Yesterday was intense for everyone. Some quick updates as of last night:

  • A large amount of the sitemod team has stepped away from the project. Other comrades from the community have volunteered to pitch in and been modded.
  • Some core devs also stepped away from the project. For the time being, you should not expect any further development of new features or bug fixes as we reassess our capacity.
  • Main has been locked. No immediate plans to unlock.
  • Registration is closed and will remain so for the time being.

We 100% understand and support everyone who left yesterday and are also looking forward to the next stage of Hexbear.

We're probably not going to be making any additional announcements or formal communication until after the weekend at the earliest. Thanks.

    • hauntingspectre [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Having been off for here for 6 days, I have been extremely surprised that the veganism debate wasn't immediately treated by the same rules as sectarianism*. That's been a pretty successful model for this site.

      I remember before that we'd regularly have the anarkiddies/tankies threads that did nothing but drive people away. Once the rule was put in place, those tendency fights ended.

      *Functionally on this site it's a political tendency, you're welcome to check out this sticky if you are unsure, even though there are arguments to be had about it being a philosophy/practice.

    • liberal [none/use name]
      hexagon
      A
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      there is no assumption of good faith at all here

      There's a good amount and the community does a solid job.

      There are multiple private discords with the sole focus of destroying this site and that is an entire level of fucking loser I never expected to see continue this long after launch.

      • gray [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        There are multiple private discords with the sole focus of destroying this site

        Jesus fucking christ, why are people like this lmfao

        • liberal [none/use name]
          hexagon
          A
          ·
          edit-2
          4 years ago

          I don't fucking know. If you hate what we're building, why wouldn't you just go do something else...

          • D61 [any]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Because, as is won't to be said around these parts "bullying works."

        • liberal [none/use name]
          hexagon
          A
          ·
          edit-2
          4 years ago

          I like you, want to be a sitemod? You'll either help this get rebuilt or get to party in the ashes if that doesn't work out.

          • Nakoichi [they/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            4 years ago

            I'm already a mod of c/anarchism and I would really like to help. Y'all are the only community I really have. If you want to site mod me I'd be more than happy to volunteer. I don't WANT to be a mod especially after all the shit I've seen slung at them but I do want to ensure this place makes it through this shitstorm.

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        There are multiple private discords with the sole focus of destroying this site .

        Can confirm these exist, they even have "sleeper accounts" which they created at site launch with the whole purpose of starting shit and inflaming every argument on here. I caught two of them yesterday. I don't understand what drives people to do shit like that, like ffs go outside for once.

    • spectre [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      It can be difficult to have good faith discussions when people internalize the "bullying works" meme a bit too closely.

    • read_freire [they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Now that you're a sitemod from this particular comment specifically, I sincerely hope you'll work to change the part of the PR post yesterday that excepted the vegan shit-stirring from rules governing sectarianism.

      This site has long had a lingering uninterrogated colonial mindset across a good chunk of the userbase (myself included!) which has been brought up multiple times, so for the admin/dev team to respond in that both sidesy way yesterday to a specific, high profile instance of it was incredibly disheartening.

      There was undoubtedly wrecking that took advantage of the original, legitimate concern, and the response from some to double down on the assimilation take just fed into that. But the response from the admin team stood in stark contrast to the way transphobes got the wall a few months ago.

    • Hexagon [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      people see someone who disagrees on a fairly complex issue and jump immediately to the worst fucking mindset possible in the person they’re debating with.

      veganism is one of the various positions in which you will rarely see unity in any given left group that doesn’t organize around it. so literally the only way to address it is for both sides of the issue to decide either their comrades are still their comrades despite a differing position on it, or that the differences are irreconcilable in which case the other side needs to be fought at the expense of the community itself.

      Yeah this sort of thing is really scary, and I know I've done it already myself a bit which I regret like implying they would throw slurs at me if I partaked in things like fishing/hunting that my grandpa and his community took part in, I realize that was unfair and rude of me to just assume. I still think it has a veneer of racism behind that but I was probably too hostile and assumptive about the level. At the end of the day, arguments around all these topics have been in leftist discourse since practically forever. And I'll also admit, I've probably upvoted a few rude comments in my haste that I shouldn't, which doesn't help cause it shows "support" for them that I shouldn't have done.

      And besides, there have been vegan communists, they have been omni communists, there was probably a lot of communist thinkers who couldn't make up their mind too all throughout history. Accusations thrown around like "Vegans are actually neoliberals!" or "You can't be leftist without veganism" are just silly because of that. It's so unnecessarily aggressive.

      Also uh, this is a problem throughout the whole internet but minorities can disagree with each other is a thing too. I posted before about how I don't want to talk over my indigenous comrades, but we do need to keep in mind that the term is broad and can refer to a lot of different cultures with different histories behind them. One culture might have a lot of emphasis on hunting and still actively teach their kids how to, while another might have veered away from that in the past few generations. One holocaust survivor might think eating animals is a fair comparison, while other survivors might find it disrespectful of the pain and suffering they went through. Someone who's ancestors were slaves might think that the comparison to slavery as unfair and rude, while another person with slave ancestors think it's an apt comparision. People can disagree about these things even in historically oppressed communities. But I do think, the only people who should really be speaking up about that are the ones who go through it. A holocaust survivor can call something similar to the holocaust, but you, someone born 50 years after, shouldn't be. You can point to the person who did say it, but that's really it. It's not your job to latch onto one oppressed person's words and use them to shove your own non experienced thoughts into a conversation.