This is nothing to do with any current or recent struggle sessions, or any one struggle session/controversy in particular. This is a much broader issue and I am wondering what it holds in store for any strictly leftist social group online. I would also like to apologize to our non-American/Western users as this is going to be very centered on that.
There was a lot of anxiety about Trump’s 2nd term back in 2020. There were people afraid that Trump would be way worse than any Democrat. I didn’t personally see it that way, but I (now) empathize a little more with comrades even if their fears don’t seem deeply well founded. This made everyone a little more jumpy. Everything seemed a little more urgent.
After 2020, a light depression set in. Bernie lost and all the people who supported that were let down. All the people who knew it was going to be a let down lost their energy as well. There wasn’t much of a new thing for everyone to focus on and talk about. Basically the left, as much as it exists, wasn’t in the conversation anymore. We were even more relegated to the crank pit. The media project that had been built, that most of us here paid attention to, simply became about dwelling on history, naval gazing about what is to be done, and supporting media careers as praxis. Even the fascist infighting of Jan 6 didn’t result in anything and thus “nothing ever happens” mentality is born.
Tensions with Russia and Ukraine, and disastrous Democratic presidency gave us something to focus on and plenty of new enemies to fight. We once again could go after libs and point to how liberals are screwing up everything. We had the invention of new internet guys at which to get mad. Ultimately, the war didn’t lead to some new level of consciousness for everyone. It became normal and whatever fresh possibilities existed in Feb of 2022 didn’t exist anymore.
Once again we were looking down the barrel of another Trump term. This time the people who felt that Dems would give some respite from fascism had either been pushed past that by Biden’s term or they left the site. Jan 6 was a nothing burger, so the fear of competency was lessened. Biden had turned most into sickos who felt Trump was exactly what this country deserved, regardless of how bad he is.
The genocide in Gaza did not help attitudes. This also brought some life back to Hexbear in terms of analysis, news, and fighting genocide denial. I think it’s has also had a depressing effect as well. We all see the depravity of Zionists and Western governments every day. We see people being systematically exterminated and everyone waffles, everyone supports it, there is very little political will from anyone in charge to do something. At best it’s turned into a market issue where BDS will save us but then all the Zionists rig that game too.
As for the past few months, it’s been rough. Once again we face massive economic crisis in the US that liberal economic analysis either can’t see or refuses to see. It’s not that the jobs market is in a lull, it’s that it doesn’t exist. The largest sector of the US economy can hire cheap labor at will without having to even look at the domestic labor pool. They’re doing massive quarterly layoffs of domestic and foreign sourced labor. Food costs are still high and getting higher. Inflation can only rise at a faster rate (that won’t be reported).
It is completely safe for the worst right-wingers to espouse their views in public. They are rewarded for it with government jobs. If anyone harms them, the President sends troops to avenge them. The highest law enforcement body in the land will sue on their behalf. There are no brakes here. All those seemingly petty fears from 2020, the debates about Trump being a real fascist or not, are all valid. Jan 6 2029 could be way more serious than the other one. First as a farce, second as a tragedy, so to speak.
The increased popularity of AI has already changed the internet. AI, whether it’s just tulips or the next industrial revolution, is here to stay. The US economy has all but dedicated its entire economy to AI and AI companies.
As others have pointed out, doesn’t the internet feel a little off? The discovery of content has been completely dominated by increasingly fine tuned algorithms that make sure you stay on the correct rails. Podcast media is no longer subversive, if it ever was, it is a real tool of the state and is actively being used as such. Podcast popularity has flooded the market with an increasing amount of superfluous content that buries everything and makes it easier for propaganda outlets to hide. Youtube is nothing now. It’s almost a Skinner box that doesn’t even reward you and produces incomprehensible slop. You can watch short videos that range from roblox rp to nazi propaganda to cooking videos to some 13 year old making guns in his garage within 30 seconds. Everything else, including the best material, is just a gig for people who don’t want a “real” job.
Also thanks to AI, it’s going to be increasingly hard to understand what’s real. The distinction between advertisement and content won’t exist. Everything will be monetized and you will not get a cut.
Just as an anecdote, I have also noticed a slow down on the internet. Not in speed, but in the refresh rate of content. Hexbear seems to get fewer posts, existing posts stay in position longer, fewer comments. I have noticed this on reddit too. It simply feels like there are less people engaging in the internet and are instead just passively scrolling, or the algos have reached a point of tuning to where they are completely busted. But since Hexbear’s algo doesn’t get tuned like reddits, I don’t think it’s the issue.
To bring this back around, I am not sure we are going to make it to 2029. As things get worse materially and the right wing cracks down, everyone will be more on edge. This is going to lead to more and more infighting. People are going to draw harder lines in the sand and be less forgiving of one another crossing it. Now, none of this will be super obvious and to most people it will seem like everyone is being more principled and that’s why it will be accepted. In fact, it will feel good and make us feel like we’re cleaning up the community. This will lead to a series of major struggle sessions that will only break down the user base. Some people will get banned and just leave. Some might come back. Users will leave if no action is taken. Users will leave because they disagree with whatever action is taken. The result is less users.
The internet as a whole is not friendly toward sites like Hexbear. We will begin to run the risk of being targeted. All it will take is some fork of grok at Doge Corp to crawl us and flag us. Then some 14 year old chud prodigy will call his dad at the AG’s office and get us taken down. Or it’ll just be death by attrition from AI agents and reduced engagement. We will be cut off from fresh users from the outside. Federation with other instances will just result in net zero because they’re going to be in the same situation. The difference is they might be more friendly to liberals and live a little longer.
I’m not suggesting any action really I just wanted to share my fears. There is no coalition we can form, no concession we can make. It seems inevitable that our future is offline. We made it, what 5 or 6 years now? I don’t think we can do it for 5 more. If the site is still up, it’s going to be like 20 people at most.
Just as an anecdote, I have also noticed a slow down on the internet. Not in speed, but in the refresh rate of content. Hexbear seems to get fewer posts, existing posts stay in position longer, fewer comments
Im sick of all this criticism when i’m out here posting my dick balls and ass off every day for you people
My ass has post burn! I demand compensation!
We’re all long over due for our xibucks, but at least I get the satisfaction of knowing I’m driving the future of AI with meta being trained on my posts
My dick balls are long gone
all my dick balls… gone!
I think this thread is relevant, at several points
selected excerpts:
This part most directly addresses the “hexbear is slowly dying” point:
Anyway during the inception phase folks are curious and poke around and there’s that New Website Smell and they break stuff and stuff gets fixed and features change and it’s like breaking in a new pair of shoes, stuff that made sense in development changes to fit what actual humans do with the site. Emotionally you can think of this as the curiosity phase.
At this point some trolls will show up and say the site was better in the olden days, ban them.
[excitement phase redacted since it happened to us concurrently with inception]
Then there’s the Nesting Phase, which other guides call Maturity. This is where the community asks itself questions about what it wants to be, figures out what’s healthy for it, and tidies up its house.
OR, it can be the Cliquey Fragmentation Phase, or the Mod Paranoia phase, or the Some People Have Been Here Too Long phase.
Remember: people aren’t supposed to stay on one website their whole lives. People aren’t designed for that, and websites aren’t designed for that.
Ideally you don’t want the same people sticking around forever, especially if your site doesn’t delete posts. People grow and change and having their old posts around to remind them of their younger, stupider selves - or worse, having other people check out your post history - either stunts their growth or makes them want to leave. Make it easy for people to make new accounts and erase old ones.
The “decline” phase can be the tragic Heartbreak Phase, with a bunch of people arguing about The Future Of The Site and about why people left (an irresolvable question that can suck in a community until it collapses on itself like a black hole) and frantically trying to renew and change itself until even the old guard are scared off, or it can be the Cosiness Phase.
In Cosy Mode, everyone who wasn’t right for the site has moved on, and the folks left are the ones who love it.
[…]
The big difference between Cosy Mode and Heartbreak Mode is that the people in Cosy Mode like being in Cosy Mode, and the people in Heartbreak Mode hate being in Heartbreak Mode but do it anyway.
People go into Heartbreak Mode because they think that a website has to grow forever, and this is madness. If a website carried on growing forever, then eventually everyone on the planet would be on that website all the time.
A thing that constantly grows until there’s nothing outside of it isn’t a community, it’s a cancer.
Anyway whether you’re in Cosy Mode or Heartbreak Mode pretty much comes down to how well you’ve handled the phases beforehand, and I’ll reiterate: REMOVE THE PEOPLE ON YOUR WEBSITE WHO DON’T WANT TO BE ON YOUR WEBSITE BUT CANNOT HELP THEMSELVES. They will put you into Heartbreak Mode every damn time.
As far as online communities go, this site is doing fine in the user growth department. Endless growth isn’t the goal, the shitposting site isn’t the revolution.
It’s more the “people using the site to immiserate themselves and others” aspect that really brings the site down.
The site will have ups and downs. I think it in many ways is better now than it was when it had more users, more novelty.
I link that thread to people every chance I get, I read through it during the early days of the site (the first year or two) and its rang true almost to a T since then. It’s hard as fuck running a site as special, specific, and welcoming as Hexbear is. In the same thread Dan says that running an explicitly leftist space has its own full set of challenges beyond what he even talks about.
Infinite growth is a capitalist lie, we’ve always focused on improving this space for those who choose to stay and become part of a community, even if its an internet community, oh the horror, we better not be “cringe” at all lest we get scolded by weirdos
I can’t remember where I got it but it’s solid. I hate how much it rings true on days like today when I feel powerless to change it.
That kind of rule would do us so much good, even if it was hard to apply
Good comment holy shit
Very good comment that is relevant based on my experience
(A) so what if it’s 100 people, have you even used small hobby forums?
(B) before 2030 a recession and probably a war will happen (first cause I’m kondratiev wave huffer, second because usa says so). whether the left will fumble the bag again like with covid -
With so much of the internet turning into shameless propaganda, and tech moguls actively trying to control public conversation. It is nice to have places for pushback even if those places might face gradual isolation.
I feel there will always be a demand for counter-propaganda. And this demand will grow as the discourse in the internet becomes flattened by the imperial mainstream. The community in Triangular bear, square bear or whatever doesn’t really need to turn people into militants. Just be a place where you can say and read the things that aren’t allowed to be said in the hyper regulated internet. And as i write that i realize that this is the creed for fascist communities as well. In the end what will attract people it the values of the community. That’s what’s important.
But that’s just my opinion from someone looking from the outside of the community.
As crazy as it sounds. I hope we become what 4chan thinks it is. We’re the real contrarians.
You’re probably right, but there’s no point in this speculation. It could end today, it could end five years from now. Who knows? Can anyone really predict anything anymore when the world is so unpredictable? If and when this place ends, it will be sad, but it’s not like all the good things that it did will disappear forever.
The internet is going through some shit, but there is also push back. We don’t know what will happen yet. There’s no point assuming what will happen when it’s all so up in the air.
I sense a lot of frustration from the general public at the moment. Everyone knows things are getting more and more oppressive and bad. People are almost at the breaking point and maybe the only thing keeping them from busting the whole system down is the bread and circuses that media, mostly the internet at this point, provides. Instead of looking at this time as a death of something you love, look at is as an opportunity to rally people against that oppressive force.
For now, we’re still here. Enjoy that. Hell, for all we know the mainstream internet getting scummy could create more niche spaces like this in the future. We’re not dead quite yet.
Also let’s tear down this shitty corporate internet and build a better internet!
Also, it’s worth remembering that we’ve had “Hexbear is dying” posts since our creation. Yet we’re still kicking. It’s going to be okay.
Does seem like the activity is dwindling a bit.
Hellworld do be infringing on posting time
I think it Hbox or Mang0, and I think it was Mang0, who was talking about the state of Melee when Nintendo wanted to make draconian rules about what is allowed in a tournament and what isn’t. They essentially looked at this huge scene that originally came from a grassroots organization effort and wanted to regulate it and make some big important concessions whose character escapes me right now. That’s when perhaps Mang0 tweeted to the effect of “we started in garages and we’ll go right back to them!”
That stuck with me as a good attitude to have. If there’s 20 posters who have to get in via TOR to post the isntreal-cool that has 1 green pixel on the star of David part then I’m posting that shit. Someone’s going to tell me today’s date and what Stalin did to fascism one way or another. Fuck it, comrade.
We need to being back Stalinist LAN parties and Stalinist couch co-op gaming.
I bet they totally do that and we’re just not invited because we’re lame Internet people.
Is this just a really long complaint that people aren’t pooooooosting enough? lmao
“GIVE ME MORE SLOP”It’s always interesting to see what other people focus on when I try to communicate my thoughts. If I could do it over again I would remove the two sentences about activity because everyone seems to think that’s the main thesis. The real point I wanted people to chew on was the part about how degrading conditions makes us bigger assholes to each other but clearly this is a feature and not a bug for a lot of users.
I didn’t mean this in an insulting way. I found it very funny, it reminds me of the CTH posts trying to get people to post more. The entire basis of the poster culture was posts telling people to post more.
I do think this site will eventually be blocked in most Western countries, and the recent Israel flag struggle session doesn’t really matter in that regard.
The US will choose fascism as they have been steering in that direction for decades now. The Europeans will choose fascism to own the Russians and to quell dissent over worsening living standards and eroding rights. Both of them will do so to protect Israel. And this requires total control over what content people are allowed to see, meaning that sites like Hexbear will be prime targets.
And the more “leftist” liberals will be caught by complete surprise by the shift. You can already see it in the hapless, clueless fools in the UK who call their “representatives” to tell them that they are concerned about the forced age verification in the UK. They get the same canned response every time. All their points are ignored, yet they don’t get the hint. They scratch their heads as their vaunted Labor government shifts further and further to the right, ignoring polls and public opinion.
And then they are bewildered at the rest of Europe following the same playbook. They can’t comprehend it. Isn’t the EU supposed to be their Last Hope ™? What happens when that hope is extinguished?
I haven’t been posting as much, that’s why the site hasn’t been as cool 😎
The site set itself on a trajectory to die when it decided that the thing to do was be insular instead of work into continue to reach out. I always thought that what made the sub great was that it did the latter, but that’s not what the people who made it here to the site mostly wanted, so it’s not what we have and I sort of gave up on the idea that it would ever change its mind a few years ago. The site was never democratic, but I think that decision mostly was, so it just is what it is ig.
I thought we refederated? Was that reversed again?
We’re federated with several instances, but that’s not really what I meant. I just mean that the site is much less interested in persuading outsiders than having the most carefully cultivated interior that it can manage (which you can see reflections of in the OP). Whether or not it is refederated isn’t necessarily 1:1 with that, and there were more people on the site interested in outreach pre-refederation (just as a matter of them dropping off over time as the majority attitude consolidated).
We are a bit like a craftworld from 40k. An insular xenophobic culture.
A little heaven in hell
I dont mean xenophobic in the way its usually used obviously I assume most Hexbear users are open to different cultures.
Its just that Hexbear for better or worse has a highly specific culture like some boards on 4chan. Which requires outsiders to lurk a while to understand the nuances and themes of the website.
We are the very opposite of mainstream which is cool and underground
But it comes with its own downsidesI feel like to fit in you already need to be some degree of radical. We dont really have the patience for baby leftists…we dont really allow mistakes. That thought actually makes me a little bit sad
Which I understand is the site culture and meant to protect us. But I also have to admit I find it a bit of a shame.
We were less idiosyncratic on the sub, but we engaged in other communities more which got more people interested. I think our idiosyncracy is probably only a factor insofar as we jump down the throats of new people who don’t really know how we communicate, but that’s definitely not the main issue.
Excuse the doublepost. I think that something like Hexbear/Chapochat would/could work great on Reddit. The problem is/was always the fact that its a corporate site and Hexbear goes WAY to hard to be allowed anyway near anything corporate…which is a bit of a shame since I promise you we could grow a fuckton I feel and reach a fuckton of folks.
I actually have been thinking that maybe the problem isnt Hexbear but Lemmy ? but I dont know enough about the tech side of things
I mean, it demonstrably did work great on reddit, it was a large sub that was only snowballing harder as time went on until the admins crushed it. I think it wouldn’t be as meaningful, but we could still do agitating in the “fediverse” to get more people on a similar basis, but without admins being able to delete our forum this time.
Lemmy has its challenges, but I don’t think it’s unworkable.
it was a large sub that was only snowballing harder as time went on until the admins crushed it
And if we tried to go back and start again we would get crushed before the ball got rolling. /r/genzedong was a fraction of the size /r/cth was when it got taken out, and related subs like /r/acidmarxism and /r/blackwolffeed have had to essentially crush themselves to avoid being crushed by the admins.
…and it’s not like we could do it elsewhere either. xitter? We’d all get banned. Bluesky? Think again. Facebook? lmao.
This website is the way it is because of the current material condition of the internet. The masses aren’t coming to niche websites, and communities that challenge the status quo aren’t welcome on the big corporate ones. The place for leftist recruitment is in the real world, and the place for leftist agitprop is on twitch and tiktok.
With that in mind, I say we try to enjoy Hexbear as it is for as long as it lasts, and if and when it ends we gotta have a Buddhist mentality about it.
Im not saying its the main issue but it certainly is true that you already need to be a radical of some degree to fit into Hexbear and to use it. Im not saying we need to turn our powerlevel down or conform to liberal ideas but I kinda wish we had comms for newcomers or people who are curious. Basically like a bring your liberal to Hexbear day
It doesn’t help that 99% of the liberals on lemmy can never see us because of mass defederation
I agree, though I think there are also plenty of people who are in a position to be radicalized immediately (or re-radicalized in a more positive direction) if only a decent communist group came to them, because they are already so alienated from society and have seen many ways in which the current system is unacceptable.
I feel like to fit in you already need to be some degree of radical. We dont really have the patience for baby leftists…we dont really allow mistakes. That thought actually makes me a little bit sad
How so? IMO the site has been an excellent forum for exposure to leftist thought; considering I thought the DSA was radical when I first joined.
I’m not trying to jump on you or anything, but I find the site to be very accepting of mistakes made in good faith - so I’m wondering what types of mistakes you’re speaking of?
Criticism of world views is fundamental to dialectics; I know I’ve been “bullied” on this site into learning about the struggles of our trans comrades - and in the process learned that that “bullying” is nothing compared to the “bullying” inherent in the status quo for any marginalized group. And so there’s absolutely no room for that status quo if we’re supposed to be a site where these groups feel comfortable. I.e. if one’s trying to remove a cancer, they remove every last bit of it and any small bit that pops up in the future - lest it reestablishes and takes over.
Socialism in one Lemmy vs Permanent Revolution
Stalin used the USSR as a base of operations to help support or install socialist governments from East Germany to North Korea. We would sooner embrace the Permanent Revolution analogue, which I believe would probably be using the site as a hub for explicitly organizing militant action until the feds obliterate us.
you ever go on a skyscraper website? those sites have all been around for like 30 years and they have like 15 regular users and they get on just fine. they have the guys who go out there and take a picture of a skyscraper every couple months and add the picture to the collection and the other 14 users go ‘wow great pic 500ft_tom’ and they do that for every single building that goes up in their city.
My personal favorite for this ^
I don’t think hexbear will decline, as HB is hosted in Europe, and the fascist attacks on free speech in the US may soon deplatform the entire left from YouTube/reddit/etc… Then we’ll have what the old internet users called and enternal September. For us, that means an endless flood of liberals seeking refuge status from social media websites that block criticism of trump and israel, while also snitching your location data to your local rapid response unit.
The future of Hexbear won’t be determined by real world politics and disasters (unless as you say the gov shuts us down directly) our future is tied to whenever the majority of the site realizes lemmy is a deadend and a slow poison, a slowly collapsing tunnel that could shut the door on Hexbear forever
Nothing like Hexbear has ever existed on the internet, we’re constrained by the limits of the medium we’re hosted on, if Hexbear had somehow tapped into the algorithm powering TikTok for instance, we’d have millions of users
This place endures because whether we realize it consciously or not, we’re sitting on an enormous nuke of potential online social energy, and it’s the future ghost of that mushroom cloud that imparts Hexbear with that nebulous feeling of uniqueness and gravitas, but the nuke is currently sealed in a deep bunker of internet nicheness and we the guards are subsisting on the dribs and drabs of the shithole that is lemmy
To pull a Felix, we found the Dark Soul, but we don’t know what to do with it
Should I eat it? I dunno, I’m scared!
Eat it! Become the Owl of Minerva and lead us to a new future Great Bird!
Why do you hate Lemmy?
It’s a poisoned well, the demographic it attracts is the one most hostile to socialist politics, the Destiny/Vaush demographic I like to call it, the children of the petite-bougies
Bored middle class youngish white men who where alienated by the Trump phenomenon but still hold intense reactionary beliefs because they welded their self-esteem to their upper class and racial background and reinforced this toxic mix by only socializing thru online echo chambered gamer/streamer adjacent spaces
We can’t grow on poisoned soil like that, one day lemmy will compete it’s metamorphosis into a dollar store version of 4chan and Hexbear will have to ask itself “What the hell are we still doing here?”
That’s just the demographic of the internet. I think this catastrophizing is toxic.
People catastrophize because they can’t pinpoint what exactly is the problem, even tho in this case it’s staring us right in the face
It’s unfortunate but alot of Hexbears have developed what I can only describe as a kind of FOMO relationship with THE IDEA of lemmy and completely ignoring the frankly incredible explosion of reaction on the greater site since 2023
Hexbears convinced themselves lemmy was a den of normies to recruit from, the reality is far different and as a result our growth is stalled and as a further direct consequence, people begin to panic and that FOMO energy starts to intensify
Hexbears convinced themselves lemmy was a den of normies to recruit from, the reality is far different
It would have been if not for the absolute toolbags that took to leadership and kneecapped literally every single bit of enthusiasm there was for growing it among good people.
For example, I had the GCJ modteam ready to go on a massive campaign to get the whole community to migrate or at least set up an active colony with real activity. What happened? One of the dipshit lemmyworld mods actively did everything they could to make people say “yeah fuck that actually”, including outright banning me when I was countering his bs consistently. This then spread on mod discords, other teams from other subs that were interested too all determined it was a terrible fucking idea with their leadership being the way it was.
At the critical moment when enthusiasm was the absolute highest the lemmyworld team actively deterred every good space on reddit from being interested.
There could have been an absolutely massive migration of people that were anywhere between normal and woke, but they actively prevented that shit from happening. And now the site is so heavily dominated by reactionaries I would never be able to convince anyone or get enthusiasm for doing it. The only way I would be able to build it up again is with their topmod actively being willing to start going scorched earth TC69 style on the lemmyworld userbase but there’s no fucking way anyone in the lemmyworld team has the stomach for purges and radical policy changes the likes of which are necessary to redirect the site towards a larger (less reactionary) audience.
I said at the time all this happened they were cultivating a nazi bar scenario and that remains true. The left was made unwelcome on the site and now it’s so full of reactionaries anyone on the left is actively disgusted by the idea of being there. So its potential growth is limited to the right. This is basically what happened to Voat except Voat’s leadership intended for that to happen whereas Lemmyworld’s leadership are just dipshits who completely fucked everything up.
My point is that this wasn’t caused by Lemmy as a platform but by the morons in charge of lemmyworld. We legitimately could’ve moved tens of thousands of people over, which would’ve become hundreds of thousands by now. But nah they had to fucking ruin it.
Do you really think Lemmy is more reactionary than Reddit—the site that birthed us? I’ve seen widespread disdain for Israel even on the more reactionary Lemmy instances.
I’ve been far happier on here than any corporate website since its beginning. Recruiting from Lemmy doesn’t exclude us from recruiting from elsewhere also.
I mean its a distinction without a difference, the user base of lemmy is a turd reddit took in the summer of 2023, these people are redditers, they just wanted a more exclusive clubhouse and you can find “disdain” of Israel all over reddit too, you think that makes reddit overall friendly to anti-ziontists or “tankie” socialists?
Recruiting from Lemmy doesn’t exclude us from recruiting from elsewhere also.
We are defederated from 90% of the site we’re hosted on and normies are not flocking to lemmy to begin with, no there is no recruitment while we’re embedded in this turd
Which software would you have us switch to?
I know, I know I’ve let you down
I’ve been a fool to myself
I thought that I could
live for no one else
such a fun track
deleted by creator
