You make a post there and wait to see if the users yell at you for it.

used to be you'd just post on main, and main was all we needed, until woke happened

We have way too many communities for the number of users that we have and people keep asking for even more super-niche communities. I would cut them down starting with every community that hasn't had a post for the past month.

I think communities should be thought of as communities rather than categories or labels. When you decide where to make a post, you should consider who would like to see it, rather than what you would describe the post as. A post in the movies comm should be interesting to people who like movies or television.

Also, a post can be made in multiple comms. However if you make the same post in multiple comms, only 1 of the posts might appear on the front page due to deduplication. You can just pick whichever community you think is most relevant.

I just post wherever tbh

the categorization problem is a fundamental flaw of reddit and therefore a flaw with lemmy.

Further, the proof that hexbear is made up of smaller communities with varying interests is that posting in a wrong comm sometimes results in users complaining on the post. People who have not made posts have not experienced this.

There have been many times where I have made a post and some rude person comments on my post that they don't think that my post is interesting or that they don't like it.

The general behavior of making a post is that users post things that they find to be interesting themselves and want to have interactions with other people who also share the same interest.

I want to make posts about things that I think are interesting (somewhat for personal notetaking purposes), but also I want other people with similar interests to discuss the subject of the post. I don't want engagement from people who are uninterested. It serves no positive purpose to interact with people who are uninterested.

I can understand that not every person will think that every post is interesting. However, if a user finds a post to be uninteresting, they should just ignore the post or report the post if it violates rules.

People should make comments on posts that they like. Comments boost a post in the algorithm. Negative comments boost a post in the algorithm. Positive comments boost a post in the algorithm. Therefore users should only post on comments that they think are good posts, so that good posts are boosted in the algorithm.

The existence of comms somewhat fixes this problem. If a user doesn't like the interests of the community, they can simply not participate in the specific comm.

Some users like shitposting, ie low effort meme/joke posts. Some users don't like to see shitposting. The people who like shitposting formed the badposting comm. If the badposting comm was closed overnight and shitposting was returned a larger comm, there would be many people complaining.

There are also many contrarians on hexbear, people who think themselves as above mainstream culture. The mere observation of mainstream cultural events sparks outrage in their minds. The behavior suggests that mainstream culture is not to be observed as if ignoring a thing magically makes the thing disappear from existence.

The idea that comms should not be thought of as communities is anti-materialist. It tries to alienate the human interaction element from the material element of the interaction. Posts are relations between humans, not independently acting objects. Posts should be imagined as interactions between humans, not labeled like living objects.

How anyone can think that hexbear is "one big community where every person has the same interests" when it is also known for having frequent 'struggle sessions' ie tedious arguments?

The most important thing to consider when you choose which comm to post in is imagining who you would like to interact with. Your post is an interaction with other people and hexbear users are evidently not all the same.

Personally I just post to whichever comm comes to mind first, assuming it follows the rules. At the end of the day, it usually ends up on the front page, so ultimately the comm doesn't matter too much. Another thing to consider is the moderators of a particular comm, some comms don't have many active mods, and mods are people, so ofc they'll have biases. Which particular mod controls a comm isn't as big of a deal as the rest of Lemmy though, since we've got a lot tighter ideological cohesion, and somewhat less tolerance for mod abuse.

There's a few things that are pretty simple, like Drug stuff goes in c/Drugs. Some people really don't want to see Drug content (ex-addicts, etc.), so it's great to have only one place you need to block.

Post wherever you want lol. Use c/slop or something.

You're not limited to what is on Hexbear. You can find and subscribe to communities from other Lemmy sites. For example, !pravda_news@news.abolish.capital is an instance I run as a kind of news wire and this is its primary comm.

!capitalismindecay@lemmygrad.ml is a great comm from lemmygrad.ml that is mostly a single users research on Fascism.

!linux@lemmy.ml and !libre@hexbear.net have some overlap but have different user bases.

!worldnews@lemmy.ml !news@hexbear.net !globalnews@lemmy.zip have similar content but the broad communities that make up their host instance changes the dynamics and makeup of their respective news communities. Some are more lib vs leftist.

Comms exist here for people with a similar worldview to talk and discuss shared interests. You might find similar topics of interest on other sites but not similar world views.

Labels are coming in v1.0 of Lemmy, which you can learn more about on the official Lemmy website https://join-lemmy.org/.