I am one of the admins of Beehaw and I’m trying to get some feedback on our potential move.
Let’s start out with a little Beehaw history before judgements are passed, please.
A handful of us were beta testing Tildes when we decided to have discussions on a Discord server.
We decided that our ‘Northern Star’ or guiding principle would culminate as ‘Be Nice’ with purposefully vague/flexible interpretations. Our overall goal is to provide a safe space to disenfranchised persons.
We talked for a little over a year and some of our members became impatient. Then someone stepped in to suggest a couple of platforms that we could consider getting started with.
One of those platforms was Lemmy. None of us knew, at that time, anything about ActivityPub.
During the Reddit exodus (surrounding the API outcry and blackout), our instance exploded. We were, initially, crippled by the mass amounts of users seeking refuge.
Thankfully, someone stepped in and volunteered hundreds of hours of work to stabilize our instance and refine it further.
After many hours of talks, it became clear to us that our overall goal could be achieved outside of Lemmy/ActivityPub.
Right now, we feel that Lemmy and ActivityPub have downsides that are limiting us from achieving that goal.
I would consider the users of Lemmy disenfranchised, whether they were the OGs or the refugees who did not want to be part of a corporate structure that is Reddit.
As for your goal of being nice, you can be a private instance with a very detail form with long list of questions that applies to your values. This will cut down new users joining and only those that are willing to go through the process of joining will show the commitment.
Having said that, having a closed door policy on the fediverse defeats the purpose of being on fediverse. If you truly only want, how you define disenfranchised, then fediverse may not be the right platform and you will always be left wondering.