Because we have like 100 people

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

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”)

we watch movies (and sometimes tv shows) pretty much every night at live.hexbear.net at 8PM EST. we use a peertube instance which can expose your IP to anyone else in the channel though so i strongly recommend only joining with a vpn of some kind.

this is a communist shitposting site, so for the most part the comms that people like to shitpost or chat in like chapotraphouse and the others are much more busy. news gets used because it’s political so even though it’s not shitposting it’s still something we like to discuss a lot. ultimately we are still a pretty small site, so the small comms just dont get much activity

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.

Communities are more tags for instance browsing and searching than actual subcommunities of the broader Hexbear instance.

This is exactly why the website should just be Main.

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

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

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.

What communities would you like to see more action in @TheChemist@hexbear.net ???

Sorry, I don’t have time to watch movies or TV theses days. I’ll do better 😔

I still don’t know how to work this new website.

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

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.