Why does beehaw and Lemmy in general feel so dead?

Because you've chosen to move to a rural neighborhood.

What do you mean by that? Is beehaw that small?

I have fedi presence elsewhere and see a lot more activity
- Well, lemmy itself is not very large and to my understanding beehaw blocks quite a bit to keep their feeds clean as possible.

What do you want? Do you want to see more posts/comments?

Beehaw is, specifically, curated for those who want high quality rather than a dumpster fire of trolls and assholes.

So, quality vs quantity.

You guys are defederated from the two most active instances i see on my 'all' feed, lemmy.world and hexbear.net, and also a bunch of minor instances that still pop up pretty often like sh.itjust.works, lemmygrad.ml and lemmit.online.

Y'all live in a tiny bubble inside the already relatively small bubble that is lemmy.

Is Lemmy.ml any good? I made an alt there a while ago but don't use it much
- It's only an option if you're OK with the admins being as transparent as a chunk of charcoal, and enforcing a hidden rule that boils down to "don't disagree with us or our political views."
  
  They're specially prone to distort what you say in order to fit the rules that they actually list in their instance.
  
  Source: former lemmy ml user for 3 years, that used to moderate comms there. I got the fuck out after the notoriously poor way that they handled ani.social.
- It's OK but really has a lot of rage bait and ban happy mods.
- No, stay away unless you subscribe to Marxist-Leninist ideology. Alternative viewpoints (so the vast majority of people) will be strongly criticized at best and banned at worst.
- If you are a member of the Iranian military who has been tasked with pretending to be a trans-communist in effort to convert lgbt kids into the Islamic extremist fold, .ml is the place for you.
  
  If you aren't that, it's probably unsafe.
- You could consider Reddthat.com if you want down votes disabled like on Beehaw
- It performs well and is connected with all of the instances with the most active users. migrating is pretty annoying on lemmy tho but was worth it for me.
- I cant say it's "good" but it's not bad. It's got some interesting discussion and the people are generally friendly. They have strong moderation so there is no hate speech or bigotry.

Better than full of bad/racist/low quality stuff

Yea

I feel the opposite.

Now I have feeds from Malasia to SGerman speaking Swiss, and watched highlights of the Sydney Swans beating the Giants in Australia Rules Football and although I have no personal experience in Malay or Swiss worldviews, and have absolutely no clue on what is happening in the Aussie match, I really enjoyed seeing them as opposed to the procured algorithm commercials that the resto of social media presents today.

I've been commenting less because it feels like the amount of vitriol is going up. Why stress myself with people's responses when no one really cares what I have to say

This is why I skip so many threads. Mostly, I just wanna talk about aquariums, gardening and bikes/ebikes.

As soon as people bring up ________ and __________, I'm out.
- terrariums and motorcycles. the worst
- There's always someone who's looking to interpret what you say as badly as possible so they can feel good about confronting you about it. I'm not being like "oh people these days are too sensitive", just... some people take everything way too seriously and are looking for things to be upset over and I hate when that's me. Really pokes my anxiety tbh. I want to stress it's not like I'm out here making shitty edgy jokes and then getting upset when no one likes them, it's just day to day comments. I dunno. I overthink a lot about whether I'm the problem, had an extremely negative self image for a long time where I blamed myself for every negative interaction I had and it's hard to let that go.
  
  Like, just happened
  
  https://lemmy.world/comment/9888819
  
  And like there's genuinely good positive replies and interactions, but they don't stick with me like the negative ones do.
  
  I'm mentally fragile I guess, I just honestly do my best to be an understanding and accepting and positive person and it hurts to have somebody think the opposite, even though their opinion has absolutely no bearing on my life. I dunno, it's... I guess it's because I'm trying to be perfectly pleasing people generally and when I fall short of that impossible standard it hurts. I'm massively overthinking this, I know. Just something that's been weighing on my mind.
Yeah, theres a lot of propaganda and people fighting about it.

Beehaw, perhaps.

I don't find the larger fediverse quiet at all. I think a lot for smaller communities have died. Following the mass migration, but that's not a bad thing either.

I follow a lot of shitpost communities, though. Not sure what you're interested in

Probably because it is, and then add in federation issues (at least that's been my experience with Kbin). That and if I post about something niche people may have no reason to actually respond.

Sub more munis, cousin.

It's definitely quiet around here. But you know, reddit or any other social media wasn't built in a day, so Lemmy/Beehaw won't either!

Thanks for posting so much though. You're not the first person I've seen make comments about the seeming lack of activity, but you at least try to change that!

Yea, I've been wondering cos it feels like I'm half the activity here,

It doesn't. Maybe you miss all the bots and trolls.

It's kinda the nature of the platform I feel like. The Fediverse is a bit confusing of a concept so it's less mainstream. On top of that, the content can be fragmented across different instances that might defederate with each other. Things could pick up in the future though, especially if people keep using the platform.

Idk lots of people are posting in the tech community and people are sharing news stories but none of that interests me very much so yeah it seems quiet to me too

Yea. Its all just uspol lol

While it might not explain everything, you can take a look at some stats here: https://fedidb.org/

Lemmy's interop with the microblogging portion of the Fediverse (which is by far the largest part) sucks. You can't follow users, so there's no way to pull in content from there and there's no hashtag support built in for posts, so Lemmy posts don't get to take advantage of the discoverability features on the microblogging side. Beehaw in particular is picky with whom they federate, but it shouldn't matter since there's plenty of microblogging instances that share their ethos. I was already a Mastodon user for a few years prior to any of the exoduses and it bummed me out that you guys didn't get to experience Fedi in its full glory because of these limitations. Hopefully the next platform that Beehaw migrates to will be better about this.

I have a Sharkey acc :3

That's why I know fedi is biiig