to start: we’re going to start staggering when we approve people a little more–at this point, we’ve literally doubled our existing userbase. registrations today will be processed at a slower pace while we talk over how much further we want to let things go, and at what pace we want to continue letting people in so things don’t become truly overwhelming.

if you’d like to introduce yourself without it getting lost in all the posts already made, i just made a thread for that over here

our sidebar should give you most of the information you’re looking for about us, but to reiterate some: we are pretty relaxed here, but we have a well carved out understanding of what we want to be. if you would like more elaboration on that, you can find elaboration on that at length in the following two posts:

What is Beehaw?
Beehaw is a Community

for some less lengthy and more relaxed elaboration, see the discussion in the comments of this post.

as for funding: we are 100% user-funded. if you would like to contribute to our ability to keep the website up, you can donate on OpenCollective, which supports both one-time donations or monthly donations.

a few questions occasionally pop up like “why do we have the set of communities we do?” and “why can’t people make their own?” (the latter is a feature of lemmy). for elaboration on that, you can see the following post and the discussions here. we are open to suggestions and creating communities as demand sees fit; see also discussion here.

downvotes are disabled on this instance and that’s a thing we’re not liable to change. if you’d like elaboration for why that is, see this comment. this may be a point of friction for some coming from reddit, but i hope you’ll understand why we’re doing it even if you don’t necessarily agree with it.

if you’re interested in our governance to this point and a brief idea of our long term goals, see the comment here.

feel free to sound off on other questions you have; i’ll try to update the OP with those and our ability to answer them as time goes on.