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.

    • TehPers@beehaw.orgEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      This is what I do. On the other site, I only really followed two subs, and on this one, I follow closer to 10 communities all oriented around the content of those two subs. Only one of those communities is hosted by Beehaw.

      Sometimes I switch to “Local” though to see if anything of interest is going on, but most of the content I view is in “Subscribed”. Sure there’s less content, but I don’t really view it as an issue if it takes me 30m-1hr to get through it all throughout the day. It’s not like I’m spending my whole day on Lemmy, this just incentivizes it less :)

    • jarfil@beehaw.orgEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      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.