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CARCOSA [mirror/your pronouns] @hexbear.net

Site update and meta discussion for the intrepid hexagonal bear

Hello users of hexbear by now you will have noticed that the megathreads are featured again. During the recent challenges we wanted to see what the site is like with no pinned megathreads, a pinned megathread portal, in the style of this https://chapo.chat/post/4470784 and finally we are back to status quo.

Please give your thoughts on the megathread experiment in comments, if you liked on way over another, etc.

On the meta update, a previous admin was able to get the hexbear.net domain back, and we were able to established shared access. We are thankful for everything that they have done as this site would not exist without them, with this shared access the stress of site administration has been lessened.

In addition to the domain registrar we have been able to establish shared access for the server provider and are working on shared access to donation accounts (patreon/liberapay)

Payment has been reestablished from the donation account for the domain and servers, and we will be working towards making a financial transparency report that lays out how much donations we receive, what our costs are and what our current funds are. We are good for the rest of the year on domain/server payments.

I know this is a really confusing, but we are establishing a bitwarden to ensure that all the admins have access to the vital accounts going forward.

Please comment any questions, and we will do our best to answer, apologies to the person who commented on the previous post that we should do the megathread experiment when we are not undergoing a site crisis, which is valid.

TLDR: hexbear.net is back and patriots are in control

We will be enabling federation after redirecting chapo.chat, hexbear.chat, etc. to hexbear.net and enabling federation after redirecting chapo.chat, hexbear.chat, etc. to hexbear.net

198 comments

  • I was open to the megathread portal idea, but in practice it nuked megathread activity and it hides the number of new comments which is a big reason to hop on and check the megathreads.

    • I will admit, the mega portal was definitely presented as the secondary function of the post I made, that is probably an error on my part. If I had called the thread "Hexbear Mega-Thread Portal + Site Update" it might have been more obvious to those looking for the Megas where to find them. It also didn't help that the Mega's were at the bottom of the post instead of the top.

      One thing that is interesting, though, is it would also seem that many people who frequent the Mega Threads are not aware that those threads are posted inside various communities. I'm not sure if they knew how to even find those communities directly. It's difficult to know without surveying people.

      There is a dynamic at play in the Mega Threads that is interesting too. It is a place on the site to talk about given subjects in a lower friction capacity. They sit somewhere between "chat room" and "message board", especially considering a few of the Mega thread posts make the suggestion to sort them by "new", which does make them easier to process.

      In the past, Lemmy used websockets to transport data to the interface in real time. If you look at the interface for a thread, you'll see that there is still a "Chat" button which sorts the thread by New but also flattens the messages so they no longer show comment threads. When the platform used websocket for rendering the site, it also allowed the site to receive data in real time, allowing the "Chat" function to transform a thread into a live chatroom. In v0.18, websocket support was removed.

      Removing websockets was part of an effort to make the platform searchable and able to be archived, since neither of those things load data from websockets. I think there were other issues around stability and performance that made removing websockets make sense. The "Chat" functionality is interesting because it still results in there being comments under a thread, and people viewing those comments without Chat enabled would see them as simply top-level comments and comment threads. However, it was never fully realized, in the sense that, the interface for "Chat" mode doesn't show you which comments are in reply to other comments, and also inversely, if you sent a message into "Chat" that was part of a continuous dialog, the "comments" would appear strangely disjointed.

      So, comments made in reply to other Comments in the threaded version appear out of context to people in chat mode, new top-level comments would be in reply to the OP and not the "conversation" happening in chat mode also making them feel out of context. Meanwhile, anyone reading the thread afterward under the default "hot" sort would see messages from the chat conversation unordered, making them appear out of context as well.

      I don't think Lemmy is seeking to synthesize this Chat/Thread dynamic anymore, and it's far more likely that "chat" as a thread filter will just be removed, but it would be an interesting thing to try and synthesize.

198 comments