No commentary here. I just think we should find more comrades and bring them into our fold. How do we do it? Post your ideas, no matter how wild. Maybe someone will see it and get inspired and make something happen.
By continuously purging and fragmenting all the comms until every user has their own
I got here years ago because someone posted a link on reddit. I think it was on r/trueanon. Are people still doing that?
I feel like posting HB links is most effective during periods of decades happening. People want the posts. But the last thing I'm thinking about when things get wild is "I should post HB links on reddit".
I do think that while the shit posting part of this site is great, and honestly what drew me in, it's the effort posts and theory discussion which kept me here. I think this component of this site is lacking promotion. Effort posting gets buried under the nth slop post. It looks like we now have unlimited pinned posts, so maybe pinning a recent effort post for a few days would drive more engagement there and promote that kind of posting more.
I feel like if we did start to market HB or whatever, posting links to effort and theory posts is not a bad idea. While the general vibe here is shitposty (and I think thats generally good because it keeps things casual), there aren't many places on the internet to have in depth theory discussions. I think part of this is there is a kind of ideological consistency here, even if we don't always agree, that provides a nice basis on which to have these discussions. (and tbh there seems to be less shit flinging I those kinds of posts)
Idk, I like this site. I would be sad to see it die, but I also don't think it will anytime soon even without much growth.
One of the primary reasons I started lurking, then posting on Hexbear a few years ago (this current alt is new) is that it was actually active. Baby communist me very well could have become active on a number of discords, raddle, or lemmygrad but chose to stay on Hexbear due to its high activity. It’s not boring here, you’re not seeing the same posts for weeks and weeks. We must keep posting comrades, don’t let the struggle session get in the way of that.
I think the fakenews and badposting sections should be banned. There are a lot of people that browse the site on mobile while not logged in and they get bombarded by badpost after badpost that are the lowest of the low when it comes to effort (e.g. "instead of getting swol why don't we get swoletariot????"). Even in this thread someone posted "I post my butt and call the website OnlyButts." Seriously, wtf. If not banned, they should be hidden by default unless explicitly opted into. Just make them NFSW so they don't show up while browsing while logged out.
Also, the site should try to be more like lemmygrad in terms of being serious about things. There are too many posts that just reek of a weird mix of ironic and non-irony. What I mean is, people will be serious when it's a topic they personally are invested in, but on other topics, they just resort to childish toilet humor and say that this is nothing more than a shitposting forum. It's the schrodinger's hexbear: topic I care about = super serious get all mods on defcom4, topic i don't care about = dIdN'T yOu KnOw that this isn't real life, it's just the internet hurrr durr it's a shitposting forum. Imagine all the global south comrades looking in on this. It's just not a good look, and yes what I'm saying is that there should be at least some degree of optics for fuck's sake.
Another thing, people need to take seriously the other pipelines that draw potential comrades away. One serious one is the joe rogan, lonely male pipeline. They may be alienated by capitalism, but on a personal level they are looking for advice on how to maybe get a date or something. Maybe some actual concrete advice (e.g. start hitting the gym, fix your hair, hygiene, conversational tips, actual dating advice). Like Bell Hooks is all good, but we can't just tell people "here read this book, even tho most ppl in society don't really read anymore." Like some actual decent agitprop that isn't READING A FUCKING BOOK OVER 100 PAGES FOR FUCKS SAKE. Like a short tiktok, then transition into shorter youtube vids, and then maybe recommending a book. Most ppl here don't even read communist theory so why such a big ask for potential comrades to do so much investment. I hate to say it, but you gotta use some kind of sales principles like not blasting someone with a huge investment up front without giving anything in return.
Lastly (and there are so many more i'm just tired of typing) the mods shouldn't poo poo this site as a way to organize. They always respond with "this is just a nondescript hole in the wall lefting shitposting site not a subsitute for real life organizing." Motherfucker the reason ppl are here is because they are isolated/alienated and maybe lack the social cirlces (or social skills to create one) to do real life organizing work. And patronizing them by saying "join an org" is just that, patronizing. The stupid ass Jan 6 guys met up due to internet shit, so why not have a disciplined "organizing" comm or something?
How do we grow Hexbear?
By individually inviting cool people we might randomly find around the internet.
We don't need a huge community to be a worthwhile community and it's evident that the staff are struggling to cope with the current pace of posting right now anyway. So we don't need to strategise about growing the site in some systematic way.
Let it happen organically. This isn't a growth-at-any-cost sort of site and every cool site I've been a part of that fell to the impulse to grooow eventually ended up a shitshow full of users who don't know/remember/understand the original purpose of the site, the history behind various rules and site culture etc.
Let corporate owned sites compete for user share. Let us avoid that impulse.
I get the impression we should be thinking more about user RETENTION than anything. This is the first day in a while where I've woken up from a fucked up nightmare, opened "my comfy favourite site" hexbear and then immediately felt a wave of dread at what I might find on the party agenda for the day.
And sure enough another pinned comment, another struggle, more upset users, more shitty bad faith replies to upset users from moderators.
The only growth desirable I see being valuable is in MAYBE federating with other like-minded sites and perhaps networking with similar efforts using different protocols and platforms, like for example matrix servers that share most of our positions and values but not actually administered by the same people who administer hexbear. Just an example. I dunno. I'm tired and grumpy and sad and adding MOAR USERS doesn't assuage any of my fears about the state of affairs here.
The solution is obvious. We must transition to HeptBear. Adding another vertex is the only way to grow the website. We must keep adding vertices until we approach infinite vertices at which point HexBear will become CircleBear,
enclosingincluding everyone on Earth in it.Of course this plan carries the risk that there will be a struggle session (perhaps several!) on whether to use Latin or Greek prefixes for Bear which will inevitably cause splits and a loss of vertices. However I think it is a risk worth taking.
I don't think that Hexbear is going to grow because smaller communities do not exist. What do I mean by this? Hexbear is basically one community and a few smaller communities which are the megathreads, but still basically the same community. Nobody actually takes the time to browse each board individually. If a post doesn't show up on the front page of "all", then it is basically invisible and dies quickly. This limitation means around 15 posts are worthy of engagement at any given moment and half them are engagement bait spam posts.
Communities aren't given the opportunity to form. You have to jump through hoops to create a board and then repeating my previous point, people don't browse individual boards.
Because Hexbear is basically one big comm, many people seem to have the idea that they have to like every post on like a personal preference level. People get mad about the fakenews comm because it doesn't match their taste of humor. There have been many times where I have posted a video on the video board and someone will comment that they didn't watch the video but they're mad about the video or they say they don't watch videos. People who aren't interested in the subject of a board should not post on that board. This kind of behavior is reinforced by lacking individual comms, users only browsing one big comm ie all/active, and lacking moderators for niche interests.
The way that reddit was able to grow is that there are so many niche sub boards with users who have niche interests and moderators who curate the boards because they have the shared interest. If someone posts on a history subreddit that they hate learning about history, then they get banned from that history subreddit.
Hexbear has people with many different personal preferences, who can still overall agree on politics. Some people don't like certain memes or certain videos. If you don't like a certain thing, you can choose to not engage with it.
There is a "fight for the frontpage". Every user is either trying to get on to the frontpage or bullying people for making posts they don't want to see on the frontpage. The solution should be to severely limit the frontpage so that it forces user to find smaller communities that fit their interests. This is already happening with the megathreads, but lemmy is a link aggregator software and is not really designed to work this way. Limit the frontpage to 5-10 "official" comms and hide every other comm from the front page. Hide badposting, fakenews, gossip, slop, etc. People who think fakenews is funny can still browse the comm and nobody gets angry about being tricked. Allow users to make niche comms which do not show up on the front page.
This also would solve the problem of the confusion of which comm posts should be made on. The current way of thinking is that posts should be posted to specific boards based on the assigned topic of the sub board. When people are fighting for the frontpage, they don't put much thought into which board a post is made on because the audience is all the same. If most boards are hidden from the front page, people will choose which board to post a link on depending on which group of people they think will want to see the post.
This isn't entirely true. The trans and vegan comms are definitely operating as independent communities, anime fluctuates back and forth a bit, it's sort of almost on the edge of being useful as its own thing but isn't quite.
So there's certainly potential for independent communities within the space.
There is a "fight for the frontpage". Every user is either trying to get on to the frontpage or bullying people for making posts they don't want to see on the frontpage.
Genuinely haven't seen this at all.
Limit the frontpage to 5-10 "official" comms and hide every other comm from the front page. Hide badposting, fakenews, gossip, slop, etc. People who think fakenews is funny can still browse the comm and nobody gets angry about being tricked.
This will be completely counterproductive to what you want to achieve. You will completely marginalise the exposure of small comms to larger numbers of people, and in doing so you will eliminate the ability for those small comms to grow. Communities grow by being seen by people that might have an interest in them, this requires their exposure.
Allow users to make niche comms which do not show up on the front page.
I think this is fine. Let the "market" make any manner of comms and let the ones people are interested in rise to the top. Switch from digital central-planning of comms to digital dengism. HEXBEAR REFORM AND OPENING UP.
It won't be an issue to police anything that is harmful.
This also would solve the problem of the confusion of which comm posts should be made on. The current way of thinking is that posts should be posted to specific boards based on the assigned topic of the sub board. When people are fighting for the frontpage, they don't put much thought into which board a post is made on because the audience is all the same. If most boards are hidden from the front page, people will choose which board to post a link on depending on which group of people they think will want to see the post.
I really want Lemmy to consider more stylisation of comms as a feature. Individual stylisation of subreddits enables more unique and individual communities. It also makes it MUCH more obvious to a user when they're in a different space and should abide by different behavioural norms to the wider site rather than just being a belligerent aggressive chapo in any and all spaces(i am guilty of this).
IIRC there have been several "fishing" trips to this end, think some of the old posts are still around on c/traa. I also know a lot of new users got pulled in from other lemmy trans comms/instances
Form a biker gang called Heck's Bears
And they're all twinks
We need to move further to the right and get a Cheney endorsement.
I mean just spread the link around. Go into other communities and tell them about here.
It'll be very incestuous though since there's no "One Big Leftist Forum" to leech off of all we'd be doing is getting people off other niche communities. Which is fine but it's not all that significant one way or the other.
Trick question. Hexbears grow in the summer to store fat to make it through winter hibernation.
