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 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, 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.
Not just Reddit. Before I found Reddit, “necro-ing” or “necroposting” on a thread, aka posting on an old thread, was frowned upon on most forums I visited. That norm carried through onto Reddit.
Interacting with an old thread on Reddit had the same effect as on the forums that discouraged necroposting. On the forums, it would move a year-old topic right to the top again, as threads tended to be sorted by “which thread was interacted with most recently?” Reddit didn’t sort posts like that. I’m not sure if Lemmy and Kbin have an option to sort posts like that.
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I think you just described Tildes! It’s not horrible, and they don’t necessarily ban images/photos/links, but it’s largely text posts, or at least text comments.
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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.
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.
Not disagreeing with what you’re saying, but are bots being accepted with open arms now? I didn’t think any official announcement had been made on that yet. The discussions are still on-going as far as I am aware
Nope, no official announcements. People are very happy about the bots in the discussion threads and feel they are an important part of a lively community.
Ah I see what you mean. Well, no decision has been made yet, and the mods and admins are aware of the split opinion on bots. I hope the decision that is made will be a good one for all, and if it isn’t, we’ll always listen to feedback and can readjust in the future if needed <3
Ditto. I share your thoughts.
My thoughts as well.
BeehawLemmy tends to feel like Reddit.Lemmy in general, yes. I’m speaking specifically of Beehaw, too.
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 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.
I observed and participated in that exchange and I also found it to be fairly disheartening, especially since it came from an admin. All I can say is that you should try not to let it weigh you down.
For the most part, my exchanges on this site have been positive and supportive and I’d like to think that will be the norm in the future.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What consequences would you like to see here?
A “hey, this conversation is not productive/nice/whatever, please disengage” would have been nice after the conversation was reported. Maybe at most deletion of the offending comments. I don’t think further consequences at this point are really appropriate, I doubt a normal user would have gotten much more than that, but an apology would be nice.
I’d rather just forgive and forget than get a forced apology though. To me it felt more like unchecked emotions taking precedence over logic rather than a bad faith argument. At least, I hope that is the case. I’m all too familiar with the stupid shit people say when they are angry. There are things I’ve said years ago in the heat of a moment and still look back on with regret. I hope that admin could use it as a learning moment instead of quadrupling down.
I think a good start would be to have that public response from a mod or admin saying “this is not productive, please disengage” to shut down the thread regardless of who is involved. Of course, you all can’t be on 24/7 and that may not always happen immediately, but I would hope that the same standard which would lead someone to do that would apply regardless of the people involved in the disagreement. In another instance I recall of a disagreement between a different mod and a user, the user was told publicly to disengage but the mod was told privately; this resulted in the user thinking they were being singled out, and only once they protested was it said that the mod involved was also told to disengage in a different medium. These kinds of things undermine confidence among users that the same conduct standards are being applied to everyone. If something merits a public call out, then that is what should happen, regardless of the recipient.
If that happens and the issue continues to occur repeatedly, then the consequences of that are above my pay grade—you all would at that point have to contend with what it means to have an individual in a position of power who repeatedly behaves in a way which contradicts the expectations of conduct you have of your regular users.
I appreciate the comments.
From my perspective, everyone was having a good chat/debate about the moral issues of cluster munitions, except one person who unable to remain respectful. I called them out but instead of being introspective about it, they doubled down. Other users called them out and they tripled down.
I think everyone in the thread was operating from the standpoint of ‘do the least harm’, and I think reasonable people can do that and remain respectful. It would be very different if some was taking the ‘kill them all, war crimes are neato’ standpoint, but that’s not the case.
I think it should be entirely possible to have a respectful conversation on difficult and controversial topics as long as people operate in good faith. To the euthanasia parallel, I think the analog to what happened would be one person believing that euthanasia should be allowed no questions asked, and another person thinking there should be the simplest of non-binding reviews done first. And even though they are nearly identical in opinion, and miles away from the other side of the spectrum, the first blows up at the second because of the slight curtailment on individual freedom.
Honestly I kinda think a weekly thread about tough moral questions could be really informative and open peoples eyes to new perspectives.
I am simply not interested in allowing space for that on this website for a dozen different reasons, but primarily because many issues people like to debate involve necessarily debating the existence of others or their humanity.
Sounds good.
I appreciate your humility in approaching the challenge. I witnessed the conversation in real time too, and it’s certainly true that morality in conflict is a super complicated topic (especially in these specific circumstances), but there is a way to manage that kind of disagreement with civility.
If I had been in that situation and implied something and/or offended someone in a way I hadn’t intended, it would be a simple concession (for my own sake I’d argue a compulsion) to apologize for at least that misunderstanding. I was disappointed and a little uncomfortable with how that conversation played out too.
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.
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.
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
It wasn’t me responding to them, that was between them and @HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org
oh oops. still, point stands.
I can totally appreciate where you’re coming from with that concern, and I would probably feel similarly if not the same. What I can tell you is that I have felt heard during mod discussions around flagged posts/comments when I disagree with how something is being interpreted, and I do try to weigh in on those even outside of communities I’m a mod for. What I hope is that if you or another user were to report a comment with a reason such as “this is getting heated with an admin and more eyes might be good before it gets not nice” it would be brought up in the mod chat and discussed and likely have an additional amount of help to resolve the conflict.
At least, that’s my expectation for how it would/should be handled
Rather than deal in abstractions, here’s the comment thread.
Thanks for sharing that.
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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.
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.
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.
I can feel my comment will not be popular, but I felt like saying this.
I mean, you can only carry niceness so far; there’s always going to be a limit. This example will be extreme, but that’s the whole point: if someone showed up trying to justify a genocide, how easy would it be to remain nice and politely disagree with them? We can all agree that there’s a line, the question is where that line sits.
I feel like a lot of people in this thread are talking about being nice, all whilst ganging up on the admin, being very uncharitable, and not really seeing things from her point of view. As I said earlier, if there was something you were vehemently against and thought was completely and highly immoral, how easy would it be to politely and nicely disagree with someone defending it? And you might not think something is “completely and highly immoral”, but maybe someone else does; they think it’s a line that should not be crossed. Of course it’s going to be hard to politely disagree about something like that.
Some topics are obviously going to be a lot more sensitive, and it’s unrealistic to expect people to be able to remain fully composed. I feel like the “be(e) nice” aspect applies to more everyday things, you know? Conversations about things like video games or TV shows, for example, which even on Reddit would quickly become very toxic. I think it’s unfair to expect people to remain so composed and collected when talking about something as sensitive and controversial as “when are civilian casualties OK?”. If I carry out a conversation like that, I fully expect it might not stay completely emotion free, so to speak.
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree here.
If people can’t stay reasonably polite, they should excuse themselves from the conversation. Once I realized there was no way to steer the conversation back to reasonable polite, I disengaged from it.
I think it’s perfectly fair to expect people to excuse themselves if they are unable to be reasonably polite and operate in good faith.
And to be clear the discussion from my point of view, and I believe others in the thread was not “when are civilian casualties OK”. It’s a trolley problem, and there’s a ton of people on both tracks. Both tracks have civilians and both have soldiers.
The big difference between your genocide example (and I understand you believe it is an extreme example and not a perfect analog) is no one was taking the ‘Harm is OK if position if X’. Both sides wanted to minimize harm done.
Maybe posting on a social media board is not fulfilling.
:0
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.
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.
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.
You could possibly use the “Subscribed” feed more to have a more selective approach?
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 :)
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.
God that feature would be lovely. !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone is currently swamping my subscription feed. Itd be great if i could create a Funny, Learning, Ragebait and Discussion feeds
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’m mighty rusting at drawing myself; I’m admittedly a bit subpar at my drawing compared to my art peers, I’d wager. Getting back on the saddle and posting publicly feels a bit intimidating, but I think that’s less community specific and more just general jitters. Something I’d like to embrace and encourage around here, however, is an appreciation for amateur work, questions, and input. The vast majority of us by wide margins are by no means masters of what we do, and I’d love to see what we offer given motivation and appreciation. Breaking out of the mentality I’ve carried from other places is challenging, but considering Beehaw’s values, I’d hope that this is something I could put into action.
-As for what the community likes, I’m starting to come around to stop trying to read the community’s mind. I think the best way to find out what the community gets into might end up being to just start posting things and see for yourself. I’ll admit I find it easier said than done to get into that mindset, and it means there’s gonna be duds, but I also think it can help to stop that sort of content paralysis.
Part of the reason I wanted to start the weekly “what are you playing” thread on gaming was to try and spawn more discussion not related to news. Although I do think a variety of topics each week is a cool idea I want to look into. I do get what you mean, but, at least on gaming, I have seen some great broad discussion topics be posted.
I can only speak to gaming but I think every community having discussions like that would be neat
The Gaming community certainly does seem to have some more community engagement going on, which is good. It would be nice to see more of that. There is some gaming news in there, but at least it’s gaming news and, thus, not as bleak and depressing as some of the news in other communities.
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.
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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. -
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 🥴
These are very good thoughts. Thanks for taking the time to write all of this.
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.
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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.
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.
Ultimately this website and the ones that it’s built on the shoulders of, are link aggregators. Most people who use these apps are looking for links and discussion of links. One very common kind of link and an easy one to share and start discussions on is news because it provides a narrative to interact with. With that being said, it is entirely unsurprising that communities which revolve around chatting have popped up, communities which focus on content that isn’t news, but rather pictures or other links, so long as there’s a reasonably strong structure around it.
There’s two ways to resolve this - first, is to go to the appropriate place for a chat type environment. Discord and Matrix are designed around communities of people directly interacting with each other (although the kind of interaction, chatting in real time, is somewhat specific). The second way is to encourage the kind of behavior you’d like to see on this site. I think there’s the reality of existing on a fairly small space on the internet - if 1 in 1000 people feels the desire to start a discussion on something, these discussions don’t happen often in a space with only a few thousand registered users. In a space with millions, it’s commonplace. There’s also a cultural component in that these spaces don’t exist yet and this kind of interaction isn’t a part of the normal space. You can absolutely help to create that by thinking up ideas of what you would like to see, and starting those discussions. With that being said, you will likely need to be quite patient with this process as it may take some time to take hold and become regular or popular and you may need to lead the charge for a long time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think in the AI copyright post there was a single lemm.ee user, commenting all over, who then proceeded to delete all their comments (kind of sus). Either that, or I’m not seeing some of the comments (Lemmy language settings are giving me a weird feeling lately).
The major opposition I see, came from a dbzer0.com user, that’s an instance which prides itself in anarchism and some swearing, they seem to have behaved surprisingly well given the case.
I did discuss some points with you in that post, sorry if that added to the load.
Don’t apologize for engaging. I’m sure you engaged well enough but it certainly was a loaded topic but overall it somewhat broadened my view. That said there was some people I felt would take my comment then only comment on what they could refute rather than arguing against the point made. So it felt like some folks weren’t engaging in good faith.
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.
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.
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
It sure seems that way.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
When I open a post with a link and OP has a written a novel I usually just move on. For me the link is just the seed for organic discussion. If OP has opinions that’s for the comments. Depends on the community I guess. I’d offer more personal insight in Music post than a News post.
Yeah I wouldn’t need a novel either but just a link and nothing else feels… boring?
Understandable, but for me it’s more… Respectful? I guess? OP’s not trying to push influence the organic reaction or waste’s anyone time.
Seems to me this is about what link aggregators are for. Is the goal to surface things from the internet or is the goal to discuss and build community? Surely it’s both, but different folks will emphasize one over another.
I guess… i just wish it was more than mostly a link aggregator though.
