Hi! I’m considering creating a “Slow News” / “Slow Journalism” community but it seems Beehaw doesn’t allow users to create new community. I’m guessing this is one of Beehaw’s Lemmy customization aiming to keep the discussion civil, possibly to avoid creation of toxic communities. Is there a process to request creation of a new community? Or is the community list fully locked and static?

In any case, here’s my pitch for a new community: “Slow News” refers to a stream of information and recent events that is intentionally slowed down, in the spirit of the Slow movement.

Rationale : The spread of real-time medias (radios, TV, Internet) accelerated the pace and increased the amount of news articles published. This may be detrimental in some aspects, with an information overload for the readers, and a race to publish breaking news first. This often lead to bad quality journalism due to the pressure to publish fast with limited verification and zero investigation.

Slow News’ aim: Go in the opposite direction and literally slow the publication of news to allow readers to consume information at their own pace, and to give more time to produce better quality, investigative journalism. Slow News media outlets favor long piece article, typically published at a slower rate. This is also known as Slow Journalism.

Slow News community: It would be focused as exclusively as possible to sharing slow news articles, preferably long piece investigative journalism. Moderation would have be stricter than a typical News community as it would limit publication of article that don’t fit the slow news concept: breaking news, article about developing events, sources that have poor reliability or bad track records due failed fact check, fake news.

  • Beehaw does seems like it got a saner approach to social media, which is why I just moved here. It’s possible this instance’s approach already avoid most these pitfalls. A couple things seemed surprising at first (no downvotes, no user-created community) but reading through the introduction post explaining the rationale I can see it how it’d avoid brigading and clans forming.

    Anyway I think Slow News is a nice concept for multiple reasons (push toward less infobesity, less propaganda, hopefully more factual and reliable) but as you said I could start posting Slow News to an existing community. Time may show whether a decidated community makes more sense.