hi there. I’m new. I’ve recently migrated from kbin.social (RIP) in the hopes of filling that big empty hole in my webs that reddit left after The Troubles.
First impressions after a week of use:
- Beehaw feels a little lonely. Not a lot of activity. Same posts on my subscriptions front page throughout the day with little movement on upvotes and comments. It’s the summer in the north so maybe people have better things to do with their time, but I am wondering, does it pick up?
- Fewer users than kbin? It feels like there are smaller numbers on the Communities subscriptions than I’m used to on kbin. Granted, kbin was inundated with spammers and bot accounts over the last couple of months so those numbers are probably not as real as I’d like them to be, and I appreciate Beehaw’s limits on new members by pushing a signup form and a review process. A social network needs users though.
- Subscribing across instances feels weird. Maybe it’s the instance (lemmy.ca) but I tried following a couple of communities from there and my subscription was marked “Pending”. Are we defederated?
So, my Ask is this: Do you have any recommendations for a newbie at Beehaw to make the most of my experience here? Are there any non-obvious Communities I should join? I’m looking for friends and fun. Where do?
Heigh-ho, welcome to Beehaw!
Do you have any recommendations for a newbie at Beehaw to make the most of my experience here?
Comments invite comments. If there’s a post you see that is interesting but has no comments, if you make one it is much more likely to bring in others to discuss.
Are there any non-obvious Communities I should join? I’m looking for friends and fun. Where do?
Really depends on your interests. Unless you don’t play games at all, I’d recommend the Gaming community as one of the most active interest-based communities.
Beehaw feels a little lonely. Not a lot of activity.
I think that for some of us, Beehaw is a nice quiet respite from the “loudness” elsewhere on the net, especially as many of us are refugees from Reddit. Speaking only for myself, over the years I’ve killed my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and only maintain a private Instagram for a few family and friends. Beehaw is somewhere I lurk daily, and it doesn’t feel like I’m being inundated with “content” like I was on Reddit or Imgur.
I sort of think of it like a ‘home base’, that I can come back to to relax after foraying out into the broader and ‘wilder’ social media and news worlds.
great suggestions and perspective. Nice to meet you @t3rmit3@beehaw.org ! thanks for the reply.
Hey! Welcome to beehaw! It is a smaller instance than kbin, but it’s more selective with who is a member so there are pros and cons if you vibe with those that are here I suppose. I also have subscribed to a bunch of communities from lemmy.ca and most of them also say subscription pending, but I still get the posts from those places in my feed so it seems to be working? Idk I would chalk that up to a little jank.
What I did here was just subscribed to all of the communities so that I don’t miss out and my feed doesn’t stagnate. Idk if that would work for you. It’s difficult to make a suggestion for someone looking for “friends and fun” since we don’t really know much about what you’d find fun or what kind of friends you are looking for. Hopefully as you make posts and replies you will find your people here!
Hi Butterbee. Thanks for the reply and the suggestions. Sounds like maybe the “Pending Subscriptions” thing is a bug. I’ll have to see about submitting issues.
I realized my plea for “friends and fun” was entirely subjective, but I’m not picky as long as people are nice. I have a lot of interests so I’m sure I can find something to talk about with just about anybody.
And that brings me to another thing I’m noticing about Beehaw: Not a lot of special interest groups hosted locally. Searching for “Photography” lists a bunch of communities on external sites, but nothing local. I find that pretty surprising as Photography’s a somewhat popular hobby.
https://beehaw.org/search?q=photography&type=Communities
Photography is lumped in with the Creative community.
how was I not in there? Thank you!
Welcome!
Hi from someone outside the hive!
Subscriptions sometimes get stuck in the “pending” state on other lemmy sites, too. I assume it’s a federation bug that only affects certain instances at any given time. Waiting a few days and then unsub/resubbing has sometimes cleared it for me. Other times, it has taken admin attention. Thankfully, it seems to be cosmetic; I have still been able to see and post messages in the affected communities.
As for the low traffic, I think subscribing across instances is likely your best solution. While there are often multiple communities for any given topic scattered around the 'verse, people mostly tend to gather around one or two of them, and I think beehaw’s selectivity and preference for a handful of broad topics kind of work against it becoming a global gathering place. I expect that helps filter out jerks, but judging by what you wrote, maybe it also makes for a very quiet neighborhood.
The good news is that many of the bigger instances also have rules about being respectful, and while moderation can’t prevent bad-faith comments, it can at least clear them out when people report them. I encourage you to try a few communities from elsewhere, and see if any of them feel comfortable. This directory might help:
so nice, thanks for the helpful suggestions.
Honestly, when I wrote my post this morning I didn’t really expect to get any answers and these have all been great.
Thank you @mox@lemmy.sdf.org and all who’ve replied. This feels like a great space.
Hi and welcome! Sometimes responses come in quickly around here, but sometimes conversations on Beehaw are a little more asynchronous - it’s not exactly uncommon to get a response several days later (at least in my experience). I think part of it is just that there’s less strife than that other site, so fewer people are anxiously/obsessively checking every few minutes.
Personally, I like to browse Local>New first and then switch to Local>Active - catch up on what’s new, and then dip in to some conversations. At first it felt a little weird not having those hyperspecific niche topics, but I actually kind of love Beehaw’s “big tent” approach to their communities. You’re sure to find them represented somewhere, but the times I’ve posted in !creative or !diy (for example) it’s been really nice to chat with people who haven’t been exposed to things and be excited with them.
And definitely chime in on the weekly threads! We want to cheer you on when things are great and bolster your spirits when they’re not.
We want to cheer you on when things are great and bolster your spirits when they’re not.
Lally, you are just the best kind of people. Thank you for the kindness you provide.
It’s thanks, in part, to all of you - y’all inspire me and make me want to give you my best
Hello! I lurk too much, but I’ll echo t3rmit3. This is a nice, quieter space. I check Beehaw daily but I don’t find myself doomscrolling like I used to on reddit. It’s just nice to pop in once a while, check if there’s anything new, and get on with life.
That said, I should start posting some of my own findings!
RIP? what has happened to kbin?
The admin has been away, and so it was basically just an error page for an extended period. Now, it seems to not be federating properly (either due to defederation, or some issue on the server side, but I honestly haven’t bothered looking into it) and bots/spam have overrun a lot of the site. The admin is apparently planning to hand over the instance which could help recover it, but it’s pretty much unusable right now.
yeah, this. I hope they can recover, but it’ll be an uphill battle convincing instances to refederate with it.
Anyone know why this thread shows 6 comments but I can only see the one from Butterbee? Is everyone else defederated from Beehaw or something?
@boolean@beehaw.org: my sense is that a decent chunk of bees here are former reddit lurkers looking for things to like or comment on. If you came here from reddit or something similar, i get that it feels a little quiet bc there are just fewer people posting, and you might be used to just scrolling and passively reading and maybe commenting once or twice a day. Beehaw is smaller, so it’s a place that NEEDS more posts and comments. On reddit maybe you felt like posting was pointless bc it would go into the void, or someone else already posted or said the thing you wanted to say. Here that is not the case. Please, contribute! I came back this week after some time away, and I’ve been trying to post bunches to drive discussion. One thing i’ve noticed is that every post gets some kind of engagement - people are HUNGRY for more to do and talk about here. Personally, it makes me feel more connected to this community than i ever did over my years on reddit. Post whatever in the community that’s most appropriate. Everyone here is chill and kind. If a post crosses a line for some reason, people will let you know in the kindest way possible, then you say sorry and it’s all cool.
I had some replies showing as French language, they might not be showing up for you. Sorry, I’m new!
i think that’s the issue, thanks for the suggestion!
Looking at Local > New on the front page, posts are from:
- now (this one)
- 2 hours ago
- 3 hours ago
- 7 hours ago…
quite a gap in post frequency.
Beehaw would be far more thriving if they let users make communities instead of restricting us to the current generic ones. I think that’s the single biggest factor preventing this place from booming.
Anyway, not sure of how much we may have in common, but I’m also on Kbin and would be happy to be friends!
I didn’t realize there were restrictions on creating communities. That does feel… restrictive.
Thanks for the reply and nice to meet you!
Beehaw would be far more thriving if they let users make communities instead of restricting us to the current generic ones. I think that’s the single biggest factor preventing this place from booming.
Honestly, I think the generic communities work better for us for now. We don’t really have the userbase for anything niche yet. Letting people create their own communities here would just lead to an awful lot of ghost towns. Doing it this way also lets us sidestep the reddit mod fiefdom problem, where anyone can create a sub and abuse the mod powers.
I think most of us like the generic communities as it means they are well cared for/moderated
I can’t answer for the BeeHaw side of things really (though it was my introduction to Lemmy), but I moved from kbin.social to kbin.run a while back. If you prefer the look and feel of kbin, you might like that as well. kbin.run is actually running on mbin which is a fork of kbin that gets updates and features.
Welcome!
My first instance here on Lemmy was Kbin too but I created a new account on Beehaw as soon as I learned about it.
Kbin was ok for me, the only thing I actually liked a lot was the chat tab or something that magazines had. At the time the UI there felt very frustrating for me.
I like how the administration care about the community and I think from all the others you can actually care about your instance instead of just using it as means to access other content.
Just keep in mind that Beehaw might not be here in the long-term as there’s a plan to migrate away from Lemmy. I don’t think there’s a set day to happen but it will, eventually.
sure. Nothing’s permanent. That’s actually a feature in today’s archive-everything, scrape it for AI training monetization cycle.
but I guess you mean moving away from “lemmy” the software which is an ambitious goal, but a worthy one. Best of luck!
what happened to kbin?
I left it because a lot of spam (including CP) was being posted on the site without much action being taken on it and I did not want any part of that. That was towards the start of this year though, so I am unsure what happened to the site afterwards.
my replies are all showing up as “Français”. Except I’m writing in English. What?
my options in “Select language” are Undetermined and Français as options. Anyway to set a Default?
sorry, I’m testing. I had “Undetermined” and “Français” as language selections. Added “English” and checking my language.