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

@CARCOSA@hexbear.net I want to say I fully support the defed decision and I’d personally actually support defedding from any remaining instances with wrecker tendencies.
It’s dire out there folks, like really dire. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is one of the only public forums on the entire English internet that is genuinely leftist and doesn’t censor leftist views, especially in this new cold war era where social media platforms have gone fully mask off, running with the “Russian” excuse to ban every single imperial core critical comment like they did to r/genzedong. This is a valuable space for people like me to go to maintain morale and remember that we aren’t alone - despite the insane systemic anti-leftist repression in the English online world. The fact that this is an LGBT space where you don’t need to do the whole rainbow imperialism bit to fit in, you honestly can’t exaggerate how unique it makes this forum.
I’ll be honest, I actually had installed a browser extension which already masked over the posts of every single non-hexbear/grad comment automatically. I get that some people love the sense of camaraderie here of dunking stray lib takes together without being ostracized because its not a lib goon owned site that bans every leftist for not toeing the line, but I honestly just simply enjoyed the part of finally finding a community where you don’t have to filter what you really feel for once. The whole having to scroll past every bad faith redditor take from one of those other instances (and honestly, I’d say it’s been 9/10 from what I’ve seen that other instances are always chuds with no intent to ever talk in good faith) was exhausting personally.
Defederations do hurt community growth however and that’s something to be concerned about. It was deeply demoralizing on r/genzedong when we got quarantined and activity plummeted as a result of the isolation. In spite of the rather closely knit community, Lemmygrad is similarly often sad for me to see just because it sucked how many people didn’t make the transition over from reddit.
In any case, while I don’t want to at all invalidate the concerns of those who oppose this decision, I wanted to let you know that there are people like me who appreciate the community you mods have built and maintained for what it is already, even without the ability to dunk on the lost libs that wander in.

250 comments