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.
This is a really cynical take of the internet. The internet is the way it is because of decisions made by people running sites, not some Malthusian human nature bullshit.
These behaviors can be influenced and changed by things like moderation and site features.
Do you know how different things would be if every social media site wasn't designed to make you scroll forever and see as many ads as possible? If everything wasn't determined by "tHe AlGoRiThM" to drive engagement?
We can change and fix these things. Hexbear/Lemmy's first mistake was trying to be like reddit instead of rethinking how users should interact entirely.
I agree that not being terminally online and going outside is extremely good, but the internet is a huge part of people's lives and dismissing it entirely is foolish and ignores many people's material realities.
We started with what we had and are iterating from there. We've already had a lot of success (pronoun tags and usage, removing downvotes). We'll see where things go, we're looking forward to it.