We've currently got a spambot talking about making $12k a month while working only 11 hours a week. The bot doesn't realize that we're trying to do even more than that for everybody. We're an obscure and fairly custom website so I'm wondering how it even got on here.
Did somebody have to program it just for Hexbear? Is it a Lemmy spambot that found our site? Are spambots now sophisticated enough to sign up to a site like ours without custom programming? Did anybody spend human effort to spam our site? I've realized I don't know much about how spambots work and would love to hear from somebody who does if we've got somebody like that here.
As for a solution, we could make our own CAPTCHA system that displays historical communist leaders and you have to select the ones that were revisionists.
Aren't we like... THe biggest lemmy instance?
Isn't lemmygrad or whatever the ML one is called larger?
I'd say it has about 20% of the active members, if that. Moves a lot more slowly. And that's after the new members from gzd
They do have a lot more "communities", but that's because dessalines doesn't want to lock down community creation.
GZD will blow up when the sub actually dies. I think it will initially be big but then go through the same kinds of teething issues Hexbear did with struggle sessions and the team trying to figure out how to handle it and not have internal emotional breakdowns or loss of morale.
Then it will probably settle at roughly similar numbers.
Hexbear has more chance to move forwards as it has more chance to expand successful independent hobby communities that aren't just politics. Lemmygrad's name alone says "we are about politics" and will stifle the development of non-political communities. Several sites block .ml domains for spam too and google probably assigns it lower authority in search rankings due to lack of trust, Hexbear's .net is doing very well on the other hand with 400k+ visits to the site per month coming from search results.
This partly depends on their userbase's interests and what skillsets exist within it too though, some luck involved.
I think the dismantling of gzd was different to cth. The ban/quarantine scare had the effect of a ban, and now the community is kinda split between a couple of discords, lemmy, a couple of element channels, a couple of telegram channels, as well as the original subreddit (which now has different mods I think and way less energy tbh).
I think I could probably write up a reflection on how community bans from mainstream social media do neuter a lot of the energy of communities (as hazy as online communities are), especially since the big conversations about banning fascist subreddits and deplatforming from way back when.
Call it 'once bitten, twice shy'
I think with federation, lemmygrad could have hobby-ish satellite servers that maintain a similar posting standard (but they really need to drop the flagship instance, it's a cesspit). Assuming gzd falls on reddit, their server cluster could get bigger than us over time. With federation on hexbear we could even be part of organizing that server cluster, but until that happens I think we'll maintain a static active user count.
Careful, the user count here is not static, it's at an equilibrium between losses and gains. The core community of heavy posters obviously knows and recognises one another but there's regularly new users popping up with bad takes or occasionally good.
The count here can go in either direction and that equilibrium is luck if anything and a poor decision could send it down or some very minor optimisation could send it on its way upwards. The main issue facing Hexbear is answering the question "Why should I make an account?" to the lurkers. There are currently 450k unique visitors per month, a lot of people are visiting Hexbear without an account and simply need to be given an adequate reason to make an account. Right now the only reasons are "to comment", "to vote" and "to sub to comms for a custom experience", the latter of which not being a large incentive until we grow considerably in size. Answering this question with the right tweaks can and will send the figure upwards.
I think hex is at a critical mass of generating content while still having a small community feel. The Timelines and subscription system on here is kinda broken from being inherited from early Lemmy versions so you're not going to get a lot of customization from membership. Commenting seems to be the primary draw, and the genuine good vibes from the community fosters good commenting etiquette which promotes a wider variety of people to post. On reddit you get shouted down by libs until the only content left is pretty stale. Someone here mentioned yesterday how a megathread for a sub with 8mil followers only had 25 comments where ours regularly tops 500 when refreshed daily. It gives the impression that people prefer to use hexbear as a nonlinear chat app.
My impression is that if the server gets too large it becomes unstable and more difficukt to moderate and administrate. So we get more banwaves and struggle sessions in periods of high activity. And in periods of low activity you just have to wait for big political news for people to come back because you don't find our political takes anywhere else.
If there were multiple communicating servers of roughly ~1000 active users each, it would be less of a load on each one's administration and software. As the site grows I'm seeing little instabilities in how pages load here and there.
That's where community devolves into separate comms with independent cultures. A rough sitewide socialist culture can be maintained while allowing independent communities to devolve into their own thing with their own culture, identity and growth. Each one of these communities itself becomes a force for growth through quality, which attracts.
I don't agree that hex is at that critical mass though, that mass is 50,000 subscribers over on reddit with an active community along the lines of the 10-9-1 rule, which is something Hexbear is definitely also adhering to roughly. Hex isn't there yet.
The actual transition into the popup of those independent communities with their own identity is probably the most dangerous moment for the site though, given the nature of Lemmy it's just as possible for communities to split into their own instance. If that becomes how Lemmy federations play out in the longterm it will stifle growth because platforms will stop trying to grow as they each slowly realise there's no point in trying due to the splits. I raise this as a problem because it's a problem for large discord servers that have multiple independent communities within them. The technical barriers to doing this might stop it though as setting up a new Lemmy instance is not nearly as simple as discord servers and it basically never will be.
50k signups sounds reasonable-ish but if you mean 50k active users the software/hardware will give out before that. Hex isn't being actively developed and doesn't have a lot of the code optimizations vanilla has.
I don't see how this would stifle growth. Federation allows for communication between servers with a sort of porosity that discord servers aren't capable of. If hex remained unable to federate I could see this being an issue. But seeing how this plays out on mastodon, a similar situation is a server being "full" and closing new signups because they reach hardware limits, which rarely if ever causes that server to collapse.
Generally, users intending toward that server will try a different one in-network and sub to their friends/parasocialites and talk to them anyway. In a similar way, lemmy users from feddit.de can sub to lemmygrad comms if they so desire (which is also what I do). So if lemmygrad ever closed itself to signups you could simply join feddit and sub all their comms and get a similar enough experience (except your Local TL will be different).
I don't understand why we'd have this mindset? It's not the goal of Fedi sites to make money so it's not like we're doing SEO and user demographic profiling like a bunch of ghouls. :porky-happy:
If users are content talking to each other, which they currently are, capitalistic style growth is a stupid metric to aim for. Local TLs should be manageable instead of marketable so that long-term users such as we see as being the majority of hex continue to stick around for years and talk to their friends. If that close-knit site culture didn't exist, most of us wouldn't stick around. I wouldn't.
I know you have past experience with this sort of thing, but if you look at fedi growth like a marketing venture, the explosive growth of services like mastodon simply won't make sense. Masto, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Peertube, and Friendica have nothing to sell you. Yet Mastodon has millions of users across thousands of servers and everyone else on the fedi is trying to copy their success. But masto has literally zero features with algorithms designed to guide the user to a specific social network and half the time discovery features are broken or turned off due to server load.
What makes masto work is simply the fact that you can organically join conversations no matter what server you're from, and eventually turn those conversations into connections with other users. It's what keeps people there, and people trying to sell you something don't last long.
The same old trick of always: to reply to a bad take. :bait:
I'm doing my part of luring people to make accounts with my dogshit takes
:freedom-and-democracy:
I think those reasons to make an account are good. I don't see the need to force people to make an account of they don't want to comment or vote - I don't see any reason to make people make accounts that never participate, with the only benefit being an increase in account numbers -- without increasing activity. It's fine as it is I think. Unless the Koch brothers want us to exceed our 3rd quarter account number targets or they'll pull funding.
Not about forcing them, it's about giving more reasons, forcing people to get accounts sucks but you can increase reasons to get an account without any kind of horrible walls (looking at you twitter and instagram). A barrier to participation is simply not owning an account and if you can break that down with a non-participant via another means then you can remove a barrier that would lead to a casual response to something, once they've made their first tiny comment they're likely to cross a resistance threshold that leads to more. You don't get that unless they're accounted up first though.
A couple that have come to my mind recently are "get an update when the megathread is posted" and "get an update when the hexbear news roundup bulletin is posted".
There are likely many others that can be thought of, the limit is solely on our own ability to imagine ways to increase the value of an account beyond simple comment and vote participation.
Does people still need a protonmail account to sign up?
Damn, that's a lot of feds.
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Hexbear is more likely to get its ass in gear with growth as it will provide new dev volunteers as well as fresh motivation to volunteer team members who are ultimately entirely fuelled by momentum and the motivation derived from it. You see volunteer teams do big chunks of their work in bursts that come from a motivational booster period and then momentum that follows, then you often see quieter periods followed by other momentum periods.