Community for asking and answering any question related to the life, the people or anything related to the USA. Non-US people are welcome to provide their perspective! Please keep in mind:
Not too often. I picked beehaw for the name, but I think they must be defederated from some of the bigger instances, because Lemmy seems pretty dead to me.
I comment on a lot of the weekly conversation threads because that seems like an acceptable place to talk about dull shit like my retail job, but otherwise I don't see too much that interests met.
Yeah beehaw likes to moderate things HEAVILY and they just couldn't keep up with the sheer volume of activity from Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works. Here is the original notice if you want to read more about it, and a more recent discussion about it (GayWallet answers the question though is barely upvoted so scroll down to find it). Also here's a funny reaction to the news from the sh.itjust.works admins:
Like many of you, I woke up this morning to discover that our instance, along with lemmy.world, had been unexpectedly added to the beehaw block list. Although this development initially caught me off guard...
Okay, so maybe it's not that funny, but it does seem odd to me that apparently no notice whatsoever was given. :-P
I thought about joining Beehaw as well, but yeah your activity levels are abysmally low. FYI, ~80% of the entire userbase of Lemmy are based on Lemmy.World - or at least this used to be true - and sh.itjust.works is the #4 instance with another 6%, after lemmynsfw.com and lemm.ee. So if you have NSFW turned off... you'll barely see like a tenth of what is going on across all of Lemmy.
So as an example, this very !AskUSA@discuss.online community (created all of 18 days ago!?!?) already has 1.87k active users per month, while the top community on beehaw, !technology@beehaw.org has only 554. And this very post itself has 4 more comments currently from Lemmy.World that you aren't seeing, i.e. this post has 11 total comments (before my reply adds one more:-D) but you are only seeing 7 of them. There really is a lot more going on than you see from there!
Then again, Lemmy has a toxicity problem, and while a detraction of being on Beehaw is that a lot of activity is being filtered before it gets to you:-(, the benefit is that a lot of activity is being filtered before it gets to you:-). There are other ways to curate your experience, but none are terribly good and they all involve a LOT more effort than simply picking Beehaw. So it is the age-old spam problem: how to let the good ones in while keeping the bad ones out, it's hard. :-| I have some hopes for PieFed, and maybe Sublinks when that project gets revived, to help solve the problem, but both are surely quite far still from a viable solution, while meanwhile Beehaw is chugging along doing its thing regardless:-). There's also dubvee.org (recent mission statement) that is similar to Beehaw but has a wider allowance of content. Though its webpage interface is VERY different from Lemmy, and more importantly it's a "regional" instance for West Virginia, USA. Fwiw, this post currently has 9 comments that I see, so in-between the 11 total vs. the 7 that you see.
It might be interesting to play around with looking at what posts show up from the various instance views, to see what you enjoy and/or can stand. e.g. from Discuss.Online you can see "Is America a well oiled machine or is it a series of mouse traps and no one really understands why it's still around?" but that is blocked from both Beehaw and dubvee. Ones blocked from Beehaw but not dubvee.org include "It's Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year! What is everyone up to?", "What is winter like where you live?", and "What is a local holiday tradition/event in your city or town?", but also the more edgy "Are Detroit thugs going to stab my wife?" I find it fascinating how this one community can serve people's diverse needs - to see more content, or less, depending on your preference.
TLDR: if you wanted to see more of Lemmy, you could, but there is no "good" way to do that with little effort from you (sadly), every single path forward that is currently available would require HOURS and HOURS of effort on your part. Though if you like the dubvee.org interface (that UI is called "Tesseract", and the admin seems like a super cool dude:-), that might be something to check out.