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.
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.
I agree, but right now the alternative is the status quo which is literally doing nothing, which is achieving nothing other than maintaining the equilibrium. My goal is revolution and I'll end up on other sites that are pursuing growth to achieve greater influence and more socialists to achieve that instead of sites that exist purely to entertain themselves and their clique of people that actively do not want to grow because they're worried it might hurt the vibe. I agree there's a balance to be found between the two, right now Hex isn't at it.