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.
I would really love it if you (or anyone!) would post something to !chat@beehaw.org or !askbeehaw@beehaw.org if you can think of anything to say. The newest posts there are about a day old and just now I was perusing them and trying to think of something to post. Let’s make a deal: I’ll try to think of something or, if something interesting happens, I will post in one of those two places and you can try as hard as me! I think those two communities, plus some others I’ve joined that might be too specific for me to mention (I don’t know you well) are key places that, with just a tiny smidge more activity, would probably satisfy a lot of people’s needs for “more community.” I think there are lots of people like me out there who want to say something to make these communities more active but can’t think of anything to say. We need a special hat to wear that will help us figure out what to post! The !gaming@beehaw.org community here is really unique from the ones on other instances because it isn’t all news. I’m grateful for that today!