When I launched Babka, just about 4 years ago, in November of 2022, I had intended it as a place where Jews from Twitter would stand up and say "No way I'll stay on this stinking platform. I'm going to the Fediverse! And where on the Fediverse? To the place where JTwitter can be its fullest expression."
But overall that's not what happened. Some of those JTwitter folks came here and saw it was "Just like Twitter, only smaller", despite all the work the moderation team here does. And so they went back.
Who came onto Babka was largely Mastodon refugees. People who came because they were told that their Jewishness was "a problem" or "making people uncomfortable" or that their standing up to Jew hatred was "unacceptable" or even tantamount to mass murder.
It wasn't my intent for this to be how it turned out. It's just how it turned out.
I should talk about the other half of this...
After about a year and a half of Babka, I was having some discussions with @raf about Mastodon and its structural failures- these included his ideas around context collapse, audience vs community, and my experiences with moderation, etc.
Around that time, I asked the Babka community (which was about twice as large as it is today) to fill out a survey about what they valued in Babka.
Those conversations and that survey turned into the next two and a half years of work by me to make a new online Jewish space that would address the problems I see with the Fediverse.
Just under a month ago that effort went into beta, and it's called Rugela.com. It's still under heavy development, but I already enjoy it more than I enjoy it here.
If you're Jewish, you can ask me for an invite and I'll bring you in. I think you'll like it.