A friend sent me a spicy enough meme and I thought “heh, they are ready for HexBear”. So I almost sent them a link and then I thought “hold on, maybe they are put off by something, let’s check”; so made the little mental exercise of trying to discover hexbear for the first time.
Good lord, there’s too much terminally online shit, anybody sane would be repelled.
I lied there was no effort post
Ppl have always had differing opinions on what the point of the place was/is. Whether it’s a pipeline or just a place to blow of steam. I used to be more in the former camp but now I think it’s fine if it’s just a shitposting forum, a little save room of the internet relatively free from reactionaries or liberal brain worms.
I think over time it’s kinda morphed more into the latter, and I think actually talking to people in meatspace is a better way to pipeline anyway. In my experience it’s way easier to change people’s minds or at least set them on the road for it irl, online people are just gut reacting to things.
Yeah I agree, I’d love for this site to become the pipeline r/CTH was, but until we have a connection to the rest of the internet, perhaps by federation, there isn’t much of a chance that happens. And becoming less niche by moderating away content that is too online will give up a lot of the site culture for really not much gain besides maybe a few more people joining every month.
On the other hand, I am worried about the site just fading out of existence. We used to have about 700 active daily users, but now it seems we’ve dipped to around 500. We do need to a find a way to at least get marginally more people interested or else we might just die out. Perhaps we should all put more of an active effort into watermarking, spreading the word on lefty friendly websites, and using the hobby oriented comms much more often.
Is easy for a reddit user to land here and get it, but still really hard from someone not online to get into. Maybe is impossible, and probably for the better, for non-online people to get in here.
