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:
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
Seconded, a positive mindset is what we are cultivating and that starts at the name. It is also clearer, we all know that reform is possible but some people interperet antiwork as full work abolishment, something way down the line of work reform.
It'll be nice if you guys can use something other than "Google Forms" for future surveys. Something a bit more privacy respecting than "Google Forms" will be a better choice for platform like Beehaw. A few suggestions,
we will investigate these but no promises we'll switch (beyond whether they have the features we need--which i'm not so worried about--ease of access is also a consideration we need to make with surveys. our audience is also not exclusively tech people and we are, bluntly, not nearly as absolutist with the need for privacy as many of the people on lemmy.)
oh, cost/resources are another consideration. our finances aren't exactly in a place where we can eat huge costs of any kind, so out of hand we're going to be a lot less willing to consider stuff with a big price tag (especially when we can't yet gauge how many surveys we'll be doing and on what schedule)
Personally speaking, I'm not opposed to paying money but LimeSurvey literally doesn't have a tier that would allow us to have everyone on the instance answer and it's ludicrously expensive. The closest they have is 10000 per year
The only realistic option for us would be to selfhost form software and personally, I don't feel like putting more weight on our sysadmins at the moment..
I'm not saying anyone should use something else just because Google bad. When I survey my students I use our school's MS Forms thing. If I want about 100 answers I use Framaforms. If I had to survey a large group of people like this, I would go for Google.
And, wow, I had no idea that LimeSurvey charged so much.
Minor complaint - my country / region (Taiwan) is not listed in the "countries" dropdown list, and Kosovo is also missing. Consider asking for "country or region" instead of "country" and include states with limited recognition when asking nationality.
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
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.
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.
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 🤔.
Just want to give a quick shout out that the questions are exceptionally well worded for encouraging valuable feedback. It's super easy to ask “What communities are you interested in”, but “What communities would you contribute to” is a different, and more valuable question. This is one of the most well-thought-out surveys I've filled out for an online community in a while. Is one of the admins possibly a sociologist, demographer, or otherwise someone who writes surveys for a living? Or did you just write a really good-ass survey based on your experiences taking not so good surveys?
This is one of the most well-thought-out surveys I’ve filled out for an online community in a while. Is one of the admins possibly a sociologist, demographer, or otherwise someone who writes surveys for a living? Or did you just write a really good-ass survey based on your experiences taking not so good surveys?
mixture of experience with surveys, lots of peer review, and lots of revising over the past week or so. we were literally revising questions up to the moment this was posted with the community mods to make sure our wording was clear and still communicated what we wanted it to
I can't personally say I'm any of those but I am in college so I'll eventually learn about how to make good surveys. I think something we took advantage of is peer review. A lot of the questions were refined by comments made by our community moderators!
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.
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?
I agree. I'm primarily a lurker, and had to view "contribute" as "would appreciate such and such a community".
As an aside, I remember someone asking on Reddit for all the lurkers to be more active and post a lot. I really don't think this user would like Reddit if suddenly the number of posts/comments increased by at least a factor of 10, most of which would be stuff like "I agree with this" instead of just upvoting.
Obviously it wasn't on the survey but I figure I should at least mention what I'd like to see directly, I would really love to have some kind of automotive community here. I'd be happy to pitch in and help develop it, but I do not think I could be a full time moderator.
Having a friendly supportive place to talk about cars, driving (high performance or otherwise), projects, and grassroots motorsports would be awesome.
This is probably a much later addition I don't know how much interest there is here. Just putting it in the suggestion box.
Keep your eyes open in the future...this is almost certainly not going to be the last round of community creation. The admins are being very deliberate about the process though.
Yes and I really appreciate it, manageable growth is key to the success of this instance. If you don't voice your thoughts there's zero chance of being heard though and I was curious to gauge interest and thoughts about an automotive community here.
Yeah some kind of automotive/motorsports/powersports community would be nice. It's my area of expertise and I enjoy sharing knowledge and helping others; but I've also seen how those communities turn toxic with the quickness. I wouldn't want any part in trying to moderate that.
Every community that's passionate about something has these issues, but with vehicles there's an extra layer I think as they are often seen as extensions of ones physical self and ego, consciously or not, so enthusiasts can take criticism of their vehicle very personally. Also you practically have to be an engineer to fully understand everything going on in a car, so misinformation abound, mostly due to games of telephone from some necessary simplification of a concept somewhere.
If cagers and bikers can get along we might achieve world peace. 😂
Probably to start they would go together I'd imagine since Beehaw is quite small. Long term they really are wildly different worlds though I can appreciate both, I've driven/ridden everything from scooters to class 8 tractor trailers personally I'm down for anything with wheels and a motor/engine.
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.
Do you think Tabletop would be the right place to discuss Dimension 20 or other actual-play content or would that be better categorized in something like entertainment?
I don't see why not. If tags ever get added in, it would be better to have actual-play stuff on a tabletop-specific community, since we're the ones who will care specifically about that kind of medium.
The only question that tripped me up for some reason was whether I consider myself to be white or non-white. I'm Filipino American, and personally I have a kinda nebulous identity toward race. I suppose I could "pass" as white, but I find myself unsure of identifying absolutely as White or Non-White. I'm not educated in best practices here, but I think a "Mixed" answer could fill the gap well without getting overly specific.
Seeing the communities list is really exciting! Maybe one day we'll have the activity to warrant all of them 😄. I have a boatload of photographs I've taken over the years but never really got around to posting anywhere. I'll likely find my ways to sneak them in relevant communities if c/photography doesn't come around, but if I had to pick One and Only One, that would be mine.
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.
Great idea to have such a survey. I couldn't find any questions regarding sex apart from the one about gender identity. That is, I'm trans but this doesn't show because I just selected 'female'. Likewise people that are intersex would not necessarily appear here. Or maybe I made a mistake somehow? If I was meant to fill out the field with the blank below, I probably wouldn't feel comfortable doing that because this would again make a distinction between 'the normal female' and an other, i.e. 'trans women'. I'm female/a woman. But I'm also trans. Both aren't necessarily connected.
A better solution would be imo to have an extra field asking if you identify as cis/trans/other. I get that this is kind of a tricky terrain though, just wanted to let you know/discuss it.
A better solution would be imo to have an extra field asking if you identify as cis/trans/other. I get that this is kind of a tricky terrain though, just wanted to let you know/discuss it.
Yes, the gold standards on how to ask these questions are addressed in this fantastic paper created by the pride study. A quick summary of best practice is as follows:
A question for gender identity - male, female, non-binary, intersex, other
A question for whether someone self-identifies as trans - yes/no
A question for sexuality (multi-select, including asexual and aromantic)
I guess depending on the audience (i.e. their knowledge on sex/gender) you could ask if someone identifies as cis, trans or otherwise in #2.
Not sure how to best include intersex people though, maybe someone else has an idea? Because they could potentially identify either as cis, trans or neither and in question #1 there also isn't room for this?
I also had similar thoughts on this. I filled out the blank with "transitioning to male", but my preference would have been for a field that just says cis/trans/other. I imagine it is tricky to go through all the comments in the blank field as well and factor that into the demographics in the way the survey was intended.
Let me just say that making a broad spectrum survey is very hard. I respect those who have problems with it and with Beehaw for having to stomach data collection for a community with such a broad set of needs.
I typically avoid demographic questions for a lot of reasons, but I wanted to participate for beehaw's sake since I understand their intentions. Damn though. Some of those boxes are just filled with all sorts of loaded emotional yuck.
I don't mean it as a criticism. Again, I get why and the value, but phew... 😬
That's a great question. You all would have been better served if I offered something helpful, but I don't really feel qualified or knowledgeable enough in sociology and psychology to offer anything meaningful.
Some of us have really struggled with various aspects of our identity all our lives and so I think, if others are anything like me, surveys of this nature are inherently going to stir that. It's okay. It's simply life.
I just imagined something silly actually. I imagined a survey with user inputted responses where one could vote with a previously entered response or make there own. Naturally, there would be multiple responses that are similar but not the same. When the survey closed, the input could then be coalesced via AI into condensed groupings that best represent most folks. This might provide for better choices in the future for demographic info and how to best serve folks.
...erm.
That was certainly not very helpful. I'm just overtired while imagineering. I think I spent too many brain cells today at work.
I'd use both askBeehaw and AMA if they were moved into subcommunities, but I don't think they need to be. They're basically just 'topic is you' or 'topic is me', which is what Chat is for. If anything, Chat is more-or-less askBeehaw right now, and we don't have enough notable users to sustain an AMA.
So I ticked that I'd use them, but I don't think they're necessary - at least not until beehaw is far, far bigger. I even suspect Chat would be almost empty if an askBeehaw was created right now.
And a community for the Labradors among us that want to show off our favourite toys is a great idea; but not as specific as TIL. Especially since 'TIL' can often overlap with 'TIFU' (eg: "Today I learned that you can't put standard dishsoap in a dishwasher.")
Something that encompasses 'TIL', but also 'mildlyinteresting', 'YSK', 'lifehacks' etc sounds neat. More of a 'fun fact' area where people show off pictures of cool bugs they found, or ideas they want to share. I just don't know what you'd call it. (And the TIFU-type posts will still suit Chat.)
This is a great idea! One of the online communities I’m in does an annual census and having data to analyze community change over time has been really valuable and interesting.
I do have a question/suggestion though: if the camping/hiking community is established, could it be encompassing of outdoor recreation in general? I ski in the winter and hike/camp in the summer and find generally that people who do one often do other outdoor activities (snowshoeing, biking, kayaking, etc) throughout the seasons. Including winter-based outdoor activities will also help keep engagement up throughout the year.
I do have a question/suggestion though: if the camping/hiking community is established, could it be encompassing of outdoor recreation in general?
we'd interpret it that way, yes. obviously there's a bit of a limit to how descriptive we can be with each community on the survey before it all becomes noise
Question: is the last question (page 4) asking what communities you’d be interested in moderating or just posting to regularly? Looks like the first sentence was cut-off so I wasn’t sure.
Great survey, I'm excited about some of the community options. I would love something akin to r/BuyItForLife - a genuine place to find products based on the feedback of real people. In particular, low waste products (maybe that fits in the sustainability category?)
If sustainability gets made I would imagine posts like that would be welcome there! Consuming less is definitely related to sustainability, and buying one higher quality thing instead of many copies of a cheap thing certainly aligns with that goal! ☺
Interested in seeing the demographic information that comes out of this. Aside, it would be useful in the future to have the ability to select multiple options on the gender and sexual orientation questions. I fall under more than one option in both of those.
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.
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
My two pence:
I really appreciate the nod to the Rest of the World in having a world news community but I honestly can't see myself participating in it. The dreadful things happening in the US are hard to avoid on social media, as is the deep deep anger they foster. Following so many other countries is a lot of weight to add, given that I also can't avoid the UK's self-immolating bin fire either.
I also question the quality of commentary it would foster being so broad. But maybe it would be a better home for say news about Ukraine and that would be worthwhile.
I think they may have tried to account for that because just being curious I clicked to see what survey type it was, It's non-privacy respecting Google by the way, but anyway, the first question is "Do you have an account on Beehaw?" Possible answers, Yes, No, I'm waiting on Approval. I exited because I don't have an account, and even if I did, I don't like having my email account tied to surveys.
I hate Google surveys as well, but this one didn't require an email log-in. Or, at least it didn't from me, and I have zero Google-related cookies in my browser.
It did say something like "sign in to save your answers", but other than that, nothing.
I wouldnt have chosen google for this job and there is lots of other discussion of that in the comments.
I don't like having my email account tied to surveys
I infer from this that your email host is gmail.com and you are already logged in to it in the browser. Without containers or other mitigation. Which is how your answers could be tied to that email.
If so, very strange to be complaining about the privacy of the survey. Your whole life is compromised...
Seeing the list of potential new communities is useful. I had a hard time even clicking on even one option and it was a bit of a stretch. I probably wouldnt realistically participate in any of them, they do not suit me. So it is more to know about the instance.