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’m sorry, but this really comes off as blaming the users and accusing them of virtue signalling for expecting the moderators to be held to the standards they set. If this instance’s admins does not uphold their own rules to themselves and then when users are trying to have a productive conversation about it, blames them, then this does not seem like a healthy instance to stay on.
Apologies, I set off on a half-baked philosophy post here. I want to make it clear that I’m not excusing anyone’s behavior. I’m genuinely looking for advice from the community. Now that you have pointed it out, I can see how this might read as apologetic towards bad behavior. I will do my best to avoid philosophizing about issues I see on the internet as a whole when responding to direct violations of conduct/behavior. I got a bit lost in terms of replies, and didn’t realize that this response is not attached to the same chain as the response where I acknowledge the harm done and take feedback to heart