All the best to you and the team, I understand it can be rough. But similarly, I think most of what you wrote could just as well have been written by a Lemmy maintainer:

I think a lot of folks don’t realize how hard it is… All we ever really wanted was a nice place for folks to express themselves… The whole team here has dumped 1000’s of hours into keeping this thing alive. It’s just rough to see the comments here.

Lemmy devs are in exactly the same position, and reading the comments in this thread, I am getting the vibe that lemmy.world admins are not willing to see this. Just check the messaging your admins are putting out there (even in the comments under this post), imagine reading that messaging as a Lemmy dev, and tell me it wouldn’t feel just as rough.

Btw, I think a clear source of all the negative comments here is not the fact that Sublinks is being developed. Every time Sublinks gets advertised on Lemmy, there is this toxic “finally we can get rid of the original Lemmy dev team” messaging along with it - sometimes it is more hidden between the lines, other times, it’s very blatant. This messaging inevitably creates uncertainty in users about the future of their instances. THAT’S the real issue here, at least from my point of view.

Considering that Lemmy is an open source project which is being built collectively by a big community, your comment sounds extremely strange. You are basically saying “we did not do enough testing for the 0.19.3 release, and we accept none of the blame for it.”

Edit: The more I think about your comment, the more strange it becomes… you guys are literally running the biggest instance, but rather than participate in the testing of big releases, you let smaller instances do it for you and then complain if nobody else is testing it at your scale. Your comments would be completely understandable if this was a paid product, but come on… Just think about it, would you also have this kind of approach for IRL community projects?

Don’t get me wrong, I get it now, I’m just saying that when I first came to Hexbear, I was confused

I think oppressed and exploited people have no need to be civil, but on the other hand, I don’t think it’s right to say that people who are alienated by “uncivil” posts on Lemmy were never really friends (I am extending your “dems” to include Lemmy users here, I hope I’m not misrepresenting your point) - I think a lot of them have good intentions and would probably support socialism if they understood it. Maybe I’m naive, but I’ve noticed several times seemingly decent people on Lemmy having negative opinions about Hexbear. Just recently, I saw one person calling Hexbear “tankies”, and then in another thread the same person was calling for the elimination of millionaires. They’re just a few steps away from being a “tankie” themselves, and they just don’t realise it because they are missing some key information.

I was saying in another thread before, I think having a friendly “intro to Hexbear” type page or post would be awesome, because it could be shown to confused Lemmy users who don’t understand Hexbear yet.

I really think it’s an honest misunderstanding, fueled by wrong first impressions.

Even for myself, the first time I opened hexbear.net a few months ago, I immediately saw some post about Trump on the front page, and a bunch of posts and comments criticising liberals. I completely misunderstood what was going on here, I also thought that it’s some kind of right wing circlejerk. This misunderstanding was later reinforced by reading comments elsewhere on Lemmy calling Hexbear a Putin supporter instance, troll instance, etc.

I only started questioning my understanding when I started noticing some sincere comments by Hexbear users, and eventually I realised that you guys have pretty much the same worldview as I do (in terms of the rich only being rich because they exploit the poor etc).

It can really take some effort on the part of external users to figure out what’s going on in here, and from my own experience, I think it’s extremely easy to get the wrong idea.

Heck yeah! I lived in a city with a bunch of architecture like that, always hear people saying how ugly it is, but I love it so much. Nice to meet another fan.

So many tech YouTubers are overrated, but one who really stands out to me is JayzTwoCents. Somehow I have several memories of clicking on one of his videos and being shocked at him being confidently incorrect about something. I no longer click on his videos at all.

Behold, the result of 4 hours of careful ship design: https://imgur.com/a/ZbfD8tN

I think all humans are selfish af, different cultures just have different ways of expressing that selfishness

I find it absolutely awesome, the game has the same “just one more quick adventure… oops 5 hours have passed” effect as TES games, but in space. I think I’ve also spent 3-4h in the ship editor at this point.

I’m probably a very boring person

If you search for Russia on hexbear, you find comments like this quite quickly, like:

https://hexbear.net/comment/3738463

Peace looks like guaranteeing Ukrainian neutrality by taking NATO membership off the table and likely ceding the DPR and LPR to the Russian federation at this point.

https://hexbear.net/comment/3765816

We also get a lot of shock at the fact that some of us think, in that situation, Ukraine would have to give independence and security guarantees to the Donbas & Crimea. Many of us think that given the realities of the civil war there over the last 8 years or so, plus this conflict, it’s probably the only way to prevent retributory ethnic cleansing in the region. It has nothing to do with ideas of fairness or sovereignty or any other nebulous concept; it’s about what’s least worst for the working class there.

I’ve seen many other such comments in the past week lurking here, so it definitely comes up every now and then. I can also see the logic behind these comments, even if I don’t agree with the logic myself.

I am personally against American invasions and am not trying to say the USA is somehow good or benevolent, I was just pointing out why outsiders may perceive some hexbear users as pro-Putin

I’ve seen several comments on hexbear (I can find links if you haven’t seen them) along the lines of “I’m not pro-Putin… BUT we should give him what he wants in order to end the war quicker”, and as an outsider, I think for sure these comments are actually seen as totally pro-Putin by non-hexbear users, due to how trying to appease dictators has ended for Europe in the past.