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.
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.
A post is only a vehicle of socialisation when the users are talking to the poster. Otherwise it is a topic where people talk about the topic, not with the poster.
Not to you it’s not. To the participants it absolutely is.
This is like saying a football chant isn’t real socialisation. It fundamentally misunderstands the group’s behaviour and how they’re bonding over the stupid thing they’re doing together as a group.
I hope you don’t take this the wrong way as I agree with your goal of increasing posts. But I’m not going to shy away from pointing out where your site theory is incorrect.
You’re right that it’s not designed to work that way but that Hexbear’s community specifically makes it so. Megathreads as a vehicle are a cultural thing, they house a different group of people to those outside them. Usually people who are interested in faster-paced engagement than they will get from posts.
As I see it there are 3 groups of people in the online space and they’re occupying different places depending on the pace of engagement they prefer:
Posts are a slower form of engagement, with stuff happening over a 24 hour period. For people that check-in infrequently or only want to check-in a few times over the course of a day.
Megathread comments last a couple hours at most and have faster paced engagement. For people that like semi real-time engagement.
Discord/Chat. A message lasts seconds and disappears, for those that want constantly involved real-time engagement.
These are different audiences that like different things.
No. It’s because it is not talked about outside of Hexbear. Changing the way the software is used isn’t going to magically produce content about Hexbear outside of Hexbear. Growth comes from exposure. Making more posts on Hexbear will not make more people see Hexbear, if you want Hexbear to grow then what is needed is posts and content that are NOT on Hexbear.
You can not say this anymore. This was the purpose of the federation. Hexbear is advertised on the main Lemmy federation website. The federation was supposed to make Hexbear talked about outside of Hexbear. What happened after the federation? Droves of users went to other instances and posted PPB until other instances chose to Defederate. All of Lemmy knows about Hexbear because it’s worse than other Lemmy instances. Hexbear is talked about but it is viewed negatively.
Here’s what telling someone about Hexbear would go like: Hexbear is like reddit – Oh reddit sucks – actually it’s not like reddit, it’s an instance of Lemmy which is a copycat of reddit which allows a bunch of different websites to share posts with each other – Oh so you can browse other Lemmy site from Hexbear? – No, all the other instances blocked Hexbear because they spammed images of pig feces – The users sound hostile. So what does the front page of Hexbear look like? – It’s usually just a bunch of meta jokes that don’t make sense unless you browse the website for 10 hours every day – Why doesn’t the front page show things that are actually interesting? – Hexbear uses a different algorithm than other Lemmy instances which prioritizes showing these meta jokes all of the time and any post that is actually interesting gets buried within 2 hours – So why do you use this website? – if you actually want to find something interesting, you can scroll through one of the seven 3000 comment weekly megathreads – What was that other website? – Lemmy – Yeah I’ll check out Lemmy.
I’ve even seen multiple users from other instances say they would use Hexbear but they don’t because the megathreads are hard to navigate from other Lemmy instances. If Hexbear had more posts and less megathread comments, then Hexbear posts would have visibility on other instances. I’m not even saying to get rid of megathreads. I’m saying that people should be encouraged to post links outside of the megathreads. That would make Hexbear more talked about outside of Hexbear.
And federation did cause growth. When Lemmy was growing. Lemmy is not growing either anymore, because Lemmy is not talking about outside of Lemmy.
I can’t take this seriously. You can’t believe that was the reason, you just can’t. The reason was ideological, not based on behaviour that is easily managed with a ban.
If you’re not going to recognise this in your next reply and roll back I’m tossing this whole conversation in the trash and accepting that it was a complete waste of my time because this is just nonsense bad faith shit.