might we better ourselves to help make A More Perfect Community?”

Ooooh man, I was searching up something earlier today and out of reflex I clicked a Reddit result. Felt icky once I realized where I ended up and went Back fast 😅.

It’ll be interesting to see if/how we’ll come to adapt to a more decentralized getup in time. I wonder how we might quickly search through all the public federated platforms at once? It’s gon’ get old fast to type [x] site:beehaw.org OR site:lemmy.world OR [ad nauseum]. I think it’d be cool if decentralized platforms got popular enough that search engines would add something like site:!social.lemmy.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I definitely appreciate this piece and the body of pieces around Beehaw’s policies and philosophies. I can imagine it eats at time that’s likely quite important to have in the current circumstances, but the writings are invaluable insights to consider and try to apply going forward.

The fact that we have Lemmy at all, let alone the growth of ActivityPub and federated platforms, feels like the kind of miracle that would stop Aaron Swartz from spinning in his grave. Tech often has a particularly wild way of making one face their values and pick their battles. I have issues with Amazon, for instance, but I can’t stress enough how a massive chunk of the internet these days relies on Amazon Web Services to get online, and I could say likewise for Microsoft or Google. I’d swear off their services if I could and embrace a hardline FOSS stance, but if I went through with that, a lot of my employment opportunities wouldn’t consider me. I could probably make it happen if push came to shove, but it would be a legitimate challenge that I’d feel a lot less secure in, and I don’t exactly have the safety net to afford that.

I wouldn’t consider it to be hypocritical or a bad thing to pick and choose your battles. On the contrary, I think it’s a mature and necessary approach in a complicated and difficult world. I’m finding it hard to think of anything in my life that doesn’t have controversy and tragedy at some point in its production or history. All of it warrants resistance and change, but if I were to give everything the drive it deserves, I think I’d turn to dust.

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I agree that a fork isn’t necessary right now. It certainly has no technical necessity—if anything, it would probably be technically worse to splinter the developer force. I can respect there’s a moral argument to be made for it, and I wouldn’t fault someone for preferring another platform over it. I think Beehaw has done a respectable job at philosophically separating itself from the controversy, however, and at this time, I’d say that’s enough for me at least.

I still have an Instagram because my friends do. Without Instagram DMs and iMessage, I lose real life connections.

Yep, I’m in a similar boat with real life connections as well as content creators I like. I’d love to drop Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, but so much of the people and content I enjoy are only in those places. I’d love to be a shepherd, but that’s easier said than done with friends and family, let alone a content creator you’d be invisible to through no fault of your own.

I’d still like to minimize my presence in such places, and I’m actively working toward that. But I think it’s going to be a long time before I’m completely out of there, if ever.

(pending evidence of good faith as discussed elsewhere in thread)

I think that’s going to be one of the big ifs about the new platform. The optimist in me really wants to give Meta the benefit of the doubt here. If they do this “right,” I think it has the potential to do great things for building up content and exposure and letting people do things their way. But admittedly I have some wariness of Meta, and I’m aware that it’s likely in their MO to mess things up in the name of profit or similar.

I suppose the approach I’ll end up taking will err towards a Wait and See perspective 🤷‍♂️

I say it’s cool to see a big company like Meta dipping it’s toes into ActivityPub and possibly cross-platform compatibility. I think that has the chance to expose more people to to the paradigm, and I really do think that more people should consider it. I’m wary about how Meta may approach it and what Meta may choose to do with it in time, but in sum, I’m in favor of it.

That sure doesn’t mean that I will be on Meta’s platform though 🙈.

I think it’ll be good for wider exposure, but I am wary of Meta’s history. Mastodon looks like it’ll scratch the Twitter itch in me plenty fine, and I’m of the understanding that Mastodon’s larger instances are pretty respectable in how they operate. Once I get my domain set up so I can don some self-hosted handles, I’ll be going with Mastodon’s services over Meta’s.

Not that I think it would happen, but I wonder if Discord could theoretically make publicly discoverable servers directly visible and indexable online?

Discord already has and maintains a web accessed variant of the platform. It’d require some UI for users not logged in and users not registered with a particular publicly visible server, but I’d wager it’s possible. Probably a nightmare to revamp the back-end to make it possible, but possible. It’d kinda feel like how Twitter is indexed and publicly searchable, but platform registration is required to participate, with Discord having the extra layer of server membership on top of a platform account.

It’d probably do nothing about servers that fall in a sort of visibility limbo, though, like servers that are significantly populated but invisible to Discord’s server discovery. Still, I like to daydream that kind of thing would put a dent on the platform’s information visibility issues 🤔.

I’m coming around to like the policy, too. I was skeptical for a while before joining, but I think I figured out why I had that skepticism.

I think I’m used to larger communities/platforms not having a reliable moderation, and I’ve seen dislikes and downvotes as a directly user controlled means for a place to self-police its content. That’s not to say I’d think moderation would act in bad faith; I’ve had occasional points when I found myself in a moderator role, and I’ve always had the impression that we were trying our best. It’s more that I’d think larger platforms like YouTube and busy communities lend its moderation force to being spread too thin and having to make judgements quickly and with less nuance. Downvotes definitely can, and have, been used in bad faith by users, but I think I felt like their intended use case made their issues a necessary evil.

I think Beehaw is actively striving to be different in that way. I don’t think that means I should say this place is invulnerable to something like Mod Decay or Apathy—I’d think something as potentially impactful like this warrants a degree of vigilance. But the vibe I get so far is encouraging. I think that if Beehaw’s moderation stays the course, I’ll continue to see the downvotes absence not just as a non-issue here, but a benefit to how we do things.

I don’t want another Reddit, I don’t want another time sink for the toilet. I want genuine discussions and the good hearted fun of old forums…

I think that gave me an epiphany that hadn’t occurred to me earlier somehow: I don’t think I ever really got to experience Old Forum culture? And I kinda feel like I missed the boat?

Reddit was probably the closest I got to experiencing that kind of place. I think I knew of a couple established forums related to my interests growing up, but I learned pretty early on that I wasn’t quite ready to be in that kind of place yet. Bless my heart, I found myself being annoying in all the wrong ways 🥴. I found Reddit right around the time I started to straighten that out. I think that was around a year or a few before the Ellen Pao round of intrigue? I suppose I just never found enough of an incentive to branch out from there.

I always found myself at least intrigued by the likes of Tumblr, Hacker News, or just general blogs and that kind of thing. I think the uniting thread behind them that interested me is an experience that has the potential to be a bit more longform compared to Twitter or Facebook. I’m used to people around me seeing Reddit as old school, different, and Off compared to whatever else, so I figured I was still getting a pretty respectable analog to the forum vibe I had a loose understanding of earlier.

But was I really? I recall sensing changes in the vibe pretty early on, and I wouldn’t even say I was an early entry on Reddit. Things typically felt too fast for me to get my word in, and the hivemind attitude toward opinion and form was a real turnoff (not that I care to throw them around like confetti, but I’d be psyched to leave behind the rampant emoji hatred 🗿.) That’s not to say I imagine forums as invulnerable to similar kinds of pitfalls, but I suspect Reddit was in a special position to make those kinds of issues more visible.

I think either way I end up with the Reddit migration, it’s going to be at a slower pace and a different form than Reddit was, at least for a while. That worried me at first, but the more I think about it, maybe that’s for the better. I’m starting to think I was missing out on something I didn’t know I’d prefer. Maybe if I grew up just a few years earlier I would’ve found myself more among a smattering of forums than I ended up.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the current round of departures from Reddit leads to someone out there making an NSFW focused instance. Maybe not in the timeframe some would want, but it feels inevitable for better or worse.

That reminds me an aspect to Lemmy and similar federated platforms that I think will be nice, whether Horny or Not!Horny: an instance with a particular focus can get invested in the policies and practices that benefit that kind of focus to a degree that really isn’t possible with a big, central tent like Reddit. Federation also means that hopping between instances to cherry pick the kind of fine-tuned experience you want is going to be a lot easier. I’m guessing that finding different instances might become a bit more difficult over time, but I’m excited to see where things go.