Beehaw Support

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.

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.

Maybe posting on a social media board is not fulfilling.

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.

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.
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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 🥴

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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 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'.

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.

For me, I did have some issues getting to a good user experience on android. Now that Sync is out, I expect to engage a lot more :)

I think a Reddit-styled UI is ok for community forming. I found many nice, niche communities on Reddit. It takes time for those communities to really emerge, though. And they might not form on Beehaw.