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.
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
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.
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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.