If anyone is interested in playing a Halloween-themed Delta Green One-shot I have one spot available https://hexbear.net/post/3667072 for a 16:00 CET / 9:00am EST game. Let me know if you are interested, in that or another day/time.

makes sense, thanks for the interest. I play in a masks game on saturday and GM burning wheel on sunday so my weekends are already occupied <3 Good luck on your thesis defense!

What is the earliest you are available in your timezone? Are you west coast? Are you available the 31st?

So excited to do a couple of spooky roleplaying with people!

https://hexbear.net/post/3667072

Already have a couple Tuesdays lined up for some Delta Green / SCP-style scares with mostly trans hexbears

sent a message!

Went thru the book, character creation, and talked about the system last weekend and are looking to start this Saturday. I can reach out in a couple weeks to see if you are still interested if you’d like

Ladies, is it masculine to rapidly move your head in a vertical range of motion, signifying affirmation and recognition of others?

WHAT no idea this was a thing I nod at everyone.

Why do social conventions have to be so confusing, literally have to study people to interact in “appropriate” ways smh

Everquest 1 and BDO

Nostalgia for EQ1 is so strong but unless you got friends trying to get into an old-style mmorpg now is painful

BDO because I actually love the combat style and gameplay but the k-mmorpg inspired upgrade system is just maddening also fuck microtransactions

https://lemmy.ml/comment/3173394

4/5 – Brigading is when you click on threads that appear on your front page

On Reddit, brigading was the initially common practice of linking to a thread or comment that was anti-racist for example, and inviting people from a racist sub to downvote and respond to it. Their sheer numbers would send an initially positively received comment into deep negative numbers and overwhelm the poster with personal attacks. The Shit Reddit Says (SRS) movement saw the positive potential of this tactic, and built several subreddits dedicated to calling out misogyny, homophobia, and racism on the site. At that point Reddit began listening to brigading complaints and built anti-brigading measures like a link style that enforced non-interaction, and threatening to ban subreddits that linked interactively to comments or encouraged bullying the posters in their original context.

Brigading still happened but the bullies had to do a little more work. Some would manually enable interaction, with the miniscule risk that Reddit would respond with consequences. Other bullies would coordinate attacks in a discord chat or other offsite communities. Whenever you received an unexpected flood of negative replies or a surprising amount of downvotes to a typically innocuous comment, it wasn’t paranoid to think that the interaction was not organic.

A similar phenomenon happens regularly on Twitter, where bullies search with keywords to find conversations between total strangers and people they would never follow to interject their unwelcome ‘hot takes.’ For this reason search on Mastodon is limited by design.

Whether brigading is intentionally organized or not, the experience of being brigaded is real. Slashdot was a famous chat forum that predated Digg and Reddit, and became known for the Slashdot effect, where the overwhelming traffic from the popular site would overwhelm the bandwidth of a smaller site it linked to, removing it from the internet with a mechanism identical to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. Similarly, Hexbear is such a large and active site, its users will overwhelm any small community or new instance with their traffic just by virtue of its content appearing in its general feed. Any headline the site finds controversial is going to experience brigading regardless of whether it is intentionally organized or not.

The idea that this can be mitigated by warning and banning for disruptive and abusive behavior ignores the fact that this represents free labor by you and your moderators. It is extremely emotionally taxing to make these kinds of decisions and inevitably defend them, and the sheer volume from dealing with a site like Hexbear will absolutely burn out most people tasked with this responsibility.

5/5 – Caveat Federator

Hexbear’s success isn’t the only example of federation being over-rated. BeeHaw caused controversy by defederating from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world to protect their moderators’ sanity. Two months on, it is obvious they made the right descision for the right reasons. A number of positive contributors joined precisely because they took this bold action. BeeHaw is currently the second fastest growing server, and has become an instance with a unique character and community that attracts positive participation from across the Threadiverse.

Federation creates the potential for a diverse variety of instances to independently find their voice and niche. Ironically, premature federation with larger instances can overwhelm a new instance, washing away its unique character or preventing it from developing an identity in the first place.

It’s commendable you’re seeking feedback from your users on the decision, and I’d suggest you continue to be open about your politics and preferences. You’re not going to please everyone, and it’s important that you grow a community that you feel welcome in and are supported. Your commitment to the principle of federation or the diversity of the political discourse here isn’t going to matter much if you burn out and have to shut it down.

You obviously have reservations about federating with Hexbear. Regardless of what the current consensus appears to be, don’t do it. In fact, consider defederating from other large Lemmy instances too, at least until you’ve built a stable community with experienced moderators, and you all agree the moderation technology is now up to the task. You may lose some current users, but you’ll attract others who agree with your decision and are more supportive of the kind of community you’re trying to build.