Lately I’ve been seeing posters here express some form of the sentiment that Hexbear has fallen from its previous heights of glory and now we post amongst the ruins of greatness. This is not a response to anyone in particular, and I don’t want to call anyone out. In fact, it seems to be a normal human tendency to romanticize the past. But I’ve been here since the beginning and want to provide an alternate view.
1. Hexbear just isn’t like it used to be. 
This is one I am particularly suspicious of, since people started posting this after the site had been around for a couple of months. Before that they posted about how chapo.chat wasn’t like the old chapotraphouse subreddit. If the good ol’ days ever existed, they always seem to have been just prior to the current moment. If anything the site culture and vibe have been remarkably consistent since its inception, for better or worse. Faces have changed, people have come and gone and sometimes come back again, but Hexbear remains.
2. People used to be nice here and treat each other as comrades. Now there is just a culture of shallow dunks. 
Seriously? Be for real. I’m not going to deny that we love a good dunk around here, but let’s not pretend that this is a new phenomenon. It’s a big part of the culture around here that predates the site and even arguably even the subreddit. You can be free to like it or not, criticize it or not, say its productive or not, but its definitely not a new development. There’s always been a lot of love and mutual support, but also a lot of vicious arguments intracommunity arguments here. If anything I think there’s less of this now. The early posters would laugh at what passes for a struggle session around here these days. The VCJ struggle session seemed at the time like it might legitimately end the entire site.
3. This site had the potential to be a place for organizing and building something rather than just posting. 
This one is an interesting counterfactual. From the beginning there was no clear agreement on what the ultimate purpose of the site would be, and there were definitely people who saw the site as having revolutionary potential. There were also people who saw it as a place to hang out and shitpost among comrades and were skeptical of its potential for organizing. Over time, I think it’s become clear that we’re closer to the latter than the former. I’m okay with that, personally, but more than that I think it’s worth considering why despite having a lot of smart, determined people on the site, organizing never really materialized, or if it ever had that potential in the first place.
4. People used to post effort posts and stuff and now its just a bunch of shitposting. 
It’s always been mostly shitposting. This is one of my first comments on this site. It’s hard to say if there really used to be more effort posts or not, but what’s stopping you from writing an effort post if you feel like Hexbear needs more of them? I’m doing it right now, and so can you.
One thing that really has changed is that we used to have more comrades actively working on developing the site. Hopefully more people will step up to do that (not me though because I can’t code).
In conclusion, Hexbear is mostly, for better or worse, as it always has been. Enjoy your time here without worrying about whether it measures up to some imagined glorious past. If there’s something you feel is lacking, step up and contribute it. This site is nothing more or less than the sum of our contributions.
Yes, it could look like unions and protests and reading groups.
It could also look like Land Back. It could look like FNB, MADR, or any number of similar mutual-aid models. It could look like prisoner solidarity. It could look like community gardens. It could look like cooperative housing collectives. It could look like local political campaigns, whether to repeal oppressive ordinances, crack down on slumlords, or get better transit. If you're good at the political campaigns, it could look like winning a controlling stake in a small city's government and actually cutting the police budget. It could look like getting a critical mass of people together to picket a small-business tyrant withholding wages from a worker. It could look like starting workers' cooperatives. It could even look like buying land out in the sticks and starting a commune on it, where you can live well and still know you're not feeding the imperial beast with income taxes.
Am I saying all this from experience? You'll have to imagine. Because your praxis really is dependent on what you can think up.
yeah I mean I've seen a bunch of orgs that talk about doing stuff like that and then it just ends up being reading groups, marches & demonstrations, and charity (rebranded as mutual aid). It's whatever, I still go to these things, but it doesn't particularly feel like organizing and more like unsuccessfully expending tons of effort to reduce the speed at which people are ground to pulp.
I also want to call out community gardens especially because people talk a lot about them and might even start them up but I have never seen them reduce food insecurity. Producing food in significant quantities is very difficult and requires a lot of work/land/equipment. It is so weird because people spend so much time talking about them but they're just like symbolic I guess?
Yes, a lot of it feels like "playing defense", even some of the things I mentioned- although they are still good for meeting people, building cohesion, and getting experience.
So what would it be like to "play offense"? How do you diminish the power of the government and of capitalist corporations, in the context of the West where if you identify yourself as a fifth column, you'll get smeared and likely extrajudicially executed? And how do you combine this with the pursuit of good things in your own life?
I've found a lot of answers to these questions in my own life but it's not necessarily something you can cut and paste.