No commentary here. I just think we should find more comrades and bring them into our fold. How do we do it? Post your ideas, no matter how wild. Maybe someone will see it and get inspired and make something happen.
No commentary here. I just think we should find more comrades and bring them into our fold. How do we do it? Post your ideas, no matter how wild. Maybe someone will see it and get inspired and make something happen.
I don't think that Hexbear is going to grow because smaller communities do not exist. What do I mean by this? Hexbear is basically one community and a few smaller communities which are the megathreads, but still basically the same community. Nobody actually takes the time to browse each board individually. If a post doesn't show up on the front page of "all", then it is basically invisible and dies quickly. This limitation means around 15 posts are worthy of engagement at any given moment and half them are engagement bait spam posts.
Communities aren't given the opportunity to form. You have to jump through hoops to create a board and then repeating my previous point, people don't browse individual boards.
Because Hexbear is basically one big comm, many people seem to have the idea that they have to like every post on like a personal preference level. People get mad about the fakenews comm because it doesn't match their taste of humor. There have been many times where I have posted a video on the video board and someone will comment that they didn't watch the video but they're mad about the video or they say they don't watch videos. People who aren't interested in the subject of a board should not post on that board. This kind of behavior is reinforced by lacking individual comms, users only browsing one big comm ie all/active, and lacking moderators for niche interests.
The way that reddit was able to grow is that there are so many niche sub boards with users who have niche interests and moderators who curate the boards because they have the shared interest. If someone posts on a history subreddit that they hate learning about history, then they get banned from that history subreddit.
Hexbear has people with many different personal preferences, who can still overall agree on politics. Some people don't like certain memes or certain videos. If you don't like a certain thing, you can choose to not engage with it.
There is a "fight for the frontpage". Every user is either trying to get on to the frontpage or bullying people for making posts they don't want to see on the frontpage. The solution should be to severely limit the frontpage so that it forces user to find smaller communities that fit their interests. This is already happening with the megathreads, but lemmy is a link aggregator software and is not really designed to work this way. Limit the frontpage to 5-10 "official" comms and hide every other comm from the front page. Hide badposting, fakenews, gossip, slop, etc. People who think fakenews is funny can still browse the comm and nobody gets angry about being tricked. Allow users to make niche comms which do not show up on the front page.
This also would solve the problem of the confusion of which comm posts should be made on. The current way of thinking is that posts should be posted to specific boards based on the assigned topic of the sub board. When people are fighting for the frontpage, they don't put much thought into which board a post is made on because the audience is all the same. If most boards are hidden from the front page, people will choose which board to post a link on depending on which group of people they think will want to see the post.
This isn't entirely true. The trans and vegan comms are definitely operating as independent communities, anime fluctuates back and forth a bit, it's sort of almost on the edge of being useful as its own thing but isn't quite.
So there's certainly potential for independent communities within the space.
Genuinely haven't seen this at all.
This will be completely counterproductive to what you want to achieve. You will completely marginalise the exposure of small comms to larger numbers of people, and in doing so you will eliminate the ability for those small comms to grow. Communities grow by being seen by people that might have an interest in them, this requires their exposure.
I think this is fine. Let the "market" make any manner of comms and let the ones people are interested in rise to the top. Switch from digital central-planning of comms to digital dengism. HEXBEAR REFORM AND OPENING UP.
It won't be an issue to police anything that is harmful.
I really want Lemmy to consider more stylisation of comms as a feature. Individual stylisation of subreddits enables more unique and individual communities. It also makes it MUCH more obvious to a user when they're in a different space and should abide by different behavioural norms to the wider site rather than just being a belligerent aggressive chapo in any and all spaces(i am guilty of this).
I gave examples. I post in the videos comm and people comment that they didn't watch the video and that people shouldn't watch videos. I post in the games comm and people post that they don't play games and that people shouldn't play video games. I post in the music comm and people comment that they don't listen to music and that people shouldn't listen to music.
"Fight for the front page" is an observed behavior based on the fact that posts die if they are not visible on the front page. One of the reasons that the megathreads even exist is because people were upset about their posts not having visibility. You can observe the behavior yourself on your posts. In my experience if a post doesn't get at least 1 comment and 10 upvotes per hour, then it will die within the next hour. If a post gets 40 upvotes in 4 hours and then the next hour does not get any, it will remain at 40 forever.
Look at the front page at any given moment and it's littered low effort attention seeking posts like badposting. The algorithm shows posts with the most active comment sections on the active page, which is why struggle sessions always show up highest. Engagement bait gets the most comments.
You mentioned that the trans comm is active and I mentioned that the boards with megathreads do have their own confined subcommunity. The trans comm has 40 posts in the last month. The badposting comm has 140 posts in the last week. So the badposting (spam) comm has 15 times the posting rate as the trans comm. This is because the trans comm is confined to a megathread. The trans comm is a good board. The badposting comm is spam and attention seeking. So why is the good board confined but the spam board is unlimited? It should be the other way around. The trans comm should have the higher post rate than the spam comm. Good comms should be encouraged to have more posts.