I'm a LG user who was introduced to HB after Oct 7th and so I'm not quite aware of the full history of the community. I didn't want to comment on the initial announcement beyond making a meme about the humorous "coincidence" of it being posted on Eighteenth Brumaire because it felt like a fait accompli. Since there has been more introspection, I want to properly throw in my voice on the chance it is possible to strike while the iron is hot.

@CARCOSA@hexbear.net, I deliberately went through your past posts before writing this to reinforce my view of how much you've done for this site. Your efforts to support the messy federation process, your defederation explanation posts (which I fully supported in that case). You care about this community, and this is why you actually stepping down would be, without exaggeration, disastrous for the site. Your absence would cede ground to the more "reddit brained" members that seem to be present on the team who see their role as more akin to a reddit power mod talking down to the filthy proles rather than as comrades taking refuge from an alienating world.

I don't particularly have an opinion on the closure of the comms nor on the attempt to foster a new site culture. The real principal issue as I see it is that a "class struggle," unironically, is being promoted within the site culture via the mod/admin-community dynamic showcased in the original announcement thread. I only really post on the newsmega and when I talk there and see Mods and Admins, I only see them as fellow comrades who simply have an extra responsibility of taking out the chuds and terfs. They've treated me in the same manner as well. As this was a leftist community, in the year I've been here, I had the feeling that everyone was an equal in the shared struggle of alienation from our deeply hostile societies that have no place for leftists (and especially LGBT leftists).

The noticeable thing is the team closing ranks and making one person the messenger. There is no reason for this. The update post made with the positions of each mod clearly shows that everyone on the team has a stance on the topic and they simply are not comfortable vocalizing it to the community themselves. The point of closing the r/SLS comms was to foster a more "ideal" community culture appropos of leftists but this ideal is a contradiction of how the team seemingly is itself uncomfortable with walking the walk. Apparently there is a private mod chat and I have no doubt the team is currently discussing the community response amongst themselves there, likely commiserating about how the community "just doesn't get it." This is inevitably going to foster resentment between the mod/admin and general community "classes." You can already see it in how some (not all) mods responding in the thread already take a "we the mod team" tone and thereby solidify the "class" divide.

Aren't we all (attempting, at least) to be fellow comrades here? I'm not sure what kind of mental catastrophism the team believed was going to happen if they descended down into the "masses" from the start and properly engaged with the community to push for the idea from the outset as fellow leftists rather than donning the robes of Vatican Cardinals, confining themselves indoors and the outside masses only being left to stare at the smoke color on the chimney.

HB can operate under Democratic Centralism if the mod/admin team understands properly what that system is, rather than the "Death of Stalin" anti-communist parody of it. Democratic centralism isn't "shut up, we decided this and if you disagree, you're a new Trotsky." That's the CPUSA style of "democratic centralism" where their wrecker-hijacked "Central Committee" only comes out to force the party masses to vote Democrat. Actual Democratic Centralism is where the idea is presented, the full party gets to have their say, then the decision is make and if you refuse to allow that decision some time in trial before making critiques, then yes, at that point you can be called a "new Trotsky."

In any case, the problem is now this: by highlighting the mod/admin decision-making process, given that applying for mod positions here is hardly as rigorous as climbing the ranks of the Communist Party of Cuba, what this has done is that it is going to promote people with less than noble intentions into becoming a mod, so they can join the "inner circle." Rather than becoming mods to primarily help maintain the community, fostering new comms and smacking down the chuds and terfs, these applicants will be doing so with the hope of joining into the "politburo."

Even if the applicants were all hypothetically still comrades and not wreckers, this will inevitably lead into a downward spiral. Given that those applicants will join specifically so they can be at last among the "decision makers" and so they'll resist passing down decision-making into the community and the more this happens, the more applicants with similar intentions will join. Eventually, the mod/admin team will likely become a more insular group, reinforced by the echo chamber of the internal mod chat, which could eventually turn into a sort of "dunk tank" against the community itself. More conciliatory members willing to break to help the team's message to the community might be pushed out by the pressure of being the community's target of ire, leaving only the anonymous hardliners. Over time, this could lead to a growing disdain for the opinions of the broader community. This dynamic could foster even more resentment, eventually resembling the relationship between Reddit mod teams and their communities—or, at worst, mirroring the real-world phenomenon where "cops start to see their own neighborhood as the enemy."

This kind of exaggerated hypothetical feels justified, in my view, because this isn't just any subreddit or random forum about potted plants—HB is one of the few (literally just this site and LG at this point) genuinely leftist public online platforms in the entire Western world. The stakes here are truly higher, and the consequences of these dynamics playing out could have a far more unfortunate impact on the community and its values.

Edit: Yikes, it looks like my concerns are already coming to pass less than half a day after making this comment. https://hexbear.net/post/3871189