UPDATE: RESULTS HAVE CLOSED! thank you for your participation—we’ve received over 1,500 responses which is quite a lot more than we expected. aggregated results and community creation decisions should hopefully come in due time.


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


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.

  • lumarius [she/her]@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I would be interested in a vegan & vegetarian community, but since vegetarian is a superset of a vegan diet, the combination would make the community effectively vegetarian. One of my favourite communities on reddit was r/vegan, where the discussions were usually much broader than just food-related, and on the other hand there was no need to look through delicious-looking food pictures to find out they were not vegan when looking for food. Hence, I would appreciate a specifically vegan community even more.

    • JC Denton@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Exactly. Veganism is not only a diet so it doesn’t make sense for vegetarianism (whatever that means) to be mixed in this.

      Vegetarians also like to mix vegetables with dead animals and other animal secretions. I ask the admins to please reconsider this.

      • treble@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Just over a year into going veggie, perhaps as a stepping-stone, and didn’t realize the term was that broad. Tentatively I’m of the mind symbiotic relationships can exist, w/ bees & cage-free chickens specifically, though I’ve yet to research the plight of dairy cows (no enzymes for that, but I am curious). If you have some persuasive materials I could ingest on these creatures handy, I’d appreciate. <3

        • JC Denton@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Well, the thing is that symbiotic relationships between beings of different ‘intelligence’ levels are difficult to measure.

          For me an easy way of understanding this is thinking for example about the relations between adults and children or adults and people with mental issues. It is very easy for an adult to exploit/abuse them and how do we know if the ‘exploited’ part is being happy about it or if they understand what’s happening.

          For me this is impossible because like them, animals cannot give us consent and they don’t understand what we are doing to them.

          And of course the abuse goes beyond the ‘rational’. Animals are systematically bred to be tortured during a certain amount of time and then horribly killed. Again and again for billions of animals every year.

          Veganism can be summarized as ‘Through my actions, I will directly and indirectly avoid to contribute to animal suffering in all the ways and as much as possible’. This means being against anything that was produced as a result of animal exploitation: consumption of animal parts or the result of animal labor, leather, wool, circuses, zoos, horse riding, animal experimentation and many others.

          It could be considered an evolution from anti-racism to anti-speciesism.

          For these and many other reasons, veganism is vastly different from being vegetarian and putting them in the same sack is a mistake.

          Regarding materials, there are a ton on internet but since you mentioned bees:

          https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan/honey-industry

          There is also a quick view of the dairy industry in youtube called ‘Dairy is Scary’.

          But the ultimate compendium of animal abuse is the documentary ‘Dominion’ narrated by Joaquin Phoenix.

          I think there is already a vegan community in another instance, I’m pretty sure that they will answer any questions you may have and provide guidance on how to transition if you are interested.

  • wildeaboutoskar@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Nice survey!

    Personally I’d like there to be more bee puns in the community names, but that’s just bee

    … I’ll see myself out.

  • blindsight@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I just wanted to say that I feel very strongly that, should it be implement, the community be called WorkReform, not AntiWork.

    In the spirit of Beehaw, I think AntiWork goes against the ethos of “Bee Kind” as it sets the entire community up to be adversarial to anyone who enjoys work/finds work meaningful. Work reform is a much more inclusive goal.

    I had a hard time with that one since I would not join an anti work community, but I was fairly active on /r/WorkReform.

    • Manticore@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      The miscommunication there is in the definition of ‘work’.

      They don’t want to abolish employment, labour, or community contribution. They want to abolish work - the idea of a labour system that is tantamount to indentured servitude, labour as an obligation, labour for labour’s sake, labour at the expense of one’s wellbeing and QoL.

      Labour you enjoy or find meaningful isn’t ‘work’ under that interpretation, and arguing for reforming ‘work’ like that is a soft-serve that ultimately ensures those kinds of labour continue to exist.

      I agree the name itself is provocative, because the meaning of the word ‘work’ has come to refer to all labour as a whole. (Mostly because almost all labour these days is work, now.)

      But their intent is not to abolish productivity, or that those who are productive and enjoy their labour are somehow wrong. It’s about pushing for everybody to be able to choose labour that is meaningful to them, so they can have that too.

      So while a given individual within the movement may have joined because they interpreted it that way, they are minorities, and not the movement’s intended goal upon its founding.

      I support language that is less likely to be misinterpreted by extremists, but that may not be feasible, and the movement itself is not against Beehaw’s values of community health. The majority of those in the movement are heavily interested in the wellbeing of our labouring communities.

      Maybe something like c/HealthyLabour, c/LabourRights, or c/LabourEthics?

      • Barry Zuckerkorn@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        They want to abolish work - the idea of a labour system that is tantamount to indentured servitude, labour as an obligation, labour for labour’s sake, labour at the expense of one’s wellbeing and QoL.

        Seems confusing to substitute a non-standard definition of “work” into that movement. The standard definitions of “work” in any dictionary don’t seem to carry an implicit meaning of indentured obligation, at least how I read them.

        If anything, the word “labor” often carries those negative connotations as much, if not more, than the word “work.” For example, someone who says “I labored for 3 years at that company” versus “I worked for 3 years at that company” seems to be giving additional, negative value judgment about that job and what it was like.

        And I recognize that the movement itself has tried to narrow its focus on this particular definition of work versus labor, but I don’t think it accurately describes the broader societal understanding of either term.

    • thepaperpilot@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I won’t fight too hard against this, but I’d like to weigh in that I feel I’d fit more into a antiwork community than work reform. I legitimately believe we should abolish work (as opposed to labor), and work reform dilutes the cause.

      But I understand the concerns with the baggage the term has and would sub to work reform if it was the one created - I can still sub to socialism and other leftist communities.

      • Jitzilla@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        What do you see at the difference between work and labor? To me they mean the same exact thing.

        • thepaperpilot@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Labor is the production of goods and services, work is when you sell your labor for a wage or salary. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the means of production”, it’s referring to the idea of who gets the product of the labor - the workers, or someone/something else (e.g. a company). It’s what enabled capitalism to coerce and exploit workers, preventing them from laboring on what they want to. Leftist ideologies advocate to help resolve this by having the workers collectively own the fruits of their labor, such as within a co-operative where the workers all collectively own the organization. This comment elsewhere in the thread also clarifies the distinction.

      • BobQuasit@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I want to abolish work, not reform it. Reforms always end up getting rolled back by the plutocrats.

  • Doombot1@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Would you guys consider creating any sort of houseplants community? Plantclinic community, and/or succulents community? If I’m being entirely honest those are the ones I miss the most, and the ones on other communities still aren’t very active/don’t exist (in the case of succulents, as far as I can tell!). /c/greenspace helps to fill the void a bit but doesn’t quite do it

  • bbbhltz@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I am not a fan either people, but remember to propose a solution when you complain.

    It must be free and as easy as Google Forms…

    • Framaforms (limited to 1000 responses)
    • Office365 (wait… No)
    • SurveyMonkey (limited to 10 questions)
    • LimeSurvey (freemium)
    • AirTable (I don’t know, never used it…)

    There are dozens more.

    Again, I feel you, but if your reluctance is based on digital privacy, the rabbit hole will drive you mad.

  • localhost@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I think it may be good idea to also add a separate general medicine-focused community.

    Health communities on social media tend to gravitate towards wellness and less-than-evidence-based practices - which is fine on its own, but may not be what some would expect by the name alone.

    • Jitzilla@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      YES. I loved r/nursing and r/medicine for their focus on evidence based medicine. I’m not interested in a facebook mommy group vibe.

  • IcedCoffeeBitch@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I couldn’t find Puerto Rico on the list, please consider adding it; I understand we are US territory but many of us consider ourselves our own country.

  • Isildun@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Done. As a side thought, I wonder if it would have been interesting to include both a “would contribute to” and a “would be interested in reading” (or similar concept). Undoubtedly there are countless lurkers here as there are on any social media site. It could be interesting to see what people are interested in lurking vs contributing to.

    As a personal example, I don’t think I could contribute well to worldwide news, but I think it’s important to consume it to keep up to date (and I assume Beehaw would have more interesting stories than traditional news media’s “front page”).

    Although, as a counter to my own suggestion, I suppose there’s no point in having a community that people are interested in reading but no one is interested in contributing to.

    • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPM
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      1 year ago

      Although, as a counter to my own suggestion, I suppose there’s no point in having a community that people are interested in reading but no one is interested in contributing to.

      this is basically the reason we settled on for the phrasing. we’re not worried about whether a community will have eyes–we’re already at a point where that’s a given with the about 11,000 users we have before lurkers–but eyes aren’t necessarily contributions and who wants a bunch of dead sections mucking up a place?

  • koezie@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Done! Also, just throwing out a couple suggestions for communities for possible future installment:

    • Style (clothing/shoes/makeup/skincare/etc)
    • Collectibles or Hobbies (toys/cards/pins/plushies/etc)
  • thrawn@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    One small suggestion: shuffle the existing communities slightly, from

    -Animals and Pets

    -Nature and Gardening

    to

    -Pets

    -Animals and Nature

    -Gardening

    Thanks for taking community feedback!

  • Phroon@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    A bit of a meta comment/thought. Looking through the list of proposed communities, I see a few that were a “Reddit thing”, communities that would be like AskReddit, Ask Me Anything, and Today I Learned. In some sense, I wish for Beehaw to have its own identity. That it figure out its own way to do things. That might just be a differentiating choice of name for the same thing, but one that helps convey our values through the names’ connotations. Or it could be that we come up with our own ideas for communities that can cover a wide variety of topics.

    In the text about our creed, Be(e) nice, I see a desire to be(e?) different. That Beehaw isn’t Reddit. I feel that should help guide the communities we create.

    • Manticore@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I agree, I don’t want Beehaw to simply replicate Reddit. It’s not remotely large enough to yet, anyway. But Beehaw is already more similar to Reddit than its users are willing to admit - and some of these would be good ideas, and should just be broader.

      AskReddit and AMA are essentially ‘Chat’; and the topic of the thread is either the OP, or the commenters. Unless these kinds of threads start dominating Chat at the expense of others, it won’t need a subgroup. We probably don’t have enough notable users for an AMA to see traffic, and any notable users that want to do an AMA should just use Chat, which is also already essentially askBeehaw.

      TIL is a niche version of “look at this cool thing I’m excited about!” and that we don’t really have an umbrella for, which I think is a shame. An umbrella that encompasses ‘today I learned’, ‘damn that’s interesting’/‘mildly interesting’ etc sounds interesting, though I don’t know what one would call it.

      • Phroon@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        An umbrella that encompasses ‘today I learned’, ‘damn that’s interesting’/‘mildly interesting’ etc sounds interesting, though I don’t know what one would call it.

        Perhaps just “Interesting”, that seems to be a simultaneously descriptive and broad enough name.

    • Enfield [he/him]@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      That might just be a differentiating choice of name for the same thing, but one that helps convey our values through the names’ connotations. Or it could be that we come up with our own ideas for communities that can cover a wide variety of topics.

      c/Q&A? c/trivia? Those were possibilities that came to mind for what you mentioned in particular 🤔.

  • TheCalzoneMan@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Hooray Tabletop! I mentioned it in my sign-up, but I am really looking forward to having a dedicated space to talk about TTRPGs, mini-wargaming, and the like. Hopefully it gets added to the list.