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CARCOSA [mirror/your pronouns] @hexbear.net

Hexbear Proposals

Proposals made are mirrored here to facilitate discussion

24 comments

  • Proposal: Limit featured posts to three at maximum (1 general megathread, event (either fundraiser, bookclub or hextube), meta-post) or two featured posts a portal post where links to community megathreads and events are commented, and a meta-post

    • Genuine: Why? News mega, trans mega, gen mega. The disability and empoc megas too...

      • Some are complaining about the amount of space all the site-pinned posts take up.

        • Understandable but I think unpinning any of them is a bad solution, especially because I bet it would kill traffic to the empoc and disability megas.

        • There's a simple button to hide the me gas, can't people use that if they think there are "too many megas"?

        • i agree with ashinadash on this, there's already a button to hide featured posts for those who are complaining about the space being taken up.

          i personally think it's great that these megas are front and center on the site. it makes gaining access to safe spaces easier and it shows that the site values those spaces. the pins drive engagement and sustain these communities on hexbear.

        • To anyone backing that proposal:

          Those megas should be taking up space, disabled, empoc, and trans comms should be occupying space on the front page

          Like /u/ashinadash said the last time these megas (especially disabled and POC) were relegated to a tiny link it effectively killed engagement in these comms until they were restored. That was for the first fundraiser (and every mega was pinned which made it fair) but unpinning those threads sends a bad message to the communities that are being relegated to a link at the bottom of the 'general' megathread that remains. A lot of the empoc users have already expressed that they don't feel comfortable engaging outside of that comm.

          Personally any complaints about these comms/megas that are mostly for marginalized people "taking too much space" is sus to me because it implies there's a real Hexbear that deserves to take up space on the front page and a non-real Hexbear that doesn't. I would be very put off by this if it was to pass.

          I don't think it's a coincidence that those megas being pinned front and center - especially as safe spaces - has sent a message to people from those communities and drawn them to Hexbear. The action of removing them from the front page sends the same message in the opposite direction. Those pinned megas are what structurally differentiates Hexbear as an intersectional social media website - it's working, and I don't think saving a number of users from the labour of having to scroll past (or click "-/+") is worth it or a valid reason to change that.

          Hexbear is better as a seamless hybrid of chatrooms (pinned megas, esp for marginalized people) and Lemmy algorithm driven posts and comms.

    • I personally don't care much for mega threads. I don't like the pattern of vibe they promote, it is not as interesting or useful as regular topic-ed forum posts. At least this place isn't full of permanent megas that go on for years; those are the worst especially when they are meant to collect information for later retrieval. I would not miss weekly megas if they were gone or drastically reduced.

      However it's clear that they are a popular and core part of the site. For whatever reason which remains inexplicable to me, people luv them. I am trying to go with the flow.

      In terms of being less overwhelming of the other content, I think there are smaller changes that could be made. Here are some ideas hopefully for discussion by people who are more tuned in to the situation.

      • It might be that everyone doesn't know they can minimize the featured posts at least on desktop. And it has some amount of persistence, it remains collapsed when you reload. I only realized recently. Easy to miss as you scroll by. So should probably tell the whiners like me that they are not helpless.
        • I don't know how to implement it but a collapse that works from the side of the whole box instead of only from the top would be nice, but that's probably outside the scope of hexbear.
      • Terser dates: "November 25th to December 1st, 2024" is very long. What about "Nov 25 -> Dec 1, 2024" or even "11/25-12/1 '24" or some other format
        • Shout out to "EM POC WEEKLY THREAD 11/25/24" --- is the second date even needed? There is a little text in the post heading that says "6 days ago" so if it's a weekly thread you know how long is left. Maybe there are contexts like apps where the info is displayed differently so 2nd date still needed?
      • Don't need to specify it's the "new" thread, that it's a "thread", or for "discussion", that it's "general" etc. People know what kind of website this is.
      • Do they need to have big cover photos? If the pics were put into the markdown of the post, they wouldn't automatically take up the whole page. Right now, in Jeroba, the official lemmy android app, there isn't a way to minimize these so they are always on top of everything else. It only makes sense to browse a site like this with images set to auto expand generally. But these posts that are the same all week, I don't see the point. Why do I need to look at Alan Moore in such detail, for a whole week? See below for example.
      • Personally I would prefer if there was some way to toggle the prominence of the featured posts. In desktop, I tried with developer tools to see if I could resolve the above issue via a user style. Best I could do was hide the images permanently (.featured-posts .img-expanded { display: none; }) .

      Rather it makes sense to assume that the featured content will be loaded at the top, in full, every time.

      For scale

      Used firefox responsive design view to emulate the current site as it appears on a mobile phone browsing /all. This is how far you need to go before reaching anything new.

      Logged out default:

      logged in with "auto expand media" toggled on:

      So this is kind of a post about what color the bike shed should be painted lol.

      Edit I did test for the above using web dev tools: Made all the titles pretty concise. Only got 10% shorter scroll till new content. Much less than expected. (This was images toggled off.) So I guess write the date as extravagantly as you feel like it.

24 comments