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 think the biggest problem is being deferated from big instance like lemmy.world, I first created my account on beehaw after checking what existed at the time, when they were federated with about everyone (except tankies) it was nice and all, but since the infamous Reddit API fiasco, the members grow on beehaw was a few thousands only… while a brand new instance like LW have 100k+ now. I understand BH defederated from them for understandable reasons, but at one time BH will have to check their decision again.
I opened an account on LW, no choice to see, read, participate, post, in their hundreds of interesting communities that we cannot see from BH.
I wanted and still want to have BH as my home but if it’s empty, I’ll check neighbours more and more.
I think Beehaw being a smaller, less populated community isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Quality over quantity, as they say. But I personally feel like Beehaw lacks that stronger sense of community that is needed to make something like that work.