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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.

  • The megathread 'experiment' sucked and lead to a drastic decrease in posts in the megathreads in my experience. At a time where major news was happening, the news thread was a trickling drip feed.

    • it started off wanting to make sure that the meta-post was highlighted so that we could get the word out to as many people as possible in case of user safety issues

      i think that majority people realize that having the megas site pinned is a benefit

      apologies for the lack of engagement in the news mega

  • Drawing any conclusions about demegathreadification is impossible when it completely coincided with defederation.

    The website has not been its best the past couple weeks and I am personally inclined to attribute to being disconnected.

    • Very true and for what it's worth we will not be doing a demegathreadification experiment for quite a while. The things we will be doing in the coming months will be a financial transparency report, a post-mortum on this domain crisis and an open-floor discussion of the hexbear code of conduct

      • Fair enough back to business.

        I realized this gaff came at a perfect time because it meant I had some entirely non world-ending news to pay attention to. That was nice.

  • If nothing else the long circular march is going to be some fun lore. I think everyone handled it great, admins were transparent, users were being constructive, the community was involved in decisions.

    I think the megas should be pinned as well. The other thing didn't really work.

  • Happy to hear we got the URL back!

    For the mega threads, I don't mind them pinned, but I would prefer if the news and general megas be in a consistent location

  • A bit bummed about that because I really wanted to know who was willing to pay that much money for this domain, but oh well.

    But I’m still unsure as to how exactly we got it back. Was it Sav realizing that they were at least partially responsible for this mess and being lenient? Or was is a case of a comrade being very clever and tricking the evil corporation (because you mentioned finding a "technical route")?

    As for the mega experiment: I felt that engagement in the megas was lower than before and it’s also nicer to have a proper view over all of the threads + easier access.

  • A few weeks ago I was starting to get convinced by some anti-megathread sentiments and psyched myself up to "just post" outside of them, but I quickly realised that there's a good reason I only feel comfortable posting in a low stakes environment such as the megas and went back to not posting anywhere, just like I had done my whole life before discovering them.

    Credit where credit is due - Hexbear is admittedly better at this than most places on the internet, however even here existing as a minority comes with extra friction due to a certain defensiveness that comes from relatively privileged users. There is an expectation of nuance when talking about these topics (understandable), but it mostly goes one way (guess which way) and all nuance goes out of the window in place of "dunks" as soon as (e.g.) the skinny people's feewings are huwt when faced with the everyday reality of marginalised folks.

    There's a reason why social spaces for marginalised people exist even in touch-grass-land - it's to give a chance for marginalised ppl to just exist and express themselves more freely while taking a much needed break from the nitpicking and gaslighting that comes with interacting with white/cis/able-bodied folks. That's just the reality of the internet (and the imperial core) as a whole, so spaces like the megas are sorely needed and very much appreciated.

    I think the least a hexbear user can do is to "put up with" having them pinned to the top of the page as a show of solidarity for our marginalised comrades. If you really don't like them, you have the ability to minimise them with a single click, and you will have a really hard time convincing me that such a simple workaround actually makes your life harder in any meaningful way.

    Rant over; please do not @ me, I didn't come here to argue and I encourage you to make a top level comment in this thread if you have any strong feelings to express.

    • I strongly agree with you here, and I think all this current "federated" movement does is recreate the heteronormative white-supremacist capitalist patriarchical relations that systems like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit have at the foundation of their design. They do not consider design centered around community first, they instead seek to replicate the "experience" of capitalist systems in hopes to decentralize them. That decentralization, at a minimum, allows places like Hexbear to create spaces that attempt to negate the contradictions of the platforms they're abandoning, but they struggle against the rigid structure that undergirds their community, reinforcing some of those same relations they sought to escape from. I could keep going, but know that I fully agree with you on the nature of Mega Threads, and what their value is. I don't think they detract from the activity of the communities they're attached to, and the relation between "communities" and the larger "feed" on the site has more to do with perceived low "activity" inside a given community than the megathreads do.

    • Sorry for @ing you buy this isn't a criticism of you just an add on. I really wish there could be a community wide serious discussion about this with ground rules in the post; this issue keeps coming up again and again and while I like the shitposty side of hexbear, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't continually strive to also check ourselves and have some self-crit sessions that address the subjects you're talking about. Undoing harmful beliefs and behaviors is a lifelong process as a white, and if the stated culture of the site is gonna be preserved this kinda shit does need to be talked about

  • I thought the megaportal was a good idea until it was implemented. It actually sucked. Now I'm glad to see the pinned megas back.

    I don't like that bitwarden mandated 2fa. Even though it's really secure its just too annoying. Why can't I just live life on the edge?

  • picturing a closeup shot of a race car driver sweating inside the helmet, making sharp ass turns, engine noises ringing in their ears and the camera pans out and shows them doing donuts in a parking lot

  • I liked not having megathreads because I think browsing posts is a way better experience overall than browsing a huge thread that is constantly expanding and getting replies to really old comments that you have to find throughout their existence. As far as I can tell, there's no way to hide or swipe away top level comments on the website or in my preferred app (Thunder), otherwise I would find megathreads much more tolerable. Then I could swipe away comment chains I'm not interested in and only see new comments in the ones I am, making them much easier to monitor. Which is currently how posts work.

    If we ever get filters too, depending on whether they go with a tag system or just let you filter words entirely, those filters may only apply to post titles or tags instead of entire words so I wouldn't be able to filter out leaked /c/badposting content that ends up in the megas.

    The main counter I have to myself is that specific community threads like the trans, disabled, and empoc mega make way more sense to me than the news or general because they provide spaces for people who are traditionally drowned out or ignored on the rest of the internet.

    But being able to just open a tab/post that people are adding new information to in /c/news is so much better than scrolling halfway down the page to a specific comment chain. And the general mega is stuff that could either go in /c/chat, /c/badposting, or /c/chapotraphouse.

    I don't think the portal post idea really worked that well. I just didn't go to the megathreads because I didn't know where to find them and am generally anti-mega anyway. I like being able to collapse them on the website, or I just swipe them away on my app.

    But my main gripe is the amount of mega comments instead of posts, which is a user behavior/preference thing, not necessarily something that's solved with a technical solution (other than being able to hide comments, that'd be really neat). So mega enjoyers can just tell me to suck eggs.

    Edit: I also do like the OP post in the megas because I get to learn a little. But I think they could also just be mini-effort posts.

198 comments