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.
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.
I want to abolish work, not reform it. Reforms always end up getting rolled back by the plutocrats.
What do you see at the difference between work and labor? To me they mean the same exact thing.
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.
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.
I strongly agree.
Definitely agreed. “antiwork” carries too much baggage.
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.
100% agree!
I agree with this too. There is nothing inherently wrong/bad about work. But the way employment is structured could do with some serious reforms.
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Can I make a wee suggestion?
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,
EUSurvey
Nextcloud Forms
LiberaForms
OhMyForm
Form ToolsThis is just a personal opinion expressed with a view to improve Beehaw experience. No offense intended.
I was also a little turned around when I saw a Google form show up.
I think the long-term answer here is for a native poll feature right in the platform. There’s a feature request for this on the Lemmy github project.
Until then, though, everything’s just a temporary placeholder solution.
Note that for our survey, a poll would not be nearly complex enough.
Very fair point, unless the Poll feature is not only implemented, but suffers from an insane amount of feature creep as well.
Yeah, like, I don’t want checkbox polling, free-forms and other stuff crammed in there - I would go insane 😰
On the other hand I think it would be an awesome option but think they should be hidden behind an advanced editor.
Mastodon has this feature baked right in. It’ll be great if this feature makes it way into Lemmy as well. 🤞
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)
Again, I can’t argue against this point. Money is a necessary evil to consider for sure 💰
Ease of access is for sure an important thing.
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.
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.
Cryptpad would be a good option
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.
Added!
Thank you! Submitted now
I don’t want anything to do with google, and I do not knowingly post personal data on their servers.
Same, especially with questions about gender and sexuality. I’d have preferred a selfhosted LimeSurvey, Baserow.io or similar.
Thank you for pointing this out.
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
This is a great idea!
I would also love to see this!!
I would absolutely love to have a houseplant community to join here
Yes please!
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.
Added! They are sovereign states - they are countries.
That’s real quick! Thanks for including my country :)
Pfft, 30mins is not that quick, no problem!
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 🤔.Maybe “Cool things I learned” and “Open Forum”
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!
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 it wouldn’t go to Tabletop. 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.
Edit: forgot to be specific
Yes! It’s the one I’m most excited for.
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.
I would love to be able to fill this out, but unfortunately it is a Google Form
yeah, I try to avoid giving Google more data whenever I can
You can respond “prefer not to say” to all the personal questions.
Done my civic duty 🗳.
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/photographydoesn’t come around, but if I had to pick One and Only One, that would be mine.Yeah I’m also multiracial but white passing, so I couldn’t really answer that question at all.
Do you think there’s something we can do to make that question better?
Chiming in since I’m also mixed but more or less white passing - I think Enfield hit on a great solution with including an option for mixed or multiracial.
Putting that in the form for next time!
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.
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.
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.
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)
Option to not disclose/answer for all above
Yes, sounds great this way :)
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?
Ah jeez apologies yeah the first question is supposed to have intersex as an option along with other, was typing up quickly and forgot to add. It’s a weird space because in medicine we usually ask about assigned sex at birth as well, so it can vary how it’s presented. Sometimes they’ll explicitly call out 2s, hijra, etc if it’s a big enough population or for like a LGBTQ clinic. I don’t think we need to go into that much detail
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.
next time we’ll probably do this yeah
I know you have a ton of work at the moment and I appreciate your effort a lot!
I just had a really bad day and felt bad to again not appear in a survey like 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.
