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The comms are more of a tagging system than an actual community. I browse all comms so everything comes through my feed. If I post about a movie, I stick it in the movie comm
This also allows people to choose what content they want to see. If you don't want to see badposting, you can just unsub
We're a site of barely a thousand users, and I remember it used to be a lot less, more like 500-600 daily, I assume after federation there was some growth. And of course only a small portion of those users post regularly, which is pretty normal for social-media-esque websites.
So there's just too many over-specialized comms, that the userbase isn't really large enough to support. Like, we probably don't need to have /c/games, /c/ttrpg, /c/tabletop & /c/gamedev as all separate things.
Hexbear is like an old multiplayer game that retains a small but dedicated playerbase that isn't enough to populate the less popular game modes
In this analogy, comms such as chapotraphouse and games are like team deathmatch and capture the flag
I remember in the initial excitement of setting up the website, a large number of communities were set up that had widely intersecting audiences. If people are going to post something, they're going to post it once (generally), and if they're going to post it once, they're going to post it to the more popular relevant community. Communities rarely get deleted, so now we have a lot of dead ones.
(this reminds me of a very old reddit post where someone complains about the introduction of communities and said that reddit should have gone with a post tagging system instead so that one post could be followed by multiple "comms")
Communities are more tags for instance browsing and searching than actual subcommunities of the broader Hexbear instance.
the site isn't really big enough to fill all those communities with content every single day, and most of the long term users browse All anyhow, and the default in years past at least was to auto-subscribe new users to all but a couple comms. In fact there's a contingent of people who strenuously opposed adding any comms other than main/chapotraphouse. I don't see it as a problem because I never really browse by comm and don't particularly care if a comm "looks dead". because it's just a way of tagging posts so people can filter out what they don't want to hear about, and distributing the moderation workload
Plus, a ton of the activity day-to-day is happening in the megathreads, not in posts. If I went and saw a new movie and wanted to talk about it, unless I had a meme to share or a lot of thoughts/an effortpost, it would probably just go in the mega. People seem to see posting as a bigger hurdle than commenting and so do it less.
In terms of playing games/watching a movie together, there are some off-site discord and matrix chats that may do that, idk. And there are the stickied posts almost every day about what's being watched together on the cytube @ live.hexbear.net/c/movies
Plus idk about everyone else but, I don't dedicate much of my time to games or movies anymore. Less and less as I've gotten older. I'd rather do things with other people IRL typically, including gaming/watching tv. and frankly nobody needs to hear my takes on the sopranos 25 years after release and well after it was watched in cytube
People seem to see posting as a bigger hurdle than commenting
This is why Hexbear continues to rely on a Posters Vanguard
This is exactly why the website should just be Main.
I assumed it was a lack of bots. Which is a good thing.
That, and we skew heavily towards introverts. So we're not going to talk unless you hold a knife to our head.
Them: "How's it going"?
Me: looks at shoelaces quietly, unsure if they're talking to me or the empty wall behind me.
writes a long comment
immediately erase it
Haha, yeah sometimes it feels like I'm commenting then deleting just because I like the effort of thinking out something and writing it down, but I have no desire to communicate with others.
It happens on Reddit way more because the libs will steadfastly refuse to learn anything so there's no reason to comment because they'll clutch their pearls when you try and explain how the world actually is to them.
I was literally tempted to delete this because, do I want the massive social commitment of one or two people commenting on my comment?
Sorry, I don't have time to watch movies or TV theses days. I'll do better 😔
Yeah, this is definitely an interesting question. I'm always astonished at the number of comments the megathreads get. If every one of those comments was a post in a community on the site, it would "feel" more "active". I wonder how many communities active users actually subscribe to. Sometimes I'll post something, and it feels like it goes to the void, even though the community might say it has a number of subscribers.
I have no idea how someone can follow the megathread comment section. With thousands of comments, maybe hundreds of top-level comments, it seems really daunting to dive into.
The megathread really is a community of its own. In honesty, I'd never even clicked on a megathread 'til a few months ago, my brain just blanks out the pinned posts.
Most of the communities could be combined into one where people could funnel their posts which would help with the lack of activity
It's been a problem for a while
It was a problem on day 1. Admins should have waited months to make comms, with everything going on "main".
the_dunk_tank and electoralism were reasonable to add early for containment purposes. Makes sense to have a a couple of trans/LGBT and empoc groups as well.
Everything else should have been created organically by the userbase saying "this type of post is clogging the feed, let's spin off a comm for it". Instead we have this....
It's not really a big deal but I just think it was massively shortsighted .
I have to agree. It’s great seeing everyone’s hot takes about movies/tv shows but posts get very little engagement because they’re siloed off to a different community from CTH/main. The old subreddit (
) had lots of activity on most threads. It’s definitely the biggest thing I still miss from back then
Why is it a problem?
The majority of the comms we have are dead/redundant
Why is that a problem?
Edit: let me expand on the question. I'm subscribed to most of the hexbear comms. When there's a post in one of the "dead" ones I see it. When there's not a post, they don't trouble me at all. Why is this a problematic situation?
I still don't know how to work this new website.
Movies and tv is a lemmee comm and its main posters are from instances we arent federated with, thats why they are empty
!movies@hexbear.net is the Hexbear comm
Because we have like 100 people
MEGATHREAD! THE PLACE TO BE!
