Beehaw lacks community

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.

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 🥴

Maybe posting on a social media board is not fulfilling.

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.

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 removeded 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.

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.

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.

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.

I think it's true that a lot of the posts that we have are news-related and discussions are less prevalent than I'd like. I think we do have some communities that show higher levels of discussions like: FOSS, Chat, AskBeehaw and some others. I think using the active sorting and subscribing more selectively can certainly help with finding discussions.

I do agree that this is prone to more negative news - largely because people care when bad things happen, which is not necessarily true for good things. I'm not really how to help with that without 'forcing positivity'.

I think the biggest problem is being deferated from big instance like lemmy.world, I first created my account on beehaw after checking what existed at the time, when they were federated with about everyone (except tankies) it was nice and all, but since the infamous Reddit API fiasco, the members grow on beehaw was a few thousands only... while a brand new instance like LW have 100k+ now. I understand BH defederated from them for understandable reasons, but at one time BH will have to check their decision again.

I opened an account on LW, no choice to see, read, participate, post, in their hundreds of interesting communities that we cannot see from BH.

I wanted and still want to have BH as my home but if it's empty, I'll check neighbours more and more.

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.

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.

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.