2y ago

Beehaw lacks community

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.

103 comments

I get you. Feel similarly.
I feel like !chat@beehaw.org is kind of glossed over by a lot of users, which results in the main feed just being links after links.
Don't really know of a solution, but if we could find a way to encourage more people to submit to that community, there would be more space for regular discussions.
We should also normalize being active in days-old posts. There was a bit of a "no one's posted in three days, this post is dead" culture on reddit. It was only in hobby subs where discussions continued over a longer time.
The problem, obviously, is that the nature of Lemmy and reddit doesn't lend itself to promoting older content, so less people will see it, especially if they're not just browsing the local feed here.
Not an easy problem to solve (and many might not see it as a problem). It's essentially down to how the users of the instance use it. Nothing can really be done about that, other than perhaps encouraging something like posting a bunch of stuff in the chat community to give it some momentum.
- Yeah, reply to that week old post. Reddit trained a lot of people to think that if something is more than like an hour old, it's stale, but that's not how async communication works, especially on a comparatively small server.
  Sure, you might run out of new topics, but that's not going to change with any of the proposals I've seen in this thread.
  
  Not just Reddit. Before I found Reddit, “necro-ing” or “necroposting” on a thread, aka posting on an old thread, was frowned upon on most forums I visited. That norm carried through onto Reddit.
  Interacting with an old thread on Reddit had the same effect as on the forums that discouraged necroposting. On the forums, it would move a year-old topic right to the top again, as threads tended to be sorted by “which thread was interacted with most recently?” Reddit didn’t sort posts like that. I’m not sure if Lemmy and Kbin have an option to sort posts like that.
- I think you just described Tildes! It’s not horrible, and they don’t necessarily ban images/photos/links, but it’s largely text posts, or at least text comments.
- When I run out of content with the "new" sorting, I switch to "new comments". This is how we used phpBBs back in the day, remember? Posts could be years old, but still engaged with. I actually think the cascading layout lends itself better to old posts than the chronological layout of BBs, as you don't have to sift through hundreds of pages of replies and can easily collapse a thread you're not interested in.

I’m finding Beehaw is sliding into a reddit-esque feel. I tend not to hang out as much or participate as much now because it leaves me frustrated and rage-baited and anxious. I suppose that is part of the consequences of the influx of redditors creating the environment they like. (And now bots are being welcomed with open arms, too.)
It’s sad to see posts telling folks to go to another instance if they want “community”, when the most endearing thing about Beehaw was the sense of community.
- Not disagreeing with what you're saying, but are bots being accepted with open arms now? I didn't think any official announcement had been made on that yet. The discussions are still on-going as far as I am aware
  
  Nope, no official announcements. People are very happy about the bots in the discussion threads and feel they are an important part of a lively community.
- Ditto. I share your thoughts.
- My thoughts as well. ~~Beehaw~~ Lemmy tends to feel like Reddit.
  
  Lemmy in general, yes. I’m speaking specifically of Beehaw, too.

I’m frustrated too.
I’m trying to comment on things, and have genuine and engaging conversations. But it feels like if you’re not 100% aligned with the community, there’s free reign to be harassed. We’re supposed to Be(e) Nice, and I was. I was arguing in good faith, I wasn’t trolling, or anything else nefarious. My view was twisted in bad faith, they claimed I would be first in line to defend heinous acts. I corrected them, saying in no uncertain terms that I would not. They could have just apologized when I set the record strait but they just kept coming back lying about my views and continued to slander me. I reported it, nothing was done.
So I’m not really sure what to do. The conduct was inexcusable. A quick and simple ‘sorry for the misunderstanding, glad you don’t support heinous acts’ would have sufficed. But no, because I’m not as far to the left as they were, I’m wrong, every view I have is suspect, and free to be slandered. A few users did come to my defense which was nice.
I don’t know if others are experiencing the same thing. But I know I’m very hesitant to comment on anything that could be controversial.
- I read that conversation, it was really off putting for me how you were treated. I haven't been able to let go of it since. It definitely impacted how I view the site.
  
  I observed and participated in that exchange and I also found it to be fairly disheartening, especially since it came from an admin. All I can say is that you should try not to let it weigh you down.
  For the most part, my exchanges on this site have been positive and supportive and I'd like to think that will be the norm in the future.
  
  Understand the sentiment and frustration, but do want to express that a user or two is not the whole site. Problematic to be sure and we as admin and mods will continue to try and keep the space nice. As of right now reporting this content with an expression why is very valuable for us. Ignoring it or just reporting with a blank reason is hard to deal with.
- Someone linked to the conversation you're describing, and all I can say is "wow". I'm disgusted by the way that admin insisted on attacking a position you didn't take, claiming you DID take that position, and using "well it's the logical next step" as an excuse. I'm in agreement with what another user said: it's difficult not to see Beehaw in a different light after observing an admin behaving like that.
- Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position!
  Monty Python
  There is a type of group-think that can emerge when people look for a safe space. In fact, it almost has to happen because part of being safe is staking out topics that cannot be "both-sided", but the nature of a voting based platform seems to actively amplify the tendency to drown out good faith voices. Discussion is almost based on people having differing views, otherwise there's nothing to say. I don't know who's old enough to remember Metafilter, but it is that type of thing that drove me away from there many years ago.
  I don't have an easy answer to it, however.
  
  Attack the position, not the person is what we used to say in a forum I frequented many years ago. While it sounds simple, it's quite difficult to do in practice, whether you are the one attacking the position or the one receiving the attack on your positions. Still, there were really very few people who could do this correctly. You would notice new members of the forum, getting personally offended when a position they were expressing was attacked, without actually getting attacked as persons themselves. Very few faced such situations properly. Looks like (and it seems it's only getting worse as web netizens increase, and commercial interests facilitate shallow exchanges) people have a really hard time separating respect for the position they hold and respect for them as persons. Also, it's really impossible, there is practically no space for a disagreement to have a productive outcome (even if the difference in viewpoints remains) once personal attacks begin. For that reason I believe we can and we must always respect the person when in disagreement, regardless of how hard it might be.
  In the thread @HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org mentioned, its obvious, at least the way I see it, that it was not the position that was being attacked.
- I can feel my comment will not be popular, but I felt like saying this.
  I mean, you can only carry niceness so far; there's always going to be a limit. This example will be extreme, but that's the whole point: if someone showed up trying to justify a genocide, how easy would it be to remain nice and politely disagree with them? We can all agree that there's a line, the question is where that line sits.
  I feel like a lot of people in this thread are talking about being nice, all whilst ganging up on the admin, being very uncharitable, and not really seeing things from her point of view. As I said earlier, if there was something you were vehemently against and thought was completely and highly immoral, how easy would it be to politely and nicely disagree with someone defending it? And you might not think something is "completely and highly immoral", but maybe someone else does; they think it's a line that should not be crossed. Of course it's going to be hard to politely disagree about something like that.
  Some topics are obviously going to be a lot more sensitive, and it's unrealistic to expect people to be able to remain fully composed. I feel like the "be(e) nice" aspect applies to more everyday things, you know? Conversations about things like video games or TV shows, for example, which even on Reddit would quickly become very toxic. I think it's unfair to expect people to remain so composed and collected when talking about something as sensitive and controversial as "when are civilian casualties OK?". If I carry out a conversation like that, I fully expect it might not stay completely emotion free, so to speak.
  
  I’m going to have to respectfully disagree here.
  If people can’t stay reasonably polite, they should excuse themselves from the conversation. Once I realized there was no way to steer the conversation back to reasonable polite, I disengaged from it.
  I think it’s perfectly fair to expect people to excuse themselves if they are unable to be reasonably polite and operate in good faith.
  And to be clear the discussion from my point of view, and I believe others in the thread was not “when are civilian casualties OK”. It’s a trolley problem, and there’s a ton of people on both tracks. Both tracks have civilians and both have soldiers.
  The big difference between your genocide example (and I understand you believe it is an extreme example and not a perfect analog) is no one was taking the ‘Harm is OK if position if X’. Both sides wanted to minimize harm done.

Maybe posting on a social media board is not fulfilling.
- :0
- This is kinda my take, too; after reading OP's post, I was left wondering how much time they spend on here and what they're doing outside it.
  I know everyone's ability and opportunity to be engaged with the world is different, so I hope this doesn't come off as a "touch grass" kinda thing, that's not how I mean it at all. For people with difficulties communicating or mobility issues, sometimes being online is the best way to engage with the world, and I totally get that. However, I think it's unwise to put all of our social eggs in one basket; we need multiple platforms for communicating and outlets for expression and connection. What ways are you connecting with people outside Lemmy?
  When I'm feeling sad and disconnected, I like to work against it by sowing the kindness and understanding I would like to be reaping. This is pretty common advice - it's not unusual for someone going through a rough patch to be told to try volunteering for something they care about - and for me, it is almost always Super Effective.
  So, maybe posting on a social media board could be fulfilling, if gone into with the attitude of finding a way to contribute instead of trying to find what is needed.
  Idk, maybe that doesn't make sense, I'm not fully caffeinated yet and out of medication and I know I'm not totally with it. But hopefully I'm getting the gist across: posting/commenting would ideally not be your primary (or only) way of connecting with others, posting is usually not satisfying, but empathetic/meaningful commenting can be, and if there's not already a meaningful reply to something, try making one and see how it feels. It might feel better than you expected to be that first meaningful comment even if nobody ever replies; sometimes heartfelt expression can be its own reward.
  
  This is kinda my take, too; after reading OP’s post, I was left wondering how much time they spend on here and what they’re doing outside it.
  I don't spend much time here at all. I open Beehaw a couple times a day, see nothing that I want to interact with, and close the tab. That was the basis of me creating this post to begin with - that Beehaw is quickly becoming a news feed with no actual meat to interact with.

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.
- 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.
  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.
  
  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.

Edit (2023-08-07 T 08:50 Z): It occurred to me that I forgot to directly mention traits that might bias what I offer. On top of a general confidence and enthusiasm for Beehaw, I'm also a moderator for !creative and !askbeehaw. I strive to keep things balanced and outside of my biases, but it feels right for me to explicitly bring that up for transparency.
I can respect it's a tough issue to put briefly, but I think I get what you're putting down. "Our content isn't diverse enough", I suppose? "We have too much news and not enough anything else"? I 'unno, but I get the impression that you'd like to see more content that isn't news. I'm not too sure what to make of conflating that with "a more positive, uplifting, inclusive place", but I'd think it's got something to do with "negative to downright doomscrolling doomerism." Do let me know if I missed the mark here or there and I'd be down to talk that out, but I'm confident enough in that perspective to run with it at least for an initial comment.
And, welp, yeah. I think there's some truth there. What's up with that? I wouldn't be surprised if there's people with a better read of the room, and there's definitely people that are more properly active than I am, but I'd like to say I'm passionate about Beehaw's fundamentals and continued success. Hopefully that's good enough to say I have some theories as to what's up and what we can do about it.
I'd wager there was a sort of honeymoon phase with Beehaw and the Lemmy fediverse with the initial API scramble and Reddit following through on that. I'd also wager that honeymoon phase has been over for a few weeks now. So now we might be doing things like spending less time on Beehaw than we first were, or taking off the rose-tint shades that often come with a honeymoon phase and realizing that Beehaw's means and ways has imperfections and drawbacks just like any other platform inevitably does.
Put another way, finding a positive sounding community is easy. Engaging and creating that positive sounding community is harder.
I'd think that the Reddit migration is also going to bring elements of old habits from Reddit, both in Beehaw and in people accessing it through federation. I think that Reddit's content leaned pretty heavily on news, so it wouldn't surprise me if a fair chunk of Reddit migrants continue to lean into posting news content.
I'd imagine that our federated activity amplifies that aspect. !technology is a pretty good example of this. Our site sidebar stats say we clock in around 12.7k registered users. !technology has 34.2k subscribers, and that's not even considering federated users that might be lurking or posting without subscribing. There's like a whole 'nother Beehaw and a half in there. Admittedly it wouldn't surprise me if these federated users are less in touch with Beehaw's values or intentions. That's not a knock on those that go through the due diligence to inform themselves on how we like to do things, but Lemmy makes the barrier of entry for federated users a pretty low bar without granular ways to raise it.
This is all to say that we, as in Beehaw users, might not be as active as it seems, and that something is gonna take space.

Regrettably I'm not so sure if there's an easy answer to this. This runs the risk of coming off a bit like a smartass answer, especially because I wouldn't call myself a bastion of activity, but I really do think it's the best means to help resolve this issue: use the thing the way you'd like to see it used.
Create things and share your progress and end product. Share the cool stuff you excel at, but share the small and goofy stuff and the experiments in other things too. Share the successes, share the failures. Take pictures of neat things you see in person, get the links to cool stuff you see online, and bring us in the loop about it. Give people some discussion and context in your OP's body—some hooks to help egg on conversation, if you will—and find ways to get in the conversation down in the comments.
I was hoping to get more active after my vacation at the top of the month, but I've been swamped with family errands and it's been a bit of a bummer. But I got some neat photos burning a hole in my pocket, creative projects I'm itching to get back to, a few neat links to share, and ideas of topics to talk shop with in a community or two. It's been a kind of epiphany rocking around my mind, thinking about how to generate community engagement. We could talk days on end about stuff like our philosophy, gray areas with content, community activities, or indulging in Tea. I'm starting to think that the most powerful solution to engagement and content issues is both the easiest and hardest: just get busy posting. Gotta plant flowers in the garden to bring in the bees, y'know? 🐝
i think my first personal action towards that is to stop giving a damn about trying to aim for "Prime Time" and just start posting, even when its O-Dark-Thirty by US hours 🥴
- These are very good thoughts. Thanks for taking the time to write all of this.
- While this account is an alt, I still interact with beehaw daily, including posting etc.
  That said I, too, have tempered my activity. To put it bluntly, largely because of the news and politics posts. I have seen where even mods are calling anything right of european left "far right" and extremists.
  I am not particularly left leaning, but it entirely depends on the topic. On many social topics I lean left, on other things, im quite moderate. On fiscal stuff Im either moderate or right. But calling sources like thehill.com far right extremist trash (See the post about young men leaning right), or anything remotely libertarian (which in its own is a spectrum of people) far right doesnt jive with me. I find it antithetical to the principles here. Its done in a perjorative way and one thats clearly not meant to encourage conversation or discussion.
  So in a way, Beehaw is not as inclusive as they really want to profess or open to discussion or others opinions (if they are the wrong ones). And rather than getting cajoled or even have mods ban me I have simply pulled back.
  Finally I have also seen some communities (and here again Ill point out news@beehaw or politics@beehaw) suddenly having moderation tactics that are HYPER focused (ie: US politics only, but not something that is used as a political football, or US News only) And frankly theres not the scale or participation ot have UK NEws, Canada News, US News Europe News etc.
  Couple that with point 1 and again, I have just kind of pulled back a bit
  Heres the rub though. If thats what Beehaw wants, Im all for it. Its their call. I am one that doesnt mind having my views challenged if its done in good faith and in a respectful way. That is waht I came to beehaw hoping to get. But it does seem that the mob mentality is taking root and the "us vs them" stuff hasnt been shaken.

Part of the reason I wanted to start the weekly "what are you playing" thread on gaming was to try and spawn more discussion not related to news. Although I do think a variety of topics each week is a cool idea I want to look into. I do get what you mean, but, at least on gaming, I have seen some great broad discussion topics be posted.
I can only speak to gaming but I think every community having discussions like that would be neat
- The Gaming community certainly does seem to have some more community engagement going on, which is good. It would be nice to see more of that. There is some gaming news in there, but at least it's gaming news and, thus, not as bleak and depressing as some of the news in other communities.

Reddit was (still is?) considered as the "front page of the Internet" for over a decade. It's likely we all need time to unlearn the habits we picked up from Reddit. I know I still have that habit of refraining from commenting in certain threads because I don't want to potentially get bitched at.
I do wonder if a forum-based UI would help promote the kind of community you're looking for. Some people have suggested that text-only posts might help encourage more discussions and that is essentially what the forums are like. If you want to link to something for context, that just goes into the body text, rather than have the content show up first and foremost. That said, I don't think Beehaw is interested in switching to a forum-based UI. I could be wrong though.
- I would absolutely love a forum-based UI. I already see this site and Lemmy in general as more of a forum than I ever did Reddit. But to go all in on that would be nice.

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.
- 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.
- 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.

Ultimately this website and the ones that it's built on the shoulders of, are link aggregators. Most people who use these apps are looking for links and discussion of links. One very common kind of link and an easy one to share and start discussions on is news because it provides a narrative to interact with. With that being said, it is entirely unsurprising that communities which revolve around chatting have popped up, communities which focus on content that isn't news, but rather pictures or other links, so long as there's a reasonably strong structure around it.
There's two ways to resolve this - first, is to go to the appropriate place for a chat type environment. Discord and Matrix are designed around communities of people directly interacting with each other (although the kind of interaction, chatting in real time, is somewhat specific). The second way is to encourage the kind of behavior you'd like to see on this site. I think there's the reality of existing on a fairly small space on the internet - if 1 in 1000 people feels the desire to start a discussion on something, these discussions don't happen often in a space with only a few thousand registered users. In a space with millions, it's commonplace. There's also a cultural component in that these spaces don't exist yet and this kind of interaction isn't a part of the normal space. You can absolutely help to create that by thinking up ideas of what you would like to see, and starting those discussions. With that being said, you will likely need to be quite patient with this process as it may take some time to take hold and become regular or popular and you may need to lead the charge for a long time.

I feel like some people just spend their day posting links to articles. They do engage in conversation as well apparently, but they also post 3-4 news per day sometimes. I do not understand why, as it just contributes to make the place more hollow.
- And it's the same articles over and over on different instances. I don't care what Elon Musk is doing, or how threafs is failing
- It sure seems that way.

Just me but I am actually pretty happy with Lemmy. Keep in mind that Lemmy is a couple orders if magnitude smaller then the other place plus lemmy does not aggregate communities really. So engagement will be less by quite a lot. Nor does Lemmy have all of the tricks that try to artificially drive engagement which is good as far as I am concerned. Plus it is summer and a lot if people are traveling and out and about.
So we will see the future... but for now with the communities I follow I am happy.

I would really love it if you (or anyone!) would post something to !chat@beehaw.org or !askbeehaw@beehaw.org if you can think of anything to say. The newest posts there are about a day old and just now I was perusing them and trying to think of something to post. Let's make a deal: I'll try to think of something or, if something interesting happens, I will post in one of those two places and you can try as hard as me! I think those two communities, plus some others I've joined that might be too specific for me to mention (I don't know you well) are key places that, with just a tiny smidge more activity, would probably satisfy a lot of people's needs for "more community." I think there are lots of people like me out there who want to say something to make these communities more active but can't think of anything to say. We need a special hat to wear that will help us figure out what to post! The !gaming@beehaw.org community here is really unique from the ones on other instances because it isn't all news. I'm grateful for that today!

I've had similar feelings towards Lemmy as a whole lately too. Maybe I need to play a bit with my sorting settings but it's starting to feel like the vast majority of posts on all my subscribed communities are linked posts without any extra info added.
Sure the titles themselves might be self explanatory but I'd expect the poster to actually also write something about the link they've posted. What did they think about it, what do they want to discuss about it.
Is just feels.. hollow? When you see link after link with not even an effort towards discussion from the poster.
It's starting to feel like I'm using an RSS reader.
Not sure what too do about it though. Require more text to be written for each link post? That might just end up with some copy pasting I suppose but it might be worth a shot?
- It’s starting to feel like I’m using an RSS reader.
  That is a good way of phrasing it and that is basically how I've been feeling lately about Beehaw. I know other Instances are going through the same thing, it's just that I am most active on Beehaw so I notice it here more.
- Sure the titles themselves might be self explanatory but I’d expect the poster to actually also write something about the link they’ve posted. What did they think about it, what do they want to discuss about it.
  On the flip side, I do enjoy that there's a death of the author thing going on, where often the OP can't actually control how the community receives or interprets a post. Giving an amplified voice to the OP makes a ton of sense, but sometimes it's fun to just see a thread take off in directions the OP never anticipated, including/especially discussion threads kicked off with a question.
  
  When I open a post with a link and OP has a written a novel I usually just move on. For me the link is just the seed for organic discussion. If OP has opinions that's for the comments. Depends on the community I guess. I'd offer more personal insight in Music post than a News post.

My advice: reply to 7-21 day old posts! Go to !chat@beehaw.org, !askbeehaw@beehaw.org and speak your mind! !chat@lemmy.ca needs more posts too! OPs there still tend to respond to those posts.
Lemmy is first and foremost a link aggregator you know. So it's not surprising there are a lot of news links. I think each community is different in terms of the percentage breakdown between news, discussion and meta-discussion.
I don't have a clear idea of what you'd want out of Lemmy, but I'm open to hearing it for ideas to make an effort to make Beehaw a livelier place that I could try contributing to myself.

I think it's true that a lot of the posts that we have are news-related and discussions are less prevalent than I'd like. I think we do have some communities that show higher levels of discussions like: FOSS, Chat, AskBeehaw and some others. I think using the active sorting and subscribing more selectively can certainly help with finding discussions.
I do agree that this is prone to more negative news - largely because people care when bad things happen, which is not necessarily true for good things. I'm not really how to help with that without 'forcing positivity'.
- Maybe tags on posts could help? Having a post tagged as [News] (#news?) and an easy to enable filtering mechanism (timelines), could help people curate their own experience.
  how to help with that without 'forcing positivity'.
  Actually... what if one of the kind of tags on news was #happy / #sad? No need to force it, just enable.

For me, I did have some issues getting to a good user experience on android. Now that Sync is out, I expect to engage a lot more :)
- Same. With Sync out now, everything changes. I'm definitely more active now than I was over the last couple of weeks.

I think a Reddit-styled UI is ok for community forming. I found many nice, niche communities on Reddit. It takes time for those communities to really emerge, though. And they might not form on Beehaw.

One idea is to use an RSS reader and ONLY subscribe to the particular communities that you want to see and engage with. This would be a temporary fix for how lousy Lemmy's feed is right now until it's fixed later.
- That helps with filtering, but not with the actual content being posted on Beehaw. In most communities on Beehaw, most of what is being posted is news. What isn't news is much more infrequent and/or old. Some communities, like Socialism, are downright flooded with news to the point of drowning out community discussion (if there were any).
  
  I agree with this sentiment, but don't know how to fix it. I don't want yet another news source. But I do want to discuss interesting topics with friendly people. Sometimes, the only things people find interesting that they feel others want to hear about, is news about what they are interested in.
- I don't think that Beehaw has tried to be something else. There are other instances that will provide community.
- This is the key. RSS reader apps also let you easily filter out stuff you dont want. I use the Lemmy feeds on Open RSS
  https://openrss.org/blog/lemmy-rss-feeds

There are a handful of communities I want to interact with that are defederated from here. I scan beehaw, but I don't find myself interacting because I can do my commenting elsewhere, and as already observed, there's a lot of news that I just don't care to discuss. I get it and I don't think an instance should be refederated because of me, but it creates just enough friction for me to impact my daily usage. It's a pity because I love the idea of a co-op style social network governed by users, but that also means it might go in directions I don't like and federation makes it so easy to jump ship that it's a real tightrope to walk for admins.

I don't mind reading news from other places of the world (I am not a US local), some of them affect me anyways. I don't mind bad news either, news tend to be bad anyways, regardless of medium, I consider it part of the package and treat it accordingly.
What I really disliked on reddit, and many social media before or in parallel to it's rise, was the lack of depth. And I don't even mean the amount of thought going into a response or a post. I find nothing more disheartening, when I think of commenting or posting something in order to discuss it, than seeing similar subjects, being commented on (and such comments being massively upvoted) by people who didn't even bother to go past the title or the first few sentences of what is linked. I see this happening here also and quite often. And I don't think there is much to be done (not just on the server, on the web in general).

I'm on three servers right now (the other two are sopuli and kbin), and although I'm not as active on sopuli as I would like, I'm kind of active on kbin. The amount of news is overwhelming, I can't complain about that. But it's true that most of those news, either they are from negativity to doomerism (which, for a person with two mental disorders, some kind of anxiety and at risk of having depression, is not good), or they're exclusive to the US (which, for a person living in Europe, I don't give a shit about what DeSantis said or did to a random citizen in Florida).
So, that limits my interaction to memes, Ukrainian war news, sometimes ADHD content, open source games, and nothing else worth of relevance. That would make almost 5% of the total content on Kbin and other servers I'm on.
I don't know what kind of solution would be the best to handle this. The only thing I can say is to block all communities/magazines that are not relevant to you. But as you said, that leaves you with almost empty content or with old content. I don't mind old content, unless it's older than several weeks, but emptiness is really depressing. Even being Beehaw a small server compared to Reddit, this server is federating with other servers, and still...
One solution I can see about posting news is to post news in your native language, and provide a translation in the body of the post. On Reddit, those translations were a comment pinned. That way, we'll have less US-centric content and more global content from other countries outside Reuters source, which is in English and limited in global content daily.
But about the other things, I don't really know.
- less US-centric content and more global content
  Aren't there some servers dedicated to some other languages/countries?
  Mastodon also has a nice "translate" feature for comments. Lemmy already has a language setting which should enable multi-language interactions, but I don't think I've seen the translate button (yet?).
  
  I know that feddit.de is dedicated to German language and Germany. But if you don't talk German and you're not allowed to talk in English, you can do very few things. Same thing with the server dedicated to French language and France, and so on.
- Thank you for your thoughts. I feel the same way in many regards and am also in the same boat.

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.

It's not from behaw but this community is cool !Patient Gamers@sh.itjust.works

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