One of the important roles of Twitter was a means to spread the news of current events, and more importantly help prompt and coalesce mass responses to those events. I've also seen similar questions floating around Cohost occasionally.
I figured at some point we would get an event that would more or less demonstrate whether that particular aspect of Twitter was going to be taken over by other platforms, and if so which platforms that would be. Unfortunately that "test" came a bit sooner than expected, and while I expected there to be some pretty big differences, I was hoping that they wouldn't be quite as "all or nothing" as it turned out to be. What was demonstrated pretty clearly was that out of Tumblr, Mastodon, and Cohost, currently only Mastodon has really taken on this aspect of Twitter. Even Tumblr had more engagement with the traumatic event then Cohost had. I would go so far to say I suspect that if somehow you were only using Cohost (I don't think that's the case for most Cohost users), you might not have even known anything of note had occurred at all until much later.
Here's the thing, I don't think for a second that the users of Cohost were unaware of the incident, especially given the makeup of Cohost. I think what has happened is that we collectively decided that sort of content wasn't appropriate for Cohost. We didn't want to introduce that aspect of the world to the Cohost space.
Is that the right call? Honestly I don't know. I do think there are discussions to be had about whether or not Cohost is supposed to be that sort of platform and what the implications of that are either way.
I definitely get this vibe. And it's not even like there's any rule against having Current Events on here, it's just that few people want to post about it here.
Ultimately it is up to the community's will what will happen on this front. The cohost dev's don't mind automated posting as long as it's clearly marked, and it is theoretically possible for someone to set up news feed pages. But will they? I guess we'll see.
It is understandable why this happens, though. Yes, Twitter exposes a lot of current events, but the response to those events tends to be a battle zone. That's likely the part that makes people weary, and part of why people want to leave Twitter in the first place.
On a site like this, I imagine we could do a lot better, but for now I'd say we'd have to give it more time. Cohost is still pretty new, after all. Apart from that, cohost isn't trying to be the killer #1 platform; if it turns out that we stabilize at a sustainably moderate amount of users, then... great! No one said we had to be the only place where people go for everything.
I think cohost's mindset in allowing you to carefully curate your experience might be of some benefit here. It is possible for a reasonably sized number of people to be into current events and politics without taking anything away from the more casual culture around here.
I think it has to do with the scope of the site, and the types of people present on here. The other site is popular explicitly because of its strong political presence. All of the politicians and journalists and their audience are present on that site, so that defines its scope and purpose. There is a serious incentive to participate in large discussions in that medium. There's a pressure to "change the world by doing activism posting," because there exists an audience to convince one way or another.
Here, none of those broad powers are present. This is where I talk about my interests and my personal life. Had this affected me on a more personal level, I may have been inclined to post about it. However, because this is a "fourth site," I can reasonably assume that everybody here has already kind of gotten the picture about the event. It's not my job to relay that news to Yet Another Platform, and I think that's an important boundary to keep up to keep this place fun and social for me.
I tend not to talk about these national tragedies in my personal life, too, for similar reasons. My friends are all tuned in to mostly the same outlets that I am. There's nobody to influence or inform, most of the time.
I assure you, I'm not a "no politics, smolbean uwu" kind of guy, lmao. I just know when the signal's already been boosted, and when I don't need to pitch my tiny voice in this time.