Did you struggle session ur asses to death or something? I’ve never seen this site move so slow. Gonna post my butthole on main to get this place moving again
I got tired of Hexbear being so goddamn reactionary so I started using reddit, discord, dbzero, twitter, parlor, and truth social. Hopefully you all will do some growth and I can start trusting you as a platform again.
I wanted to get away from all the liberals so I joined BlueSky.
I blame megathreads
So many good posts thrown into the pit of never being seen ever again
I get the benefit of having pinned posts, and the benefits it has for the users who post there.
But tbh, I’ve been browsing lemmy.ml and I find myself spending more time there in large part because I can see like twice as many posts on the first page.
where is HexbearMegaSkimmer to repost all the good shit to the home page
Bring back downvotes to reignite the downvoting every megathread struggle session
This came up in an unrelated thread recently so I’m just going to paste something I said last time this came up, with a couple edits:
It’s been very sad watching this place decline after years of what felt like one of the few truly vibrant leftist spaces on the internet. I do have my own thoughts and opinions as far as a diagnosis for the decline, but I think they’re right in line with what you’re saying. The series of major struggle sessions where the moderators and admins were at odds with seemingly most of the users on the site were in my opinion what dealt the heaviest blows that this place never really recovered from. But what you’re saying about how “left-signaling” has always been an issue here is at the root of those struggle sessions.
There was a comment that a lemmygrad user made almost a year ago that got to the heart of it and expressed the issue better than I could hope to. Here is just a small part of it.
Without this educational and patient emphasis - and without structures that help democratize the way the organization communicates and functions - the group becomes at risk of toxicity and focusing endlessly on grievances based on whoever is “in charge” at the moment. Sometimes you get lucky and the people “in charge” keep things running well and avoiding turmoil. More often, you get toxic cliques, subsequent imbalanced application of norms, and a treatment of comrades as primary enemies. creates burnout and alienation between everyone.
This instance is increasingly tending towards the latter, with calcifying cliques at various levels that are increasingly hostile towards the userbase. They frame this using communist and liberationist language, though often inconsistently.
It is a much longer comment than what I just quoted, the quoted part alone doesn’t really get at the heart of it, so it’s worth reading in full. The comment was removed for “dismissing legitimate issues as tokenization” (perfectly exmplifying the point) but another less campist or beligerant mod reinstated it fortunately. It should be noted that the meaning of who is “in charge” isn’t necessarily the mods and admins, but can just as easily be a nebulous group of frequent commenters who tend to set the mores of site culture. Incidentally, I think a lot of the problems have actually died down. Hexbear feels significantly less cliquish now than it did roughly a year ago. It is also significantly less active, but that’s because of the damage that has already been done, and even if it’s not as bad as it was, the problem never entirely went away.
May as well tag @purpleworm@hexbear.net since I was speaking to purplworm in the pasted comment, who had some important things to say that I was responding to.
Was surprised to see the linked comment was in reply to a post of mine haha. I had upvoted it back then because I thought it was good too.
I knew exactly what post you were talking about just from your quote, it’s one of the best posts on site culture in my opinion.
News has been depressing so that discussion isn’t particularly post-worthy for me, and now that I have a partner I have that immediate outlet for talking about my personal life so I don’t feel the need to journal post.
Posting requires going to sites other than Hexbear to find content
I post purely from my mind
Free yourself from your physical shackles; embrace the realm of pure thought
I just dont enjoy posting as much anymore
real
All sites experience user churn and all sites must put effort into combating churn with a new influx of users or experience the effects of negative user churn.
I used to spam the site over on the spaces I moderate on reddit but burnt out on doing it and there’s essentially no effort from any section of this site to find other sources of new hexbears like there used to be.
The site was getting a sort of no-effort natural in-flow of new bears from lemmyverse but defederating from everything (or being defederated from) removed that no-effort source.
I wouldn’t be against doing more to push the site elsewhere again but I would not want to be doing it alone.
Do we not get new users from lemmy.ml?
Lemmy.ml users have no reason to become main Hexbear users when they can just post here from lemmy.ml, they would just reduce their ability to use anywhere else on the platform for no real gain. The users that came across from lemmyworld and elsewhere were leftists that decided they wanted a leftist instance to be their primary space because they didn’t like the leadership of those other spaces. There’s no real reason to leave lemmy.ml when you can use here and can’t really say their leadership is any less left than here.
A socialist user is likely to leave a liberal instance for a socialist instance if they see it and like it. A socialist user isn’t likely to leave a socialist instance for another socialist instance particularly if it reduces the range of content they get access to. The benefit of federation to us was always being able to suck socialist users out of the liberal spaces or convert left-sympathising liberals into socialists and then take them.
Being defederated from .world, at the very least, is a plus. Lemmy as a whole has trended towards being monopolized by .world, and if you’re federated with that instance, it mostly ends up the same no matter which instance you’re on.
Having the site’s own distinct character is something I would call a huge benefit. It’s good to have access to a wide range of users, but not so wide that it becomes just like Reddit but federated. The centrist instances and the worst of the shitlib ones are good to defederate from, but the rest are good cross-pollination material.
We are vastly more active and would be more powerful than .world, their comments sections would be completely different if we were in them.
but not so wide that it becomes just like Reddit but federated
I’ve always felt that should be handled by bans, not by defederation. Banning the hoggiest hogs and just leaving behind the ones that are capable of being influenced.
The initial federation shock would be large but over several weeks the worst of the worst would be filtered out by bans, leaving behind a generally ok crowd that just need influencing.
Some of them would convert to bears, some of them would not.
This was basically the formula that worked for CTH. Although, CTH’s modteam was considerably more unhinged than Hexbear’s.
In that way it’s kind of like tending a garden. You rip out (user ban) what threatens to bring down the diversity and integrity of it, maybe you prune (removing posts) some of the intended stuff that doesn’t grow in the right direction, and you keep looking for more stuff to plant (users and content).
no reason to become main Hexbear users
We got emojis and our upvote button is cuter
Did we defederate again?
There’s nobody left to defederate from
I thought we federated back for a brief period, or did they all just pull out from us?
preemptively, as a last resort
Did I give them permission to pull out? Absolutely not, I will not stand for this cowardice
Wait are we talking about internet forums
I knew I opened myself to that as soon as I pressed “reply”.
We use an allowlist
where butt
got told off at work for looking at my phone (hexbear) too much
Thank you for your service
Well for me, the main thing I would log onto hexbear to check before was the newscomm and the news mega thread, then that would lead me to posting in other places.
But the news has been so bad lately that I’m basically avoiding this place, and other sources of my news, to keep a mind capable of continuing on and enduring daily life. Idk, it’s just been that bad out in the world lately. Every piece of news is depressing. Every now and then there’s something like Charlie Kirk incident, but for every one of those there’s like 10 other bad events, and I can’t keep looking at those and be a normal, functional member of society at the same time.
Need more bloomer content in here for me, but then I feel like that easily turns into begging for the same distracting slop everyone is seeking everywhere else.
I’ve been trying to post more bloomer content, but sometimes I feel like I’m just being annoying because the world is pretty miserable at the moment.
I’ve noticed and I appreciate it! I don’t think you’re being annoying.
Work is brutal and the Lemmy.ml trenches are awful.
Thats like saying sun shines, snow falls, and birds fly lol
Yep, but the sine waves of each managed to line up for once. My usual escapism from work is also bad, lol
My escapism promotes philistinism, in the Marxist sense, so it can’t be as bad as me just wallowing in the mud and eating slop out of it, proverbially, with my enjoyment of Korean webcomics
Haha, fair. My escapism is either video games or lemmy, assuming I’m not hanging out with my spouse and doing something together. Haven’t read any webcomics in a long time, might have to do that just to mix things up.
I’d recommend “greatest estate developer” because it was recently completed. Most excellent story, genuinely one of my favorites.
I’ll check it out! TheLastAxolotl also has me wanting to read Absolute Batman too, so there’s a fair bit I have to check out right now. Thanks!
I’m not really a reader of western comics (not that I hate them, it’s just that it’s saturated with like multiverse soup stuff and not even the fun “middle period Philip K Dick” kind), but the Absolute comics in general seem to be really incredible, even Superman, and I’ve always thought Superman is impossibly boring.
My favorite is the one-shot called Absolute Evil, which is sort of a big cross-story issue that covers an intersection of all the series, but you don’t really need to know who any of the characters involved are to understand why I like it, except: Green Arrow (who is historically sort of a naive liberal progressive inspired by Robin Hood) and Hawkman (who is historically a reactionary piece of shit who always got in political feuds with Arrow). idk if this is familiar to you or not so I’m just saying it for completeness. There’s a lot of benefit to knowing who the others are before reading it, but I think you can basically vibe it out with a vague recognition of the very biggest characters.
On the other hand, it’ll be a little more familiar if you read any amount of Absolute Batman first, but besides genuinely being my favorite, I mention it because Absolute Evil is just the one issue rather than 15 and ongoing.
Oh you’ll have a well-rounded profile of comics to read between the two, then. The former’s a more light-hearted fantasy-comedy, while the other is a more serious action-adventure(?) (I haven’t read absolute batman. Nor any u,s comics for decades). If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to bounce between the two when you find time to chill.
This is apt. There is a confluence or synchronicity or syzygy–some form of seemingly meaningful alignment–of just absolute shittiness in the Real and posting hog into the void about it just isn’t hitting the same.
Things have never felt so despondent, nor so ripe for true organizing
Very well said. I should channel this into more org work IRL, I just feel absolutely drained lately.
I’m worried we’re gonna have another db0 struggle session soon :(
Eh, there are some users there that are truly awful, and the head admin is pretty bad for harboring them, but there are also good comrades there and decent content.
Yeah that and the fact that if we defederate it will be harder to push back against the obvious bullshit lies they peddle about hexbear. I had to stay out of that thread because I was a work and there was no way if I started replying I wasn’t going to get banned for some petty bullshit. Fuck the admin and every Nazi apologist allowed to continue to post on that platform. Spineless fucking worms.
The sooner the mods and admins can separate criticism of AES from Nazi apologia the better.
There’s a user over there that’s “anti deutsche” and openly zionist now, I expect absolutely nothing from their admins/mods.
The slim bit of hope I have is for their internal contradictions to force change for the better. There are some good users there and I like talking to them, and I have hope that this improves over time. Then again, I tend to be optimistic, perhaps to a fault sometimes.
I agree that not all their users suck but that thread now that I read through it all shows the bad probably outweigh the good and there comes a point when I am conflicted on engaging with them. The Debs guy is the worst. Just constant lying and extreme bad faith. Also db0 using autism as a shield for allowing that shit is very tiring as an ND person myself. I wish I shared your optimism but if they keep banning people for pointing that out like they do it’s only going to get worse. The funniest part is it won’t stop all the even worse subs from calling them tankies for the occasional okay take.
I know, but they’re really being awful today.
I still find it ironic they banned brain in a box for ragebait but not any of the other ones doing even worse ragebait
There’s absolutely selective tolerance going on. If it isn’t corrected, this will probably die down for a bit then pop up again in a month or two.
Brain was 100% right. I looked at that thread during my lunch today and db0 was on a tear being an even worse power tripping mod than almost any example I’ve ever seen in their own power tripping bastards comm.
It’s weird how excited they get when it’s people getting banned for being assholes, and wild only the ones pointing out op did the exact same thing got locked almost instantly
Isn’t there a shitshow temper tantrum with their admin on a banning spree as we speak? In yptb comm hilariously enough.
While still not banning the one who literally says they are just for causing drama and always being a giant asshole.
But yeah it’s totally hexbear being the issue when it’s a post from someone who earlier banned a user for pointing out they were using slurs
As long as we have grievances and they hate ‘tankies’, the struggle sessions will continue
I haven’t been back to their ecology-related comms to see my allotted science denialism in a while. Perhaps I’m due.
it has been particularly bad lately, I too have been very busy with end of year shit at work
Sorry to hear that, comrade. Seems a common story every year.
Work seems to have gotten pretty shit for a lot of people recently. I used to have lots of time to goof off and post bad posts but recently I dont even get time to go to the toilet. The late stage capitalism mill grinds ever harder
Grind grind grind it goes.
Busy with work and depressed…
Busy trying to find work and depressed. Capitalism is a fuck.
I’ve been reading fiction as I’m burned out by this hellscape of a planet
what are you reading if you dont mind sharing
ive been looking for good fiction
I recently read a WebNovel called Shadow Slave which is a fantastic read, it is very long though and I had to find a less than official place to read it because I can’t afford to drop hundreds of dollars just to read it (it has over 2700 chapters currently)
yeah same. plus this is the busy time of the year for me at work and i’m too exhausted.
The “ceasefire” in Palestine is still more or less holding. Ukraine is the same as ever. The US is looming over Venezuela but hasn’t started a war yet.
I’m sure in a month or two we will have some new adventurism or world conflict to post about. Until then we can chill a bitIt feels like tons of events are right on the edge of happening, but I can only remain engaged for so long.
Misread that as “engorged”
ever since the ban of nakoichi the sites activity level went down by half
There are (were) like 10 to 15 power posters I could name off the top of my head that, while not the only ones to do so, were a huge piece of what kept this place hopping, but who are all just gone now. Some from bans, like you said was the case with Nakoichi, but also Z-poster (somewhat ironically because the two of them always wanted the other banned if i remember right), many others left due to the struggle sessions like PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULT, Egon/REgon, (this part of the list I think is longer but I’m not sure about some of them), and some just seemed to up and vanish like Frank. (I miss that guy).
With some it’s hard to know because frequent name changes. But it’s still clear that many of the people who were the biggest posters just aren’t here anymore and we dont seem to be getting new high frequency posters to fill the very real void they left.
Shoutout to the power posters who have stuck around though!
missing Frank gang represent
considering how many relatively new accounts were involved with the recent meta discussions, i do think there are a lot of “power users*” who are still around under new usernames, but who maybe just don’t see posting as being as central to their lives anymore, and/or who think the site’s still worth engaging but don’t feel as comfortable/welcome as they used to (wouldn’t know anything about that though i just joined three months ago
)but yeah i do think site culture issues have brought down activity quite a bit, sadly. still better than the vast majority of the rest of the internet, but yeah.
*i’d add that i prefer the term, idk, “active members of the community” or something to power user/poster since the latter feeds into the deeply weird microceleb personality cult stuff that’s fueled a lot of the cliquishness here & the issues with giving passes to repeated bad actors.
don’t know how they do it.
feels like I’m on here all day yet all I can manage is a handful of comments/day
