Hello,
Today the !covid@hexbear.net and !doomer@hexbear.net communities were created.
As of now they are not set to appear in the /all feed so in order to see posts here you have to subscribe.
They do appear in the /all feed and will require users not wanting to see these posts to ensure they subscribe to all communities they do want to see and then change their feed to subscribed only in their settings
Please post !covid@hexbear.net or !doomer@hexbear.net appropriate posts in their respective communities.
Going forward covid/doomer posts that are not in those communities may be crossposted there & removed.
Posts that are without a content warning and/or are titled in a sensational/excessive/clickbait way will be crossposted to one of these communities & removed from the community it was originally posted in, consider using the sourced article headline with a content warning to avoid having this occur.
I know this is an inconvenience and posts restricted to those communities may not get as much engagement but for now this change is intended to help.
If you see a post in another community that may be more appropriate for !covid@hexbear.net or !doomer@hexbear.net please report them.
This post intends to discuss this change so please comment any questions, comments, or concerns regarding this. Thank you
This change is a result of user concerns raised in:
https://hexbear.net/post/166749
https://hexbear.net/post/166985
Honestly, I think we already probably have too many comms for the number of users and posts we have. A lot of the comms are quite specific and only get used rarely or by one or two users. It's good to have things be specific, but by the very same argument, then shouldn't every single post related to Canada go into c/canada, for example? Every post about China in c/sino?
How prepared are other mods to spend all day just sorting and re-sorting posts into appropriate channels? Do posters not lose interest in posting as they clarify more and more specific subjects for their thread, Usenet style? What do we do when we lose the will to sort and everything ends back up being posted into vague umbrella communities and now we have dozens of unused detritus comms that haven't had a new post in 6+ months?
I have found that in maintaining other spaces like forums and discord servers that you sort of run into this problem where you think maybe we need a new more specific channel for things, only to have channels die off. It often seems to either end up with more channels than posts, or everyone just ignoring all the channels and posting in General.
I think that a c/collapse that also encompasses climate change makes more sense than a doomer one, but I think it might be just as likely to swallow c/news and c/politics where most posts are already pretty much focused around that sort of vibe.
I think the actual right move might be to try to get people to not post extremely depressive and vague threads of wild personal speculation based on like, four Covid cases somewhere or "I'm having a bad day right now personally and this means that you are going to die a miserable death" type posts.
Tl;dr: I already have enough of a tough time trying to figure out what comm to post anything in, especially since so many are kinda dead. Maybe we should just go back to all posts being on c/main and just not post such doombait titles lmao