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.
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.
Yeah not the latter.
Because your drivers of growth are users who are actively pursuing it, and the realisation that their efforts will not actually contribute to the growth of the site they care about but instead lead to the existence of some new site will demotivate them. Same reason that locking signups for a while resulted in a drop in new user signups that never recovered, it disrupted users that had a routine of advertising and then they never re-engaged that routine afterwards. You want to avoid any disruption to motivation or routine of key users engaged in that kind of activity and these tend to be an absolutely minuscule number of people, key events like a split that put a dampener on their growth pursuing activities will have a profound effect on morale, not just on those pursuing the growth but the entire site as a whole, each split event is a danger zone for a site never recovering depending on what kind of bad blood such splits generate (and they always do). This is an unproven problem though, just some pre-emptive speculation of future problems based on personal experiences that's all.
Because what is the point of the site existing if not to take measures to help do something useful for socialism. More growth means larger impact which means larger capability to do more for socialism, not to mention the donations that will eventually lead to enough to pay for much development the site needs. Socialists that don't want to grow socialist projects are just admitting they only see the project as purely entertainment, in which case we should just shut it down as it's a purely an entertainment distraction in that regard.
Profit is not the only reason to pursue growth. No matter what happens educating more socialists is a good thing, and the ultimate goal of socialists is movement growth in the first place.
Mastodon is gamified at its core. Followers are a clout metric. Pursuing the growth of followers is what drives users of Mastodon to consistently advertise Mastodon on other sites and services. It has real value too I won't entirely discount that, but you can not underplay the fact it is operating on tried and true gameification methods that haven't just worked for Mastodon but other services as well. Reddit by comparison generates (or used to generate) a lot of its growth from its moderators being incentivised to compete with alternative communities on the web, slowly edging them out and consuming their userbases. Reddit turned its independent modteams into the growth monsters that killed each internet forum for the relevant topics by making mods obsessed with making subscribers go up in a similar fashion, whereas on twitter and mastodon every single user is incentivised into chasing followers over on reddit the clout chasers are the mods in each team trying to make the sub count go up. Hex has obviously done away with almost all of these gamey features and it's... Nice. I don't dislike it. There is little reason not to pursue optimisations outside of gameification methods though if they do the important thing of adding real value and usefulness.
FYI I'm not suggesting anything as radical as we privately discussed previously, all of that was a purely hypothetical alternate site. That stuff is not suitable for Hexbear at all.
I suppose I just don't understand gamified posting because it doesn't motivate me. My ideal community would honestly be a hexbear satellite server with 10-200 active users so participation in the big stuff is optional, but I can keep track of everyone on local without forgetting their personalities and histories. I would get back into adminning to have that experience.
Yeah it does and doesn't on various people. In my experience it works on the kinds of people that actively try to become power users and it works on getting people to do their first "i'll try it out" action like making a post or comment to break the first-action barrier that leads to more activity. But yeah it's definitely not something that works on everyone, all these systems are "if it works on a % of people, even if small, it has a tangible effect on changing the balance between user churn and user gain", everything in community site growth is about taking small tiny actions to tip that balance slightly further in the positive direction.
There's a thing called Dunbar's number that might be worth reading about because you're basically referencing it. There's a bit of phrenology to it and I'm not exactly convinced it's that exact number as I've seen it vary even up to 500 depending on how groups are organised but there's some interesting ideas in the theory, there is obviously some sort of limit and it's likely a range that can be impacted upon in different ways.
Oh, yeah, I got that number from my anthropology classes and just keep referencing it because honestly if I had to write down a list of 200 people I know I'd probably start blanking out around 80-90 (if I even know that many people). My whole thing is that I'd rather know someone well than have a bunch of little fav drones following me around.
I will admit you have a point there. I suppose my worry is just how we prioritize things. Focusing only on growth like commercial sites is like burning through a lamp wick faster to get more light. Sure, you got more light, but now you've sacrificed a bunch of wick because you didn't give the fuel a chance to burn off. There needs to be a middle ground of slow burn so we can let users shine on their own, I think.
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:
Marx was a revisionist.
I mean, yes,
Pete Buttigieg is going to lead the revolutionary vanguard
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?
I did not need any email address to sign up a month ago.
Huh? Really?
Would I lie?
Idk I'm sure I had to use an email to create this account and not needing and email to do an account is pretty dumb
Oh wait I checked your username
Damn, that's a lot of feds.