four new Beehaw communities (and a word on new community creations)
four new Beehaw communities (and a word on new community creations)
hello folks! some additional suggestions have been made to round out Beehaw's current set of communities, so we've gone ahead and done that. we have four new communities accordingly, which are:
Disability and Accessibility! i think this one is pretty self-explanatory, but for anyone ambiguous on its intent, @[email protected] puts it like this:
Feel free to post anything health, chronic illness, disability or accessibility related. If you need a space for support or sharing your experiences regarding all of the above topics, this is the right place as well :)
People of Color! this is a community specifically devoted to ethnic minority groups and their issues, and for discussions and connections relating to those minority groups. we're also hopeful it'll be a good space for minorities who are migrating to Lemmy, since i'm not aware of very many communities on here to this point like that. there's an already existing introduction thread in the community by @[email protected] if you'd like to drop by.
Betterment and Praxis! i'll let @[email protected] speak for the idea behind this one, because i think it really gets at some of the stuff we're trying to help build here:
Even if it’s just growing a little bit extra in the garden for the local food bank, picking up rubbish on the side of the road, or just making an effort to use the bus, having a supportive community encouraging you makes those little choices a bit easier. Maybe you’ve always wanted to do a little bit more for your community but don’t know where to start. Maybe you already do some of these things and want to help others get started. Maybe you’re just really proud of how something is done in your community. We might not be able to solve all the problems but we can at least try to make a few small things a little bit nicer.
and, finally: Socialism! there's no shortage of communities like this on Lemmy but a commonality many people have experienced is they're... not very welcoming, in general. luckily, a left-wing subreddit got in touch with us about moving (pre-boom, even) and we think their community on Reddit fit the ethos of the site pretty well, so we've helped move them over here. as the sidebar states, this community is:
A place for all leftist and labor news and discussion, as long as you’re nice about it. [...] Non-socialists are welcome to come to learn, though it’s hard to get to in-depth discussions if the community is constantly fighting over the basics. We ask that non-socialists please be respectful and try not to turn this into a “left vs right” debate forum by asking leading questions or by trying to draw others into a fight.
we hope you'll find each of these four new communities a useful space to discuss in.
now, as for the subject of new community creations: we're definitely slowing down on batches of communities after this set. this isn't a total stop--as our existing communities grow, we'll split off new ones as needed--but we're going to try and keep additions to a minimum until the Reddit wave crests. tentatively, our next batch of community creations will probably be after July 1, and any we create before then will be on an individual as-needed basis.
we think the current set of communities covers most things adequately enough for our purposes right now. some imperfections exist but to reiterate: we aren't trying to be Reddit, so some overlap and imperfection in coverage is fine with us.
this also doesn't mean we're done taking public opinion checks. we're not sure when this will be sent out yet (it's being worked on today), but we're drafting a community survey where among other things we'll gauge interest in the suggestions i've seen that haven't already been added. be on the lookout for that.
thanks folks!
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honestly I never had much use for the general communities like "technology", "news", "sex", etc. I came to reddit and stuck around for the niche stuff. Even niches that I am not involved in, it is fun to see what people care about and get a different perspective. And sometimes it's a life saver to be able to access specialized communities. Holla at /r/pestcontrol, /r/bedbugs, /r/whatisthisbug and the related subs.
I can understand from an admin perspective of a specific instance why you'd want to keep a lid on things during a time of crazy growth. In terms of lemmy as a platform, having small communities that can develop shared norms and knowledge is what will make it worthwhile and avoid the general feeling of being "over run" with low quality content. the big tent groups will always be lowest common denominator. Also the general topics do not want to get full of a specific kind of common but boring post. Like /r/apple (IIRC) didn't allow tech support type question; there is a separate space for that.
In your position I would consider making a "new group request" section where people can post their ideas and others can express interest. You could request for people to do a bit of work such as writing up community guidelines to show some effort. When a group is rejected by this instance and they form somewhere else; in most cases you could allow them to link to that (unless it is you know terrible) so it can be found by others in the future. I understand that would entail a whole lot of work and headaches to run and people will be mad about it but over time it could shake out to allow actually communties.
I think the other hand is that beehaw itself is more like a general "home" server. There will be instances with more niche interests that you can subscribe and interact with. And beehaw seems to be more about building a community in the broader sense. But idk, I'm not the big yeehaw of beehaw.
That makes a lot of sense!
Yeah. Beehaw/Lemmy as a whole isn't going to be as centralised as Reddit. As possibly for VERY good reason. Niche communities won't stop existing ever though.
I guess anyone who is interested in ever starting a community should not get established here.
Eh, I wouldn't go that far, personally. There's a lot more to building a community than just the name of it, yknow? I'm going to start work on building a hand spinning and fibre art community, and I don't need to really post outside of DIY/Creative to do so.
It's more like building the people before the home. I don't mind it personally. It's comfy here.
I think the other hand is that beehaw itself is more like a general “home” server. There will be instances with more niche interests that you can subscribe and interact with. And beehaw seems to be more about building a community in the broader sense.
yeah basically.
Precisely this. Leaving Reddit I am now seeking a home for discussing specific software libraries, sub-genres of music and cultivating specific types of plants. Am I to understand that Lemmy/Beehaw doesn't offer this easily without setting up your own server? If so I see this as a massive showstopper for ongoing advancement of popularity. There's people passionate about a subject who will give hours and hours of their weeks to investing in a discussion or moderating etc. but who are not technically confident enough to run a server.
I'm not asking this to bitch, what is here right now is amazing and great and highly virtuous choices of new communities but I am questioning if Lemmy is the answer to what are my own current interests from a new community platform.
Users can create communities on most other Lemmy instances (the Beehaw FAQ outlines why this is disabled on this instance.) You can eg create another user on some other instance to be able to create the communities you'd like to see
Interesting to know thank you for explaining
Beehaw specifically is more restrictive than most Lemmy instances. I think after a while some instances will stay fairly general with few, chosen communities, while others hopefully go deep down into specific niches with all sorts of specific communities. Or I don’t know if “hopefully” is correct, I don’t know what’s healthiest for the Fediverse yet. I just hope that after a while we will get strong and healthy niche communities on a lot of weird stuff.
In terms of lemmy as a platform, having small communities that can develop shared norms and knowledge is what will make it worthwhile and avoid the general feeling of being “over run” with low quality content. the big tent groups will always be lowest common denominator. Also the general topics do not want to get full of a specific kind of common but boring post. Like /r/apple (IIRC) didn’t allow tech support type question; there is a separate space for that.
on these points: Lemmy has no shortage of small communities--and those have overwhelmingly gone poorly and/or not really developed in that way (nor have the "big tent" groups, which you must remember are hundreds of orders of magnitude smaller than Reddit's) in the past year and a half on the platform. it's possible the new influx of users will breathe life into some of these, but most of them are completely dead and will always be, and basically just clutter the experience. i'm also not really sure what we can do objectively about the "common but boring" post you describe, since that's going to always be a subjective measure, but we do already prune comments people report as low-quality so it's not ridiculous to me that we'd also try and apply some baseline level of quality to posts.
In your position I would consider making a “new group request” section where people can post their ideas and others can express interest. You could request for people to do a bit of work such as writing up community guidelines to show some effort. When a group is rejected by this instance and they form somewhere else; in most cases you could allow them to link to that (unless it is you know terrible) so it can be found by others in the future. I understand that would entail a whole lot of work and headaches to run and people will be mad about it but over time it could shake out to allow actually communties.
this is not to shut down this idea, but in my honest experience: i don't think most of the people requesting communities will put this much effort in, which would just be a headache for us (because we'd probably just have to ignore it) and for the suggester (because i mean... where else are they asked to justify, on that level, a proposal for an internet community?). the vast majority of suggestions we've gotten to this point have been one-line or very brief suggestions, not a pitch package, and i expect that to not change.
in any case i don't think this will happen in the immediate term if we do it. that would be another space we have to really keep an eye on, and we're already covering a lot with not very many people.
Regarding your comment about "small communities" not really developing: Couldn't we just have a simple technical solution? Communities that aren't "active" just get pruned, culled or just removed from the search.
This would allow the opportunity for some of those "small communities" to thrive (while others die out).
I'm like the parent poster. I came from Reddit and joined /r/GameDeals and /r/PatientGamers but I specifically did not joins /r/Games. Why? Because for me there was too much noise and content I wasn't interest in /r/Games, but GameDeals + PatientGamers combined offered me more quality with less noise.
I'm kind of frustrated with Lemmy that I need to filter through all the Gaming communities (and noise) just to sort-of keep tabs on what's happening in the community.
Regarding your comment about “small communities” not really developing: Couldn’t we just have a simple technical solution? Communities that aren’t “active” just get pruned, culled or just removed from the search.
not really at this point. the brute-force way of doing that would involve manually tracking this and nuking all content from the community which is not desirable. a more technical solution may be possible but there's no functionality which lets this occur in Lemmy, so someone would have to offer to code that on their own time (and have it be accepted by the devs). it's also not clear to me if the second solution, if possible, still jives with what we want--there's no granularity in being able to create communities, only a flat toggle of "everyone can" or "admins can", and there is no circumstance i can currently conceive of where we'd open the floodgates.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. Your absolutely right "opening the floodgates" would be an administrative nightmare, plus it might put you (as the admin) at some sort of legal risk.
However, maybe there's a middle-ground. Let's assume, for arguments sake, option 2 existed (some simple rules - you defined - which would cleaninly archive, purge, cull inactive channels).
Then foster/encourage people to submit small/nitch channels. Of course, it would need some sort of approval process. It could start out as a simple "blocked word list" and there after would need a manual approval. This manual process could be done by people who you believe are like-minded and "understand" what Beehaw's purpose is.
Of course, this vetted group will not always choose exactly as you would. However, community members would/could report content, which would draw attention from either you or the vetted group, which could result in the channel being revoked and purged.
If there's one thing I've witnessed at Reddit, it's the power of passionate people / Mods. They're not afraid to "roll up their sleeves" and get dirty, if they're given the chance.
my point is mostly that there literally isn't the functionality to most of do this in Lemmy. even if we wanted to, we could not (and likely will not be able to) do anything near what you're proposing here, except maybe we could kind of do parts of it manually but that'd take time investiture we simply do not have and may never. community creation is hard coded right now as an all or nothing switch, with no binary or gray area. either we make the communities or you do, and we can't make an approval process that ultimately differs in how it manifests from what we're already doing. we also don't want this to be a job, and that's something that will also inform how we go about things.
Understood. Since I'm coming from a development background, I guess what I'm trying to gauge is "What are the technical limitations vs cultural"... since, technical limitations are usually easier to change than cultural :)
I know federation isn't the answer to every UX bump that folks are going to encounter when joining a community like Beehaw from a much larger place like Reddit, but in this case I think it actually is an answer at least.
There's a fairly active Patient Gamers community over at lemmy.ml, and you can subscribe to that via Beehaw by going to https://beehaw.org/c/[email protected] and just clicking subscribe. Then it'll show up in your subscribed feed just like communities that are hosted on the Beehaw instance.
There's not a Game Deals community that is as active, but there is a fairly new looking one on another instance we federate with, here: https://beehaw.org/c/[email protected] - The prices are all listed in pounds though, so YMMV.
I guess the point I'm trying to get across is that you can kind of have your cake and eat it too with federation. Beehaw can keep communities fairly general and manage them carefully so that they fit our ethos and we can moderate them to the level we want without burning our mods out, and our users can join communities on federated instances if there are more specific topics that they want to be active in.
Thank you for pointing those communities out, I just subscribed :)