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.

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

I personally don’t find it a problem but I think it may lose a lot of users who are simply too impatient to fill out the questionnaire and then wait to see if they were approved.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

I like the registration process, it acts as a filter against unwanted users.

I’ve only had one text field / question, but they took over a week to come back to me for approval. Obviously made a kbin account in the meantime already and am happy with that. Maybe I’ll use the account if I give Jerboa another try. The last time I tried the app it crashed 5 times just reading the Reddit refugee welcome message. Definitely not the best first impressions given.

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.

It wasn’t bad, but in my opinion they need to figure out how to make the process a tad faster. Took them two days for mine. Granted, I know it’s a small operation so I get it, but based on their documentation I figured something went wrong and so I attempted to submit a second registration (which hopefully didn’t go through since I also had an issue where the submit button for both login and registration would spin endlessly).

Growing pains is all it probably is.

The process to ask simple questions like these is not a barrier for users looking for honest conversation.

That is one of the facts I did choose Beehaw, because it shows the will for maintain a non-toxic community.

I’m really glad they ask a screening question. It takes like max 30 seconds of your time to form coherent thoughts and add them to the form. I want to have discussions with folks who are capable of doing that.

Leaving Reddit made me realize that being a part of a truly affirming & thoughtful space is still possible. I’m so used to taking all the racism and classism and transphobia for granted - like “oh I’m on the internet, of course people are complete garbage.” What if we all had a stake in making spaces that actually serve us? What if we were ALL a little more invested in contributing? Seeing all the folks coming from Reddit complaining about how the Fediverse is just infuriating & and impossible to understand kinda shook me, too. I was like that for the first like 3 hours of trying to figure out what the Fediverse is - “why isn’t there just one fucking website and I can search all the fucking communities and see them all in one gd place holy shit I hate this, way to make it unnecessarily complicated” - and then I went and read about it and figured it out (somewhat). I put in a little effort. Realized, holy shit, I’m so fucking apathetic after years of companies spoon-feeding me shit in exchange for my personal data. Like “just make it easy whiiine yes accept all cookies yes you can read all my messages and contacts whatever just open the damn app” and it’s like. Fuck it doesn’t need to BE like this. We don’t NEED to just put up with this shit.

Life is always kicking my ass and sometimes writing 3 coherent sentences after a week of working and not enough sleep is just too much. Like I’m constantly burnt out and sometimes, it really is too much. But if we all did even .5% more, if we thought about what we were doing and put even that .5% more effort, if we committed to thinking and contributing just .5% more, maybe we could really make shit happen. I think it’s worth a try.

So yeah, I wrote a few lines on my application. Come on y’all, we can do this.

A lot of comments from people with social anxiety; as someone with social anxiety and aspergers, figured I may as well throw my thoughts into the ring.

I’ve been through the “approval process” dance a few times now, both for Mastodon and Lemmy and honestly, I don’t really find it that bad. The secret is internalizing that mods have so many applications to get through, so they won’t really scrutinize your language or overanalyze it to too much. I know easier said than done, but really, the fact that you’re putting any amount of thought into it is probably more than most people.

Honestly, I think approvals is a good system and should be the norm for social media sites; it slows down trolls/bots ability to make accounts, and IMO is better than all the alternatives. Email is problematic, capchas aren’t really accessible, and screw Instagram requiring you to take a photo of yourself when you sign up. One site I signed up for actually wanted you to ask another user to “vouch” for you as not a troll which means talking to scary strangers.

I think there is a “cultural” miscommunication though. A lot of us are deeply ingrained in “fediverse culture” where this sort of thing is the norm, and so we intuitively understand that it should only be a sentence or two.

However, if you look at where non-fediverse people have seen this type of requirement before? Job applications, university applications, that sort of thing. I think this is why people think that they need to write long, intricately detailed posts saying why they deserve to join what feels like an exclusive club.

I think Beehaw could make it clearer that they are only looking for about three sentences demonstrating that you’ve read the documents (actually, do you need to fully read the documents? It’s a bit unclear), and that you aren’t being “graded”. Out of interest though, would “I just want to lurk and read posts” be acceptable as an answer to the third question?