Hexbear has been getting a lot more attention and activity as of late, and while it is very fun to dunk on the new people posting on the site in bad faith, a post to appreciate the new good faith users contributing to the site seems like a great idea.
So, what new users do you appreciate, and what should other potential new users do to get the same reception?
Hexbear appreciation comment:
My instance doesn't defederate as a general rule. It has its upsides and downsides -- I still have dbzer0 and lemmygrad, but I also have to put up with occasional bullshit from exploding heads and similar. Gotta say it's nice having you folks pop up in my feed to balance out the bad takes.
See, I didn't know that and randomly picked sdf.org when some of the other instances were having tech issues and growing pains. It quickly became my "primary" account and in all this drama I've learned that I was very lucky in my pick. I definitely appreciate the viewpoints I see from hexbear users.
I’ve learned a lot from lurking the unfettered conversation that happens here, subjects that I’ve never heard of discussed in great detail. The shitposting is next level. Just a great mix of leftie content here. Also, the site logo is fire.
I think this is the objectively correct answer
However how about for me who is sadly an older adult?
I'm no expert but I am am enthusiastic learner. It's never too late. And you have advantages that kids don't have. E.g. if you read Spanish world news, you'll recognise half the vocab because it's the same as formal English (which is mostly from Latin rather than German) or it's 'international' language (like brands and international bodies with the name in a different order). So after a little bit of study, you can read Spanish to get the gist reasonably soon.
To get that start, Language Transfer Spanish is a great free course and will give you a big leg up. (Just be sure to start the playlist at the first episode as the SoundCloud link sometimes starts halfway through!)
Do you speak any other languages?
Here are some answers I've given others:
- Learning languages, step-by-step
- Listening-Reading (LR) method (this works with any language)
- Summary of the LR method
- Some tips for making your own Anki decks (spaced repetition cards) if you fancy that
- Some tips on playing games and using word lists to learn vocabulary
Happy to answer questions if you have any. Here or in !learnspanish@lemmygrad.ml or tag me.
Everyone I know who is trying to learn a language as an adult uses duolingo, but I think that's more out of convenience and less because it's actually the best way to learn.
The best way is still probably from a native language speaker who has been teaching a class for a while.
No, Duolingo will absolutely not teach you the language. It’s use is that of a glorified vocabulary tool
The only folks I've known to learn Spanish as adults have all worked back-of-house
A friend of mine is a Spanish first language speaker and when I visit them the next time I would like to have a rudimentary language skill set, just to be nice and show appreciation to them.
worked back-of-house
Does this idiom mean working in areas without customer contact like back office, kitchen, maintenance, IT, technical stuff, labs etc?
Woooow how original, a gay hexbear. Sheesh, get some new material
spoiler
jk I love all my comrades, gay, trans, bi, and (may I be forgiven for uttering such profanity) straight
Gotta say I have much enjoyed my time here so far
No weird socially conservative "communism"
No state department brained liberal "socialism"
Only good takes and unironically based people
No weird socially conservative “communism”
this is a subset of the western leftist they attack. i know this is counterintuitive. they're basically a subset of breadtubers who play antihero / heel roles
they do a great job of making "NATOids" feel good about themselves
jackson hinkle was recruited by tulsi gabbard a US military psyops person
It’s surprisingly hard to find a place that doesn’t veer into patsoc silly reaction or radlib ignorance. I’ll even put up with a bunch of leftcoms or anarchists or anything by else as long as they are anti-imperialist and don’t make one of the two errors above
You guys are the cool commie friends I wish to have, and I'm sad I haven't met you guys before. Such a happy place to get some
GOOD OL' MURICANfreedom from all the lib crap we endure daily ❤️✨My only regret is that I wasn’t here sooner! I missed the CTH discord but now I’m glad to be back in the same boat
Nah, I was really lazy when picking my name the first time I tried to learn mandarin, but I did keep it despite everything. Happy coincidence I’ve been Dong on most sites for a while now.
Been lurking for a few months but this is first online space I haven't gotten those fucked vibes from
I'm still getting through my list of theory so I don't feel confident joining certain conversations yet but I'd like to think being open-minded to deprogramming all the western propaganda bullshit I've ingested over a lifetime has helped me discover this community
I wish hexbear had gone with the name lib.rehab, because finding this place has done so many wonders for getting the worms out of my brain
Don't feel like you can't join conversations because you don't have all the theory down comrade. We've all got plenty gaps in our knowledge and people are pretty cool about explaining things if required.
Sometimes the best discussions are kept going and reach greater depths because someone asks an 'obvious' question or contributes a 'basic' point, too. The simple shift in perspective can help everyone to see things from a different angle, which is hard to do even if it's the crux of diamat. And we all learn when a question or contribution prompts an even more knowledgeable comrade to swing by with more theory, etc.
Just make sure to qualify your statements and ask questions in earnest. I appreciate they aren’t making declarations without investigation
Say the wrong thing some time. Folk will set you right. Its a bit rough on the ego but nothing stamps out brain worms quite like a stern rebuke and as soon as you say "oh shit you are right" everything is good.
I'd almost consider it like an online anxiety lol. Mustering up the strength to not revert back to being a lurker after not expressing a thought succinctly and powering through the posting to stamp those worms out.
I had that until hexbear. Right now I'm possibly getting torn apart by a comrade who seems to have raead more than me. Otherwise how do I figure out what I don't know? And this comrade is cool about it
It always helps when it’s an actual discussion instead of a bad faith debate
Otherwise how do I figure out what I don’t know?
A related question: do you ever get that feeling where you say something (if you're lucky you might stop yourself first) about something that you learned before becoming a commiewithoutorgans and realise it's ludicrous? I do that so often. It's like only the new memories and information have been re-framed. Much of the old memories and information is sat in an archive in the back of my mind, complete with a perfectly intact liberal outlook.
Back to your question: when this happens to me it takes a [span of time] to realise that although I have an answer, I don't actually know what I'm talking about. If yours wasn't a rhetorical question, I don't have a great answer other than to say: try to recall where you learned what you think you know and when. If the answer isn't The Collected Works of Lenarx Dengping and/or 'recently', I try to err on the side of caution.
Oh I daily (maybe slight exaggeration) think about why I think/know something and realize it's absolutely baseless and either drop that or try to figure out where I went wrong, depending on the situation. Just yesterday I was discussing with my SO how an oversimplified understanding of linguistics had led to my belief that, for example " 'TWAS" was only to be understand as a shortened "it was" and I remember feeling proud of the realization at like 12. But now I disagree, as 'twas has very specific context in which it is used, not for all "it was"s and therefore I was proud to remove it from all context and analyse it nakedly as opposed to seeing it's relations to other words. Very small example but I haven't been organizing/working for a few weeks so it happens less hahaha
That's a great example and exactly the kind of thing I meant. My mind is littered with them! Although now there's one fewer: I hadn't considered that you can't replace every "it was" with "'twas".
There's just so much room for ever increasing nuance. Always something else that looks completely different if it's understood as a relation. Sometimes it's big ideas but not always (or often, really, as they're likely the first ones to reconsider).
I envy future generations who will never have to start the first however many decades of life learning an outlook that doesn't correspond with reality. They're going to achieve so much. It's hard to imagine.
Or go back and revisit something you loved from childhood and realize it’s shitty and reactionary and you didn’t have any idea at the time.
Dark Knight, CGP Grey, a bunch of anime (like 99% of it), Lion King, etc etc. There’s so many things dripping with ideology and it doesn’t even cross your mind until you have a Marxist lens shift
fr!
I dread consuming old books, music, and movies etc that I loved when I was younger in case I realise it was trash and I ruin the memory. It's a shame because I want to re-live those memories. But you have to balance it: is it a risk you want to take?
You know, I gotta say the whole Lemmy vibe has fixed a lot of that issue for me. I had some 500k karma on Reddit from comments, but I deleted all of them within a week of posting because the anxiety got to me. I wanted to be entirely transient there. Part of the conversation, but as soon as the conversation was over, gone.
Lemmy is a smaller more community-feel community in general, and other than a few bad actors, it’s really peaceful here.
I have wild amounts of anxiety about tons of things, and I don’t feel weird participating here (even without deleting all my content regularly!)
Once you get through the “I’m posting to help everyone here” barrier, which that silly message on posts with no comments helps a ton with, it’s such a good space to exist. Even if you don’t agree, if you do so from a place of open communication and accept what others want to share with you, you’ll be totally fine.
Thanks, this gives me a lot more confidence in just going with the flow. Some of the back and forths here have already been pleasant too
Better yet, if you're not confident you have the right answer, say that instead of pretending you have all the best takes and then digging in when people disagree. You'll get an even better reception.
Even after reading loads it's still possible to be wrong. It's good to be humble and see knowledge not as an individual thing but as something that it takes a community to work out. That helps a little with the hits to my ego, anyway. It's still hard not to take a stand due to the way liberalism shapes the mind before it's freed.
The dialectical process of discovering knowledge is awesome until it arrives at something I disagree with. Then its bullshit!!!
Is As We Have Always Done By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on that theory list?
holy shit, the GOAT joined our website
also don't worry, we're fucking wrong all the time. we then talk it out. it's how we grow
Very excited to have you aboard!
No ableism
Don't forget, if you need to you can disengage from a conversation at any time, just say disengage if you ever need to, if users don't respect that they get banned on the spot o7
Please post, please ask questions, and remember
John Brown did nothing wrong unlimited bloodshed against Slave Owners
just say disengage if you ever need to
Little corollary: this is not to be used as a "let me post a wall of text and call you names then say 'disengage' and call the mods on you if you reply" tool. You have to actually disengage. Learning how to do that is good.
🥹
this and no downvotes seem like the best things ever to my anxious ass holy shit
On Lemmy.world the downvotes mean your triggering the cognitive dissonance - that’s my kink.
Omg I wish everywhere did that.
I had a conversation earlier that I wanted to disengage with because the person was strawmanning me and it was clear, after pointing out to them already that’s what they were doing, I wasn’t going to have a productive discussion, so I said I was no longer going to interact and got 2 reply meaaages to it, basically trying to egg me on to re-engage, one of which said it was ironic I was telling him I was disengaging.. Simply because I told him I was doing so?? (Which I did not respond to, for obvious reasons)
I love that that will be respected here. 💜
I’ve been on Lemmy.world for a month. I’ve wanted to see this place and Genzedong.
God damn lol I don't remember young Chomsky but I do remember him in his
50s60s (holy shit mans is old)One of the major founders of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which was the precursor of the Communist Party of Russia, Georgii Plekhanov led a life-long struggle alongside his comrades in growing the class consciousness of the workers and peasants of the Russian Empire. He supported the Bolsheviks over the Mensheviks and was a respected figure of authority by Lenin - even though they had disagreements - and the Communists.
While I'm not acquainted with any of his works nor knowledgeable on his biography, I do know that he had his good moments in history and his not so good moments in history, and that's okay.
Question: Is anarchism an older person thing? It's starting to feel like all the kids are Maoists
No not really. The young ones are mostly just liberals with a rebellious streak that need guidance though.
Though I guess that could also be said of zoomer Maoists. They are sometimes just as insufferable especially in places where one is trying to educate people and they constantly do the
"Well ackshually China, Vietnam and Cuba are revisionist capitalist states" which literally does nothing when trying to explain to liberals some of the gains of past socialist movements.I feel I’m an anarchist. I’m still learning. I like the idea of council communism or implementing a cybersyn planned economy. Socialism is inevitable due to climate change.
I’m usually the only boomer with leftist views- the token one. The devil’s weed is still illegal where I live.
Idk the new users names yet but I like the one with the pfp that looked like a queer scarecrow I think
I welcome fresh blood. Cant wait for them to start their first struggle session.
Finally made an account after lurking for the past few months. This community is one of the few corners of the internet that doesn't give me psychic damage. Hello, comrades, thank you for the warm welcome and for being cool people on a cool bear website.
I appreciate @ewichuu@hexbear.net! She seems super cool and sweet and like she's here to listen and learn what we're about, I better not see y'all being mean to her
uncritical support to ewichuu for being so nice she actually reads my rambling
Speaking for myself here, but one thing that always makes me happy is seeing more users who are into Star Trek, furries, into hobbies, or any combination of those.
Star Trek and furries are great. You've been very welcoming. Hopefully more hobby and niche content is making it through now that y'all have run the bot. The lemmy devs are also toying with the algorithms to give smaller comms more weight for visibility.
The part about smaller comms is especially great news imo. We have quite a few comms here that could use more love.
Welcome comrades and hopefully soon-to-be comrades.
I've had some really nice exchanges with new users and those from other instances and look forward to more and more of it.
Even those who have just dipped their toes in to ask questions and then backed out presumably because it wasn't for them or didn't like the answers - you won't read this probably but thanks for being on earnest and cool about it.
love seeing allies from other instances. 
braver than the troops
when a hexbear spots liberals and nazbols
look at this bear
