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.
One idea is to use an RSS reader and ONLY subscribe to the particular communities that you want to see and engage with. This would be a temporary fix for how lousy Lemmy’s feed is right now until it’s fixed later.
That helps with filtering, but not with the actual content being posted on Beehaw. In most communities on Beehaw, most of what is being posted is news. What isn’t news is much more infrequent and/or old. Some communities, like Socialism, are downright flooded with news to the point of drowning out community discussion (if there were any).
I agree with this sentiment, but don’t know how to fix it. I don’t want yet another news source. But I do want to discuss interesting topics with friendly people. Sometimes, the only things people find interesting that they feel others want to hear about, is news about what they are interested in.
Honestly, I suspect the availability of interfaces that prioritize text/comments over posts might actually naturally tip all Lemmy communities in that direction.
I saw in another thread on another instance an observation that comment activity seems to be way up after the Sync client was released yesterday. Personally, I find it way easier to read and respond to comments in Sync than in the normal browser interface.
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I don’t think that Beehaw has tried to be something else. There are other instances that will provide community.