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.
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.
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.
Perhaps just “Interesting”, that seems to be a simultaneously descriptive and broad enough name.
c/Q&A?c/trivia? Those were possibilities that came to mind for what you mentioned in particular 🤔.Maybe “Cool things I learned” and “Open Forum”