tbh I think this is pretty cute, as long as they’re being well behaved about it!

My two cents:

The news outlets are only putting out what their audience wants to see.

I don’t think this is entirely true. Yes they’ll run with stories that get lots of engagement, but news agencies still have, well, agency. They can choose what to focus coverage on, even if it’s not the most lucrative story. They also have lots of room for how they want to cover a story, what angles they want to take.

While I agree that to an extent there’s a relationship from views to money to coverage, saying they’re “only putting out what their audiences want to see” is kinda reductive. They also play an important role in shaping what their audiences want to see. I’d say it’s important to be critical of what we’re being shown and what we’re not, and how different stories get spun.

One point I think we might agree on is that this also means that we should think critically about ourselves and our own reactions to the stories we’re presented with. For example, I know I have a tendency to get interested in these kinds of stories from the perspective of wanting to learn safety lessons for the future (same reason I keep up to date on US CSB reports). At some point, though, it became apparent that there were no (or not many) interesting safety lessons to learn here and I continued following the developments anyway. It’s worthwhile for me to consider why I did that, and taking that time to consider my own reactions here is a part of this same process of thinking critically about the news we’re shown.

For beehaw, I’m grateful that I haven’t had to take a single moderation action yet! I’ve been keeping an eye out just in case on c/science, but even when there’s been some disagreement about how to, eg, interpret a study people have been engaged in constructive discussion. I think that’s really indicative of the quality of the community we’ve got going here! Love y’all ♥

In real life I’m grateful to the folks at my local grocery store. My wallet was stolen over the weekend and though my bank gave me a digital card while I wait for a new one to show up in the mail, it hasn’t been working. The folks at the grocery store were super accommodating with it and happily held on to my groceries for me while I hurried home to get a check (it’s been forever since I’ve needed to use a check!) to pay for them. They even put my frozen stuff in the walk-in in the back so it wouldn’t melt before I returned. I guess some might say “They’re just doing their job,” but for me it really made a difference on an otherwise stressful day.

be sure to report any of that stuff to the mods

Please do, yes! It’s definitely going to be better to get some reports that end up not requiring any action than to not get reports about behavior which should have action taken (especially with the relatively low volume of reports at the moment)

and only split once the userbase of that community has developed enough.

I think that’s the key thing. I do quite like the idea of more specific communities (which I’ve expressed a couple times), but only once there are enough people participating that they won’t just sit dormant. Like I agree, tabletop gaming is something I’d very much like to have a dedicated community for, but not right now.

My perspective is that the main value in more niche communities is that they help people find posts related to a specific internet amongst a sea of unrelated posts. E.g. if I want to chat about specifically Citizen Sleeper, but the main gaming is flooded by posts about Elden Ring, other people interested in chatting about Citizen Sleeper might not see my posts.

(On that note… Anyone want to chat about Citizen Sleeper?)

At this point, that’s just not an issue Lemmy has. Keeping things more general for now is definitely the right strategy.

And like several people have mentioned, Lemmy is federated! So if someone wants to go ahead and spin out some more niche communities, they are free to do that on their own instance and we’ll all still be able to join in!

I’d love that! I just recently learned how to adjust my own derailure, and even just knowing that’s it’s something I have control over has made me a lot more aware of how my shifting feels. I’d love to learn more about some simple things like that, that I can maintain on my own without any specialized tools

Scuba diving! 🤿

Or just diving / water sports in general (although probably more thought should go into picking the name…). Specifically scuba is probably too niche to make an active community at this point in time, but it feels a little out of place in a more general sports community.

r/scuba was always a fun place to go and see people’s cool videos of marine life and underwater selfies, as well as being a good place to ask questions and discuss gear.

There’s BikeCommuting@lemmy.ml, which is not exactly what you’re asking about (and not on beehaw) but might be a good place for that kinda post in the meantime!

I’ll second a 3D printing community! The ones on reddit really helped me a lot when I was starting out with resin printing and nothing worked lol. I feel like without someone to explain how I should be tuning my FEP (and even that I should doing that in the first place) I may have gotten discouraged and just let my printer collect dust

Oh for sure. And pacman / the AUR. It’s the reason I stated with an arch-based os even though I got a little tired of managing all the minutiae myself (I did used to use arch)

I haven’t read this entire post yet (may have additional thoughts after I do), but I wanted to comment to say that it was really cool to see the evaporative cooling post linked here! I read it back around when it was published, and it was really influential on my thinking about online communities.

To anyone who may have skipped the link: you should scroll back up and check it out! It really is an excellent post.

Heya from another reddit refugee:

I’m a late 20s guy (he/him) working on getting a PhD in materials science and engineering. I’m pretty optimistic about Lemmy, and Beehaw in particular.

I think that right now the thing that I’m missing most from reddit is the plethora of niche communities for very specific interests, but I’m aware that’s something that comes with time and a big enough userbase. For now we’ve got Gaming, if we get enough people we’ll probably get MMORPGs or similar. I don’t mind waiting.

Other communities I’d love to see pop up would be for things like scuba diving, specific TTRPGs like Lancer, more specific science communities (edit: looks like there’s already one for space), biking, solarpunk aesthetic stuff, Q/A communities (like r/askscience and r/askhistorians), and so on. (I actually haven’t searched for all of those yet… Maybe some already exist!)

“I use Arch by the way”

(I kid, I kid… I use garuda)