Proposals made are mirrored here to facilitate discussion
Proposal: Only matrix accounts verified on Hexbear are allowed to send messages in this chat, unverified accounts may react to messages to vote
Proposal: Adding a room role with the power to remove messages that rotates based on a user election
Is this similar to my proposal of a system of rotating mod appointments? If so I'm definitely in favour
No it would be specifically for a role involved with mediating proposals, site feedback, and mod action appeals not a moderator for a specific community
Proposal: Making the removal of https://discuss.online/ from the hexbear allow-list permanent
I fear this will lead to intense fragmentation as seen on other Lenny instances.
Proposal: Making the removal of https://thelemmy.club/ from the hexbear allow-list permanent
Hold on, this seems like a bad idea? Wasn't this one only defedded due to one Hexbear user abusing their sign up process? I was unaware of any issue with the instance itself.
This was an older proposal
The admin has recently changed the sign up process, and the instance was readded.
Also it was not a hexbear user, rather a long-time wrecker
I don't think any of these proposals should be implemented at this time. The last thing we need is even more sweeping changes. And I think we should consider the time of year right now:
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Winter has come/is approaching, which means many people are going to be affected by SAD, which leads to more volatile emotions including anxiety and depression.
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Around this time is also when Covid cases start to rise before peaking in January, which means there will be many people here who will be scared and angry at their plague rat relatives and friends and might take out their fear and anger at other people. This isn't right, but it is what it is.
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For people who don't have many friends and who are estranged from their families, the holiday season is actually very depressing. It's depressing to see other people spending time with their families while they are out stuck in the (figurative and literal) cold all by themselves. This loneliness sometimes translates to bitterness, and that bitterness is sometimes taken out on other people.
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To many people, the realities of a Trump presidency will finally hit like a pile of bricks on January 20, and while it's the cool (and correct) leftist analysis to say that a Trump presidency doesn't mean a whole lot will change, people's emotions are very different. You could intellectually understand that Trump isn't a whole lot different from Biden while still being emotionally scared.
All this combined together is going to lead to volatile emotions and people being more on edge. And there is evidence of this from past years:
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I remember a struggle session around late December where some dude completely melted down because he was willing to die on the "bidets are bourgeois d-word" hill. Why did he had a complete meltdown harassing users who didn't share his opinion on bidets? Because he was super drunk. And why he was drinking so much? I can't answer this but I don't think it's a coincidence that someone would be more likely to self-medicate with alcohol during winter.
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I remember another struggle session around New Years Day where there was a massive struggle session between people who think New Year Eve party goers are plague rats and people who think New Years non-party goers are shut-ins who need to touch grass. This was obviously exaggerated by Covid cases peaking in January, meaning Covid was at the forefront of many people's minds. It's why people were more willing to have a struggle session during early January instead of a struggle session on concert goers.
Frankly, I think implementing these changes now is foolish. Hexbear needs to be an island of stability as winter approaches. The last thing many people who feel more lonely, more anxious, and more emotionally irritable need is for Hexbear to be hit with another struggle session because half of the people didn't like some new change. Discussion for improvements is fine, but it's much wiser to hold off pushing out those changes until early February at the very least, which is around 9 weeks from now. By early February, the holiday season is over and Covid cases usually start to drop.
Thank you for the comment, you are absolutely correct.
We won't be making any changes in the near future, I agree with the timetable you have laid out. The comments in this post are all the proposals being currently discussed. This post is making the discussion process more transparent: mods and now users make proposals, we discuss them for varying periods of time before agreeing on a way to execute the proposal, and then we begin drafting a statement to communicate.
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Proposal: Images of text require a transcript in the post
I think that this is a great idea, idk about enforcement, but nurturing a site culture around transcripts is the right way to go imo
🇵🇸 [click me]
Please help Aya in Gaza ❤️ 🇵🇸https://gofund.me/1222af19Please help Mahmoud from Gaza ❤️ 🇵🇸https://gofund.me/5156f6e9https://www.gofundme.com/f/getting-food-for-my-brothers
https://www.gofundme.com/f/younis-family-relief-and-evacuation-from-gaza
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-yamen-undergo-surgery-in-gaza
(work in progress 🚧)
Proposal: Limit featured posts to three at maximum (1 general megathread, event (either fundraiser, bookclub or hextube), meta-post) or two featured posts a portal post where links to community megathreads and events are commented, and a meta-post
Genuine: Why? News mega, trans mega, gen mega. The disability and empoc megas too...
Some are complaining about the amount of space all the site-pinned posts take up.
Understandable but I think unpinning any of them is a bad solution, especially because I bet it would kill traffic to the empoc and disability megas.
There's a simple button to hide the me gas, can't people use that if they think there are "too many megas"?
i agree with ashinadash on this, there's already a button to hide featured posts for those who are complaining about the space being taken up.
i personally think it's great that these megas are front and center on the site. it makes gaining access to safe spaces easier and it shows that the site values those spaces. the pins drive engagement and sustain these communities on hexbear.
To anyone backing that proposal:
Those megas should be taking up space, disabled, empoc, and trans comms should be occupying space on the front page
Like /u/ashinadash said the last time these megas (especially disabled and POC) were relegated to a tiny link it effectively killed engagement in these comms until they were restored. That was for the first fundraiser (and every mega was pinned which made it fair) but unpinning those threads sends a bad message to the communities that are being relegated to a link at the bottom of the 'general' megathread that remains. A lot of the empoc users have already expressed that they don't feel comfortable engaging outside of that comm.
Personally any complaints about these comms/megas that are mostly for marginalized people "taking too much space" is sus to me because it implies there's a real Hexbear that deserves to take up space on the front page and a non-real Hexbear that doesn't. I would be very put off by this if it was to pass.
I don't think it's a coincidence that those megas being pinned front and center - especially as safe spaces - has sent a message to people from those communities and drawn them to Hexbear. The action of removing them from the front page sends the same message in the opposite direction. Those pinned megas are what structurally differentiates Hexbear as an intersectional social media website - it's working, and I don't think saving a number of users from the labour of having to scroll past (or click "-/+") is worth it or a valid reason to change that.
Hexbear is better as a seamless hybrid of chatrooms (pinned megas, esp for marginalized people) and Lemmy algorithm driven posts and comms.
I personally don't care much for mega threads. I don't like the pattern of vibe they promote, it is not as interesting or useful as regular topic-ed forum posts. At least this place isn't full of permanent megas that go on for years; those are the worst especially when they are meant to collect information for later retrieval. I would not miss weekly megas if they were gone or drastically reduced.
However it's clear that they are a popular and core part of the site. For whatever reason which remains inexplicable to me, people luv them. I am trying to go with the flow.
In terms of being less overwhelming of the other content, I think there are smaller changes that could be made. Here are some ideas hopefully for discussion by people who are more tuned in to the situation.
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It might be that everyone doesn't know they can minimize the featured posts at least on desktop. And it has some amount of persistence, it remains collapsed when you reload. I only realized recently. Easy to miss as you scroll by. So should probably tell the whiners like me that they are not helpless.
- I don't know how to implement it but a collapse that works from the side of the whole box instead of only from the top would be nice, but that's probably outside the scope of hexbear.
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Terser dates: "November 25th to December 1st, 2024" is very long. What about "Nov 25 -> Dec 1, 2024" or even "11/25-12/1 '24" or some other format
- Shout out to "EM POC WEEKLY THREAD 11/25/24" --- is the second date even needed? There is a little text in the post heading that says "6 days ago" so if it's a weekly thread you know how long is left. Maybe there are contexts like apps where the info is displayed differently so 2nd date still needed?
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Don't need to specify it's the "new" thread, that it's a "thread", or for "discussion", that it's "general" etc. People know what kind of website this is.
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Do they need to have big cover photos? If the pics were put into the markdown of the post, they wouldn't automatically take up the whole page. Right now, in Jeroba, the official lemmy android app, there isn't a way to minimize these so they are always on top of everything else. It only makes sense to browse a site like this with images set to auto expand generally. But these posts that are the same all week, I don't see the point. Why do I need to look at Alan Moore in such detail, for a whole week? See below for example.
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Personally I would prefer if there was some way to toggle the prominence of the featured posts. In desktop, I tried with developer tools to see if I could resolve the above issue via a user style. Best I could do was hide the images permanently (
.featured-posts .img-expanded { display: none; }) .
Rather it makes sense to assume that the featured content will be loaded at the top, in full, every time.
For scale
Used firefox responsive design view to emulate the current site as it appears on a mobile phone browsing /all. This is how far you need to go before reaching anything new.
Logged out default:
Show
logged in with "auto expand media" toggled on:
Show
So this is kind of a post about what color the bike shed should be painted lol.
Edit I did test for the above using web dev tools: Made all the titles pretty concise. Only got 10% shorter scroll till new content. Much less than expected. (This was images toggled off.) So I guess write the date as extravagantly as you feel like it.
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