It appears API rate limiting has effectively killed these alternatives. You essentially get nothing but “Too many requests” 429 errors.
Lemmy sadly does not have the active niche news and discussions I want. But now nothing can be read without going to Reddit. I hate Spez
See I thought that Beehaw.org was the Lemmy instance for news, as it’s supposed to be a well moderated instance, am I incorrect in that assumption?
Also it would be nice if Beehaw’s mods approved my account so that I could use that instance for those purposes. I’ve been trying to get an account created with them for almost a month now.
I’m like you OP, my main focus on Reddit was staying up-to-date on the most current events and technology/science based posts, the sort I generally used on Reddit was “Top this Hour” because that seemed to be the most reliable and up-to-date hourly news as the news rolled in.
Another thing that helped greatly was Reddit is Fun’s content filtering capabilities. Because who tf wants to read some bullshit from Fox News or other severely corrupted and biased news sources? The third party app for Lemmy that let’s me eliminate garbage sources from my feed is the one that wins me as a user, and I used RiF for as long as it’s been around, so they would be winning a loyal user.
Beehaw isn’t great to be a source for news since they defederated two of the largest (from what I can tell) instances.
Create an account at lemm.ee. Great instance and federated with beehaw, so you can enjoy the content if you wish.
I just started a US and World news community on my instance (had federation issues with Beehaw and a lot of stuff randomly didn’t come through in either direction, especially comments/replies). I contributed to the moderation policies they use for their news sub, and the community I put together has even tougher standards than that.
If you’re interested, here’s a post I put together with the standards for posts and the moderation policies we use: https://dubvee.org/post/58845
Community link: /c/[email protected]
I feel guilty plugging my own community, but if Beehaw isn’t an option (they really are well modded), then I hope for this to be the next best thing. I’ve found the other existing news communities to be somewhat lacking in proper moderation and source vetting.