Update on federation

Hey hexbears just want to update everyone.

We took the weekend to properly consider and are removing: programming.dev , aussie.zone , and lemm.ee from our allow-list.

We will look at refederation with lemm.ee after local-only communities are developed. When that feature is available we would really like to consider changing every hexbear community to local-only except for chapotraphouse, askchapo, news, and the_dunk_tank. The final say on if a community is local only or not is 100% up to the mod team on that community.

The reason for this is that lemm.ee despite having twice our monthly active users has a 700k annual comment rate to hexbear's 1 million, in addition lemm.ee has very little active communities that do not exist on hexbear.

Resulting in lemm.ee benefit of federation being votes and views, with a secondary benefit of comments.

However, as expressed by users belonging to marginalized groups, comments from .ee users are often lib-shit and in some cases outright hostile. While many on hexbear love dunking on these lost libs the duty to protect marginalized users is much more important.

The end vote for programming.dev and aussie.zone was a tie, so we decided to break the tie in favor of defederation. The decision on lemm.ee was much harder as the average user did express desire to remain federated however the admin team decided that a temporary removal from our allow-list was the best option.

As an admin team we have never wanted to prioritize growth, and we wanted to give federation with liberal instances a try, however we consider providing a safer browsing experience for marginalized users more important than the opportunity to dunk.

While user side instance blocking and local sort are options, neither address the issue of federated instance users coming into posts in hexbear communities to make reactionary comments.

Thank you everyone who gave input and please provide any feedback, comments, concerns, etc in comments.

final vote count:

federation

all 32

aussie.zone 27

lemm.ee 41

programming.dev 27

lemmy.blahaj.zone 5

defederation

all 40

aussie.zone 19

lemm.ee 4

programming.dev 19

lemmy.blahaj.zone 43

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250 comments

Ive i where a Fed . i would make an account on Hexbear to start Drama like this to islolate it and therefore Neutrilse it..
"I read XXX on Lemmy fuckboy why would i ever even go there "
"DEFEDERATE NOW HEXBEAR !"
you have a local button just use it .. make a "localbutton" PSA
- I've been browsing local only for months on my old account, it was one of the first things i changed in the settings when i made a new one and i'm still glad we defedded from these instances. What positive did they add to this site? Those among them who can be won to our cause either have already made accounts here or will do so after defederation, that's a bigger benefit to us than staying federated with them.
  I get that some of you love to dunk on these shits, but we have an entire comm dedicated to dunking on people, if you have that kind of energy it's much better to use it for brigades and other targeted measures that actually reach a sizeable number of people because they happen off-site on larger platforms than to let it out on some manosphere turd shitting up a thread on one of our queer comms that made it to lemm.ees or programmingdevs frontpage.
  
  The benefit was that there was a decent amount of relatively normal, non-ideological people getting exposed to new thoughts and ideas, and introducing them to better ways of approaching the world. Not every person we federated with is a chud coming here to attack or be dunked respectively. A lot of them are just regular ass people on the internet, which can lead to healthy participation and growth with Hexbear over time.
  
  According to the mods, the amount of banned users from .ee was rather huge, and most of the rest does not engage with us. I didn't see them post a lot on here, but when i did, it mostly was shit that added another one of them to the ban list.
  I can't speak for hexbear engagement on .ee itself, but if you want to expose as much people as possible to our viewpoint on their home turf, doing that under a hexbear account is maybe not the right approach because many of the larger instances either have proactively defedded from us because we're too far left or are so irredeemably awful and chuddy that federation never was an option, or led to disaster like the shitjustworks federation.
  And honestly, if reach is what you're after, you need to brigade much bigger platforms than the feddiverse.
  
  Well, it's just a natural outcome that you're going to have a greater number of banned users from a larger userbase. The sustainability of that is really just a mod question I think. If they're willing and able to keep watch over that volume of posters, then it's fine.
  Of course if the instance overall slants in a negative posting direction, that's different, and where a defed is warranted, but I never really got that impression with lemm.ee, like I did with Blahaj and shitjustworks.

250 comments