I’m increasingly of the opinion that owners at L.W don’t know what they want it to be. The lack of direction manifests as wild moderation and shitty user behavior fairly often and people are tiring of it.
Instead of being able to provide stability and guidance when controversial things come up they attempt to play both sides or ignore the issues pretty often. They don’t want to lose their stranglehold on a huge chunk of users so they don’t want to discipline the people who are already there, mod or otherwise. From the fact checking bot to their promotion and acceptance of bad faith arguments it seems pretty clear that nothing there can be trusted IMO. It’s a recipe for disaster and we’re seeing the early symptoms of it.
There is probably time to turn things around but it requires making difficult decisions and shouldering responsibility for the mistakes of the past while addressing them for the future. I don’t see it happening.
I suspect the slander from other places like L.W will keep a lot of people away from hexbear.
FWIW I don’t believe the future of the fediverse is large instances anyway. A few larger ones will likely make it as the “default” landing zones for people first discovering the tech. I think the larger instances will continue to suffer from users who insist they have a right to act like assholes just because they have an account, and most of the instances seem fine with this if it means their engagement is up. The larger they become the more the problem snowballs as it becomes harder and harder to keep up with the expanding membership.
There are a few that are putting in the work required to maintain civility, like db0. For most of the others it’s a race to the bottom just like capitalism because that’s all they’re capable of seeing.