Unironically it’s just the post sorting algorithm. It was way better before federation, although I can’t put my finger on why exactly. (Not to criticize our admins and tech people who work on that stuff behind the scenes, I’ve also seen a ton of improvements and stuff too).

it’s ‘been dying’ since 2020, there’s a post like this every 6 months

Having been here since basically the beginning, I feel like it’s only gotten better. Some good changes I’ve noticed:

1. Far more explicitly pro trans than it was initially
2. Generally seems like more of an effort is made to be welcoming
3. More activity and fun community events like movie nights
4. Struggle sessions are more or less a joke and angry struggle sessions seem much more rare

Some things I miss:

1. Posters like tervell, brookebaybee, UlyssesT, and others who aren’t as active or no longer around at all. If you’re out there reading this, come back and say hi!
2. President Parrot has also disappeared from the public eye following the last scandal that was in the news. I think it was the one where President Parrot was naked or something.
3. Also, this was kind of always an issue, but there are lots of smaller commas that could use more love.

I’m not on hexbear because of the federation issues, I still enjoy the instance from my .ml account. Not a poster though

90/9/1 rule

90% of users are lurkers and they need to be bullied into posting

I assumed this was a joke post

Ive been here the whole while, and currently it feels quite healthy actually, to me at least, compared to where it’s been at difficult times

Love you all

Unfortunately, UlyssesT left to go touch grass and isn’t likely to return for some time, if at all.

But I think the site’s fine. We got that one new power user, demoncracy (whose apparently gone now lmao), hanging around now. Probably some others I don’t recognize as easily because their avatar doesn’t stand out so much.

It used to be around 500 daily users , now it’s at 900. So, it’s not decreasing, but maybe not increasing by as much I guess.

I will never log off.

I can’t be always online stealing memes ok?

I remember seeing the first Hexbear is dying post in like August 2020

Your experience on the site is largely determined by what sorting algo you use by default, IMO. (or what mega you browse if you primarily hang out in the megas)

If you use Hot sort you will see mostly new posts, but comments sections will be pretty empty. If you use Active, you’ll see the posts with the most active comments section, but they’ll all be like 12h to 2 days old. Etc.

So using Hot (or especially New), the comments can feel really empty: but you have the opportunity to be the one who starts the interesting discussions in the comments, or gets first dibs at the cheap jokes. Using Active you’ll see the fullest comments sections and most struggle sessions

You can try both of them out using the selector on the front page, but if you want to change your default that’s on your user settings page (in case it wasn’t obvious)

I switched to Hot after we migrated and federated, but it took me a while to realize how drastically different the site experience was on Hot vs Active. I still default to Hot but sometimes I switch to Active to see slapfights or good posts that I missed

EDIT: Also to provide some data, our monthly active user count is actually up ~200 since 6 months ago. That’s something like 10% growth? These things are hard to really judge precisely but I don’t think there’s any sign we’re dying