I come from a different point-of-view that I support the question portion, but I did find it hindered me slightly. Only because of my own anxiety, not because it’s a bad idea.

I mostly wanted to reply how the handling of my application was really personable, in case anyone else is lurking and finds it intimidating, like I did for a week or two. It’s not a college thesis and I imagine those running beehaw want more people to make the place more bustling.

I think the little question bit being there will lead to a better environment overall. I’m outing myself, but back in my roleplay forum days the ones with a bit of an application process had better quality engagement. Ymmv, of course.

Honestly, I was more frustrated with the spinner of doom that kept me from actually submitting my registration for a few days. That meant re-writing my response to that application question until I decided to just save it in notepad until I was able to get a registration form actually submitted.

The “interview” process itself makes total sense, and I’m happy to have even something so simple that helps keep some of the low-effort riff-raff out.

I wasnt expecting it. But it made me think about my motivation for joining above and beyond “an alternative to Reddit”. It took a couple of minutes thought while standing in the post office queue! Instead of mindlessly auto completeing another registration page, I actually spent a fraction of my day thinking about why i was doing it. I found it quite fulfilling.

I think it’s a good idea. I have no problem doing this for these instances. It’s to protect the community. If it were Facebook, then I’d not do it because I know they are selling my information.

I just went through the registration process and I really liked it. It didn’t go smoothly because of technical problems (the spinning wheel of doom), but this can be fixed.

The fact that users have to read, think and write about the beehaw philosophy makes it far easier to avoid trolls.

I didn’t think it was too bad. Like others I wrote 3 sentences or so basically just answering the questions honestly. I was approved fairly quickly.

I was just accepted yesterday. I have social anxiety, so a younger, less self-aware version of myself would never have even submitted it. But thank goodness I’ve gotten better at this type of thing. Instead of over-analyzing and writing a huge essay, I timeboxed my response. Thankfully, it seems to have worked.

From what I can tell, I really do align with what the admins are after, here. I hope that it continues to work well.

Vetting users with a questionnaire is a good idea, allows admins to see who they should let in. What and how a person answers the questions tells a lot about the applicant.

They asked what I thought I could add to the community and I wrote something about sports and apparently they aren’t interested in that so they denied me.

I probably wrote “too much” as I was thrilled to find a place which is working towards kindness and community :)

My general rule of thumb is that things tend to go better if every owner, admin or mod team utilises the approaches which work best for them. If an instance is functioning well, I’m going to start from a place of trust that what they’ve made a good choice for themselves and the existing community. It’s up to me to decide if it’s also a reasonable choice for myself or if somewhere else would be a better match.

Beehaw’s registration process is quite easy, asking you only to write a few words on why you want to join (which could just be “it seems like a nice instance”), in comparison to other registration processes I’ve seen and done.

I’ve been through registration process where to guarantee that you’ve read the rules and anything required would hide words in the post containing that essential content and then asked you questions of which the answers where those words. Sometimes with the addition on asking you why you wanted to join.

This (Beehaw’s registration process) is nothing in comparison

I don’t get what all the fuss is about. I told them I don’t like Nazis and was approved within minutes. It was not a complicated process.

I wrote like 6 sentences. Got accepted in like 16 hours. Just said I disliked the authoritarian left on the main instance and prefered the sense of community Beehaw provides.

Honestly, if you aren’t prepared to fill out a simple text box to join the instance, I’d prefer you went somewhere else.

There were rules to read? Can I leave my shirt off?