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.
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.
Absolutely how I feel after dealing with a bunch of people arguing against me all from a few instances that I've never even heard of. Beehaw should probably default to not federating with a server until they show their community is inline with our community guidelines.
Have you been arguing with them... in Beehaw communities, or in communities outside of Beehaw?
I haven't seen many problematic actors in Beehaw communities, even those coming from external instances. Instance rules should probably be more prominent in app interfaces when interacting with a remote instance, but otherwise I find Beehaw to work as promised.
The last 2 posts I made were to Beehaw communities. I don't post anything outside of Beehaw and I got tons of lemm.ee users complaining about my take on AI and copyright. A few comments simply started with "You are wrong" like they weren't able to even consider the fact that AI copyright is not anywhere near a set-in-stone thing and they had all the facts despite not being judges.
I think in the AI copyright post there was a single lemm.ee user, commenting all over, who then proceeded to delete all their comments (kind of sus). Either that, or I'm not seeing some of the comments (Lemmy language settings are giving me a weird feeling lately).
The major opposition I see, came from a dbzer0.com user, that's an instance which prides itself in anarchism and some swearing, they seem to have behaved surprisingly well given the case.
I did discuss some points with you in that post, sorry if that added to the load.
Don't apologize for engaging. I'm sure you engaged well enough but it certainly was a loaded topic but overall it somewhat broadened my view. That said there was some people I felt would take my comment then only comment on what they could refute rather than arguing against the point made. So it felt like some folks weren't engaging in good faith.
Better moderation tools which could allow others to read but not comment and/or post until whitelisted in some fashion would completely resolve this. Unfortunately this platform is still very new and these kinds of tools really only exist on Mastodon when it comes to federated software. Hopefully one day we will have it.