this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
39 points (100.0% liked)

Beehaw Support

2797 readers
1 users here now

Support and meta community for Beehaw. Ask your questions about the community, technical issues, and other such things here.

A brief FAQ for lurkers and new users can be found here.

Our September 2024 financial update is here.

For a refresher on our philosophy, see also What is Beehaw?, The spirit of the rules, and Beehaw is a Community

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

if you can see this, it's up  

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Zmodem@beehaw.org
Gaywallet@beehaw.org
alyaza@beehaw.org
Lionir@beehaw.org
Penguincoder@beehaw.org
remington@beehaw.org
39
Beehaw lacks community (beehaw.org)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Thalestr@beehaw.org to c/support@beehaw.org
99 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Apologies for the clickbaity title or for the messy wording to follow. I’m not great at articulating myself.

I’ve been finding myself posting less and less on Beehaw lately and that my enthusiasm for it is fading, and I have been trying to figure out why I personally have felt this way. Beehaw is, in theory, a great community with a solid foundation built on a good code of conduct and mission statement. This is the place that many of us wanted to find, especially those of us who long for the days of webforums and wanted that sense of community that Reddit never really provided.

I think I have figured out why now. Simply put: The vast majority of content posted to Beehaw is news. Much of that news ranges from mostly negative to downright doomscrolling doomerism. There is very little community engagement or discussion going on, just page after page of news. I don’t follow most news-heavy communities, so if I change my sorting then it will filter out some of it but then the posts I see are days to even weeks old. If I sort by Local - New then it is just page after page of news, most of it with very few or zero comments. And this is with several news-centric communities (like US news) already blocked.

Maybe this is just me or maybe some of you feel the same way, I’m not sure. Or maybe it’s just that this Reddit-styled UI doesn’t lend itself well to other types of engagement; I don’t know. But I was hoping to find more here than just another news aggregator. I was hoping Beehaw would be a more positive, uplifting, inclusive place.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] nfld0001@beehaw.org 23 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Edit (2023-08-07 T 08:50 Z): It occurred to me that I forgot to directly mention traits that might bias what I offer. On top of a general confidence and enthusiasm for Beehaw, I'm also a moderator for !creative and !askbeehaw. I strive to keep things balanced and outside of my biases, but it feels right for me to explicitly bring that up for transparency.

I can respect it's a tough issue to put briefly, but I think I get what you're putting down. "Our content isn't diverse enough", I suppose? "We have too much news and not enough anything else"? I 'unno, but I get the impression that you'd like to see more content that isn't news. I'm not too sure what to make of conflating that with "a more positive, uplifting, inclusive place", but I'd think it's got something to do with "negative to downright doomscrolling doomerism." Do let me know if I missed the mark here or there and I'd be down to talk that out, but I'm confident enough in that perspective to run with it at least for an initial comment.

And, welp, yeah. I think there's some truth there. What's up with that? I wouldn't be surprised if there's people with a better read of the room, and there's definitely people that are more properly active than I am, but I'd like to say I'm passionate about Beehaw's fundamentals and continued success. Hopefully that's good enough to say I have some theories as to what's up and what we can do about it.

  1. I'd wager there was a sort of honeymoon phase with Beehaw and the Lemmy fediverse with the initial API scramble and Reddit following through on that. I'd also wager that honeymoon phase has been over for a few weeks now. So now we might be doing things like spending less time on Beehaw than we first were, or taking off the rose-tint shades that often come with a honeymoon phase and realizing that Beehaw's means and ways has imperfections and drawbacks just like any other platform inevitably does.
    Put another way, finding a positive sounding community is easy. Engaging and creating that positive sounding community is harder.

  2. I'd think that the Reddit migration is also going to bring elements of old habits from Reddit, both in Beehaw and in people accessing it through federation. I think that Reddit's content leaned pretty heavily on news, so it wouldn't surprise me if a fair chunk of Reddit migrants continue to lean into posting news content.
    I'd imagine that our federated activity amplifies that aspect. !technology is a pretty good example of this. Our site sidebar stats say we clock in around 12.7k registered users. !technology has 34.2k subscribers, and that's not even considering federated users that might be lurking or posting without subscribing. There's like a whole 'nother Beehaw and a half in there. Admittedly it wouldn't surprise me if these federated users are less in touch with Beehaw's values or intentions. That's not a knock on those that go through the due diligence to inform themselves on how we like to do things, but Lemmy makes the barrier of entry for federated users a pretty low bar without granular ways to raise it.

This is all to say that we, as in Beehaw users, might not be as active as it seems, and that something is gonna take space.
-

Regrettably I'm not so sure if there's an easy answer to this. This runs the risk of coming off a bit like a smartass answer, especially because I wouldn't call myself a bastion of activity, but I really do think it's the best means to help resolve this issue: use the thing the way you'd like to see it used.

Create things and share your progress and end product. Share the cool stuff you excel at, but share the small and goofy stuff and the experiments in other things too. Share the successes, share the failures. Take pictures of neat things you see in person, get the links to cool stuff you see online, and bring us in the loop about it. Give people some discussion and context in your OP's body—some hooks to help egg on conversation, if you will—and find ways to get in the conversation down in the comments.

I was hoping to get more active after my vacation at the top of the month, but I've been swamped with family errands and it's been a bit of a bummer. But I got some neat photos burning a hole in my pocket, creative projects I'm itching to get back to, a few neat links to share, and ideas of topics to talk shop with in a community or two. It's been a kind of epiphany rocking around my mind, thinking about how to generate community engagement. We could talk days on end about stuff like our philosophy, gray areas with content, community activities, or indulging in Tea. I'm starting to think that the most powerful solution to engagement and content issues is both the easiest and hardest: just get busy posting. Gotta plant flowers in the garden to bring in the bees, y'know? 🐝

i think my first personal action towards that is to stop giving a damn about trying to aim for "Prime Time" and just start posting, even when its O-Dark-Thirty by US hours 🥴

[–] admin@beehaw.org 7 points 2 years ago

These are very good thoughts. Thanks for taking the time to write all of this.

[–] fred@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

While this account is an alt, I still interact with beehaw daily, including posting etc.

That said I, too, have tempered my activity. To put it bluntly, largely because of the news and politics posts. I have seen where even mods are calling anything right of european left "far right" and extremists.

I am not particularly left leaning, but it entirely depends on the topic. On many social topics I lean left, on other things, im quite moderate. On fiscal stuff Im either moderate or right. But calling sources like thehill.com far right extremist trash (See the post about young men leaning right), or anything remotely libertarian (which in its own is a spectrum of people) far right doesnt jive with me. I find it antithetical to the principles here. Its done in a perjorative way and one thats clearly not meant to encourage conversation or discussion.

So in a way, Beehaw is not as inclusive as they really want to profess or open to discussion or others opinions (if they are the wrong ones). And rather than getting cajoled or even have mods ban me I have simply pulled back.

Finally I have also seen some communities (and here again Ill point out news@beehaw or politics@beehaw) suddenly having moderation tactics that are HYPER focused (ie: US politics only, but not something that is used as a political football, or US News only) And frankly theres not the scale or participation ot have UK NEws, Canada News, US News Europe News etc.

Couple that with point 1 and again, I have just kind of pulled back a bit

Heres the rub though. If thats what Beehaw wants, Im all for it. Its their call. I am one that doesnt mind having my views challenged if its done in good faith and in a respectful way. That is waht I came to beehaw hoping to get. But it does seem that the mob mentality is taking root and the "us vs them" stuff hasnt been shaken.

[–] lightninhopkins@beehaw.org 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Maybe posting on a social media board is not fulfilling.

[–] the_itsb@beehaw.org 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

This is kinda my take, too; after reading OP's post, I was left wondering how much time they spend on here and what they're doing outside it.

I know everyone's ability and opportunity to be engaged with the world is different, so I hope this doesn't come off as a "touch grass" kinda thing, that's not how I mean it at all. For people with difficulties communicating or mobility issues, sometimes being online is the best way to engage with the world, and I totally get that. However, I think it's unwise to put all of our social eggs in one basket; we need multiple platforms for communicating and outlets for expression and connection. What ways are you connecting with people outside Lemmy?

When I'm feeling sad and disconnected, I like to work against it by sowing the kindness and understanding I would like to be reaping. This is pretty common advice - it's not unusual for someone going through a rough patch to be told to try volunteering for something they care about - and for me, it is almost always Super Effective.

So, maybe posting on a social media board could be fulfilling, if gone into with the attitude of finding a way to contribute instead of trying to find what is needed.

Idk, maybe that doesn't make sense, I'm not fully caffeinated yet and out of medication and I know I'm not totally with it. But hopefully I'm getting the gist across: posting/commenting would ideally not be your primary (or only) way of connecting with others, posting is usually not satisfying, but empathetic/meaningful commenting can be, and if there's not already a meaningful reply to something, try making one and see how it feels. It might feel better than you expected to be that first meaningful comment even if nobody ever replies; sometimes heartfelt expression can be its own reward.

[–] Thalestr@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago

This is kinda my take, too; after reading OP’s post, I was left wondering how much time they spend on here and what they’re doing outside it.

I don't spend much time here at all. I open Beehaw a couple times a day, see nothing that I want to interact with, and close the tab. That was the basis of me creating this post to begin with - that Beehaw is quickly becoming a news feed with no actual meat to interact with.

[–] luke@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago

:0

[–] potterman28wxcv@beehaw.org 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I feel like some people just spend their day posting links to articles. They do engage in conversation as well apparently, but they also post 3-4 news per day sometimes. I do not understand why, as it just contributes to make the place more hollow.

[–] altima_neo@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 years ago

And it's the same articles over and over on different instances. I don't care what Elon Musk is doing, or how threafs is failing

[–] Thalestr@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago

It sure seems that way.

[–] comicallycluttered@beehaw.org 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

I get you. Feel similarly.

I feel like !chat@beehaw.org is kind of glossed over by a lot of users, which results in the main feed just being links after links.

Don't really know of a solution, but if we could find a way to encourage more people to submit to that community, there would be more space for regular discussions.

We should also normalize being active in days-old posts. There was a bit of a "no one's posted in three days, this post is dead" culture on reddit. It was only in hobby subs where discussions continued over a longer time.

The problem, obviously, is that the nature of Lemmy and reddit doesn't lend itself to promoting older content, so less people will see it, especially if they're not just browsing the local feed here.

Not an easy problem to solve (and many might not see it as a problem). It's essentially down to how the users of the instance use it. Nothing can really be done about that, other than perhaps encouraging something like posting a bunch of stuff in the chat community to give it some momentum.

[–] psudo@beehaw.org 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, reply to that week old post. Reddit trained a lot of people to think that if something is more than like an hour old, it's stale, but that's not how async communication works, especially on a comparatively small server.

Sure, you might run out of new topics, but that's not going to change with any of the proposals I've seen in this thread.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] itsgallus@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago

When I run out of content with the "new" sorting, I switch to "new comments". This is how we used phpBBs back in the day, remember? Posts could be years old, but still engaged with. I actually think the cascading layout lends itself better to old posts than the chronological layout of BBs, as you don't have to sift through hundreds of pages of replies and can easily collapse a thread you're not interested in.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] ted@beehaw.org 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

My hot take, I feel like federation is almost not worth it for beehaw. It's billed as a place where folks will be(e) kind with each other yet some rando can walk in from the street and start slinging garbage without care. I know mods could intervene but sometimes the line is not clear and there's nothing stopping that person from creating another account on limitless instances.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Absolutely how I feel after dealing with a bunch of people arguing against me all from a few instances that I've never even heard of. Beehaw should probably default to not federating with a server until they show their community is inline with our community guidelines.

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Have you been arguing with them... in Beehaw communities, or in communities outside of Beehaw?

I haven't seen many problematic actors in Beehaw communities, even those coming from external instances. Instance rules should probably be more prominent in app interfaces when interacting with a remote instance, but otherwise I find Beehaw to work as promised.

[–] MJBrune@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The last 2 posts I made were to Beehaw communities. I don't post anything outside of Beehaw and I got tons of lemm.ee users complaining about my take on AI and copyright. A few comments simply started with "You are wrong" like they weren't able to even consider the fact that AI copyright is not anywhere near a set-in-stone thing and they had all the facts despite not being judges.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago

Better moderation tools which could allow others to read but not comment and/or post until whitelisted in some fashion would completely resolve this. Unfortunately this platform is still very new and these kinds of tools really only exist on Mastodon when it comes to federated software. Hopefully one day we will have it.

[–] Rentlar@beehaw.org 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

My advice: reply to 7-21 day old posts! Go to !chat@beehaw.org, !askbeehaw@beehaw.org and speak your mind! !chat@lemmy.ca needs more posts too! OPs there still tend to respond to those posts.

Lemmy is first and foremost a link aggregator you know. So it's not surprising there are a lot of news links. I think each community is different in terms of the percentage breakdown between news, discussion and meta-discussion.

I don't have a clear idea of what you'd want out of Lemmy, but I'm open to hearing it for ideas to make an effort to make Beehaw a livelier place that I could try contributing to myself.

[–] nlm@beehaw.org 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I've had similar feelings towards Lemmy as a whole lately too. Maybe I need to play a bit with my sorting settings but it's starting to feel like the vast majority of posts on all my subscribed communities are linked posts without any extra info added.

Sure the titles themselves might be self explanatory but I'd expect the poster to actually also write something about the link they've posted. What did they think about it, what do they want to discuss about it.

Is just feels.. hollow? When you see link after link with not even an effort towards discussion from the poster.

It's starting to feel like I'm using an RSS reader.

Not sure what too do about it though. Require more text to be written for each link post? That might just end up with some copy pasting I suppose but it might be worth a shot?

[–] Thalestr@beehaw.org 6 points 2 years ago

It’s starting to feel like I’m using an RSS reader.

That is a good way of phrasing it and that is basically how I've been feeling lately about Beehaw. I know other Instances are going through the same thing, it's just that I am most active on Beehaw so I notice it here more.

[–] BarryZuckerkorn@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Sure the titles themselves might be self explanatory but I’d expect the poster to actually also write something about the link they’ve posted. What did they think about it, what do they want to discuss about it.

On the flip side, I do enjoy that there's a death of the author thing going on, where often the OP can't actually control how the community receives or interprets a post. Giving an amplified voice to the OP makes a ton of sense, but sometimes it's fun to just see a thread take off in directions the OP never anticipated, including/especially discussion threads kicked off with a question.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org 9 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I’m frustrated too.

I’m trying to comment on things, and have genuine and engaging conversations. But it feels like if you’re not 100% aligned with the community, there’s free reign to be harassed. We’re supposed to Be(e) Nice, and I was. I was arguing in good faith, I wasn’t trolling, or anything else nefarious. My view was twisted in bad faith, they claimed I would be first in line to defend heinous acts. I corrected them, saying in no uncertain terms that I would not. They could have just apologized when I set the record strait but they just kept coming back lying about my views and continued to slander me. I reported it, nothing was done.

So I’m not really sure what to do. The conduct was inexcusable. A quick and simple ‘sorry for the misunderstanding, glad you don’t support heinous acts’ would have sufficed. But no, because I’m not as far to the left as they were, I’m wrong, every view I have is suspect, and free to be slandered. A few users did come to my defense which was nice.

I don’t know if others are experiencing the same thing. But I know I’m very hesitant to comment on anything that could be controversial.

[–] Lycan@beehaw.org 9 points 2 years ago

Someone linked to the conversation you're describing, and all I can say is "wow". I'm disgusted by the way that admin insisted on attacking a position you didn't take, claiming you DID take that position, and using "well it's the logical next step" as an excuse. I'm in agreement with what another user said: it's difficult not to see Beehaw in a different light after observing an admin behaving like that.

[–] snowbell@beehaw.org 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

I read that conversation, it was really off putting for me how you were treated. I haven't been able to let go of it since. It definitely impacted how I view the site.

[–] Penguincoder@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Understand the sentiment and frustration, but do want to express that a user or two is not the whole site. Problematic to be sure and we as admin and mods will continue to try and keep the space nice. As of right now reporting this content with an expression why is very valuable for us. Ignoring it or just reporting with a blank reason is hard to deal with.

[–] Fauxreigner@beehaw.org 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Rather than deal in abstractions, here's the comment thread.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] snowbell@beehaw.org 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

In this case, the person I was replying to was arguing with a site admin. I would be hesitant to report it for that reason alone.

[–] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

To be absolutely clear, please report me and other admins if we step out of line.

FWIW the thread being discussed was reported, and I observed the conversation. I have mixed feelings on how things played out and I don't think I'm smart enough to figure out a way to navigate such treacherous waters. I'd talk more about how I feel, but I'm also worried about starting another fight in the comments here. Any issue which involves talking about a decision which will result in literal lives being lost regardless of the decision made is one that is going to be fraught with obstacles.

I don't think there's a way for this discussion to happen healthily on this website. It's like trying to debate the merits of euthanasia for seriously ill people who wish to kill themselves. This just isn't the right venue for a discussion on a nuanced topic that requires experts to weigh in. It's the same reasoning as to why we don't have a mental health community or any professional advice communities.

Also tagging @HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org to be sure they see this. And if you ever want to direct message me or other admins or ping us on matrix or discord, please feel free to reach out.

[–] polarimetric@beehaw.org 9 points 2 years ago (10 children)

For the “bee nice” ethos of Beehaw to mean anything, the expectations have to be the same for everyone, regardless of what position of power they might hold. That unfortunately does not seem to be happening in this case. I am pretty certain that if that conversation had been between two regular users, an admin or mod would have stepped in after the first or second exchanges and encouraged them both to disengage because the conversation wasn’t productive, as I’ve seen happen here numerous times. Instead, it dragged on for several comments, getting increasingly personal and vitriolic, and was ultimately not addressed until now in a different thread. It’s hard to see that as anything other than a double standard, and your comment here appealing to the difficulty of the subject, while true, glosses over the fact that the argument on one side immediately escalated to personal attacks which were totally unnecessary to the point being made. Saying “your logic unfortunately could be used to justify much worse things you shouldn’t want to support” is one thing; saying “you would be first in line to defend mass murder” Is quite different, and diametrically opposed to any interpretation of “bee nice” I can imagine. If Beehaw wants users to always assume good faith, having an admin rapidly escalate a disagreement with a user based on an extremely bad faith interpretation of their stated position and ultimately face no consequences is not really conducive to that. While this is a different subject than the OP initially raised, I think it’s important to consider the effect of these kinds of issues on building community here when you have multiple users in this thread expressing that seeing or participating in a discussion with particular individuals has encouraged them to avoid speaking their mind for fear of retribution.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] satyr@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Okay, I'll take you up on that and report here since it's relevant to the discussion. The other day I reported someone for calling a celebrity they disliked an "insane dangerous psychopath" because they didn't believe her accusation against Marilyn Manson. You told the user they probably shouldn't do that, but let it slide because you don't know enough about the situation. All you did was embolden that user who went on to say that the celebrity in question is clinically a psychopath, as if they're a doctor able to diagnose something like that, and they picked apart her parenting which is irrelevant to what may or may not have happened between her and Manson decades ago. The whole time providing no sources, because the sources for such claims are gossip rags that can't be trusted. I tried talking sense into the person myself, they called me gross and doubled down that it's valid for them to be throwing diagnoses at strangers.

They were not engaging in good faith. When someone resorts to aggressive name-calling and severe accusations they're unable to back up with evidence, that is bad faith argument and it needs to be more than tiptoed around as you did. I stopped engaging because the both of you made it clear that it would not be possible for me to have a conversation in good faith without having insults hurled at me.

Why do the rules only apply to some people, and not others? Why let the name-calling slide when the motto is "bee nice"? Is there a case when it's okay to call someone a "dangerous insane psychopath" and we're not talking about a convicted felon with APD? Is it because she's a celebrity that you're happy to facilitate a space where she's so aggressively slandered? I'm trying to understand here. Even if you needed the facts before making a decision, It's easy to search up that Manson has already been tried and convicted of the sexual assault he committed in public back in 2001, that it was at least the second time he committed such an assault in front of his crowd, and that he has a growing list of accusers that is in the double digits now. There's no possibility that he is innocent in all of it, since at least two cases of sexual assault against nonconsenting individuals were witnessed and one case already convicted.

I was so put off of this site after seeing your response to this person with an obvious vendetta against Manson's accuser for who knows what reason. If you keep the users who resort to name-calling and unfounded accusations unchecked, you're going to lose engagement from the people who behave themselves. If you're wondering what I'm looking for here in response, a simple "Sorry, I'll do better" will suffice. And then do better. Delete and ban offensive name-calling and obvious slander that damages the credibility of women who speak out against their abusers.

[–] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I wasn't aware that they continued to go off on you in the comments. The only reason I showed up in the thread was because of a report. Past telling them to calm down I wasn't present in the thread except when they showed up in my inbox. If someone escalates after being told to disengage please report the additional comments or send me a message in my inbox. I apologize for how things played out, I don't want that to be anyone's experience of this website, but this website is also far too large at this point for me to have eyes on everything.

Edit: and to be clear, I'm going to do my best to figure out a system to check back in on threads which are reported to ensure people are behaving, but it hasn't been a part of my usual workflow because there's just so much content on this site that I've been struggling to keep up with it.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] bermuda@beehaw.org 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I just read the thread. I find it really unnerving that that conversation happened. It seems to me that the person you were responding to was sealioning and arguing under very bad faith. I can see why you're frustrated, because I am too.

I feel like this is a trend for this particular admin to act this way, but I don't have anything to back that up unfortunately

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] stinkytaco@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position!

  • Monty Python

There is a type of group-think that can emerge when people look for a safe space. In fact, it almost has to happen because part of being safe is staking out topics that cannot be "both-sided", but the nature of a voting based platform seems to actively amplify the tendency to drown out good faith voices. Discussion is almost based on people having differing views, otherwise there's nothing to say. I don't know who's old enough to remember Metafilter, but it is that type of thing that drove me away from there many years ago.

I don't have an easy answer to it, however.

[–] forestG@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Attack the position, not the person is what we used to say in a forum I frequented many years ago. While it sounds simple, it's quite difficult to do in practice, whether you are the one attacking the position or the one receiving the attack on your positions. Still, there were really very few people who could do this correctly. You would notice new members of the forum, getting personally offended when a position they were expressing was attacked, without actually getting attacked as persons themselves. Very few faced such situations properly. Looks like (and it seems it's only getting worse as web netizens increase, and commercial interests facilitate shallow exchanges) people have a really hard time separating respect for the position they hold and respect for them as persons. Also, it's really impossible, there is practically no space for a disagreement to have a productive outcome (even if the difference in viewpoints remains) once personal attacks begin. For that reason I believe we can and we must always respect the person when in disagreement, regardless of how hard it might be.

In the thread @HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org mentioned, its obvious, at least the way I see it, that it was not the position that was being attacked.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Just me but I am actually pretty happy with Lemmy. Keep in mind that Lemmy is a couple orders if magnitude smaller then the other place plus lemmy does not aggregate communities really. So engagement will be less by quite a lot. Nor does Lemmy have all of the tricks that try to artificially drive engagement which is good as far as I am concerned. Plus it is summer and a lot if people are traveling and out and about.

So we will see the future... but for now with the communities I follow I am happy.

[–] StringTheory@beehaw.org 8 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I’m finding Beehaw is sliding into a reddit-esque feel. I tend not to hang out as much or participate as much now because it leaves me frustrated and rage-baited and anxious. I suppose that is part of the consequences of the influx of redditors creating the environment they like. (And now bots are being welcomed with open arms, too.)

It’s sad to see posts telling folks to go to another instance if they want “community”, when the most endearing thing about Beehaw was the sense of community.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] Silence@beehaw.org 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Yeah, I joined to talk about books and even though I'm going to agree with the politics of most of Beehaw's news posters, I can't mentally handle another doom-scroll. I ended up blocking a bunch of communities but it's made my local feed very empty - only one page over and I've got posts that are 3 days old. And there's still a ton of negative news.

It also makes me pretty uncomfortable blocking communities like LGBT+ because I do want to see LGBT+ content in my feed and excluding it like this feels pretty gross. And it makes me uncomfortable admitting this because the news content is important, and people being able to post about it is way more important than my avoiding a doom-scroll.

If I want to talk about my hobby I should go make the content I want, but it takes... skill, and I just don't have it. Also I'm new and don't think I have a good grasp of what kinds of posts the community'll like.

[–] Lionir@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

You could possibly use the "Subscribed" feed more to have a more selective approach?

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Lemmy is still missing the feature of custom grouping of subscriptions, like the "timelines" on Mastodon, or the "multirredits" on Reddit.

Right now, I've spread subscriptions across multiple instances, but it isn't really sustainable. I'm thinking of creating alternate accounts just to have more "Subscribed" feeds, but I'm split on whether to participate with a single account or going full multiple personality.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] jonsnothere@beehaw.org 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

For me, I did have some issues getting to a good user experience on android. Now that Sync is out, I expect to engage a lot more :)

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] mifuyne@beehaw.org 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Reddit was (still is?) considered as the "front page of the Internet" for over a decade. It's likely we all need time to unlearn the habits we picked up from Reddit. I know I still have that habit of refraining from commenting in certain threads because I don't want to potentially get bitched at.

I do wonder if a forum-based UI would help promote the kind of community you're looking for. Some people have suggested that text-only posts might help encourage more discussions and that is essentially what the forums are like. If you want to link to something for context, that just goes into the body text, rather than have the content show up first and foremost. That said, I don't think Beehaw is interested in switching to a forum-based UI. I could be wrong though.

[–] sunflower_scribe@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago

I would absolutely love a forum-based UI. I already see this site and Lemmy in general as more of a forum than I ever did Reddit. But to go all in on that would be nice.

[–] forestG@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago

I don't mind reading news from other places of the world (I am not a US local), some of them affect me anyways. I don't mind bad news either, news tend to be bad anyways, regardless of medium, I consider it part of the package and treat it accordingly.

What I really disliked on reddit, and many social media before or in parallel to it's rise, was the lack of depth. And I don't even mean the amount of thought going into a response or a post. I find nothing more disheartening, when I think of commenting or posting something in order to discuss it, than seeing similar subjects, being commented on (and such comments being massively upvoted) by people who didn't even bother to go past the title or the first few sentences of what is linked. I see this happening here also and quite often. And I don't think there is much to be done (not just on the server, on the web in general).

[–] Ignacio@beehaw.org 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I'm on three servers right now (the other two are sopuli and kbin), and although I'm not as active on sopuli as I would like, I'm kind of active on kbin. The amount of news is overwhelming, I can't complain about that. But it's true that most of those news, either they are from negativity to doomerism (which, for a person with two mental disorders, some kind of anxiety and at risk of having depression, is not good), or they're exclusive to the US (which, for a person living in Europe, I don't give a shit about what DeSantis said or did to a random citizen in Florida).

So, that limits my interaction to memes, Ukrainian war news, sometimes ADHD content, open source games, and nothing else worth of relevance. That would make almost 5% of the total content on Kbin and other servers I'm on.

I don't know what kind of solution would be the best to handle this. The only thing I can say is to block all communities/magazines that are not relevant to you. But as you said, that leaves you with almost empty content or with old content. I don't mind old content, unless it's older than several weeks, but emptiness is really depressing. Even being Beehaw a small server compared to Reddit, this server is federating with other servers, and still...

One solution I can see about posting news is to post news in your native language, and provide a translation in the body of the post. On Reddit, those translations were a comment pinned. That way, we'll have less US-centric content and more global content from other countries outside Reuters source, which is in English and limited in global content daily.

But about the other things, I don't really know.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments