Yeah it is all so extremely obvious:
Assume good faith in even the most obvious of questions, except in cases where a user is explicitly acting in a combative or unreasonable manner.
Do not directly link to comments or posts of other federated instances on public posts with intent to goad or mock.
When in a federated instance, their rules (and their code of conduct) apply.
Allow instances their own space for discussion, if requested implicitly or explicitly.
etc., though none of that is ever actually enforced, making it a list of "suggestions puh-lease", rather than "rules".
Speaking of voting, as a mathematician you will appreciate this one most of all: https://hexbear.net/post/1712067. Quick summary: they took a vote, then discarded the vote entirely. One of the results was 41 for remaining federated with lemm.ee vs. only 4 for defederation - that is 91% for, vs. only 9% against. And then programming.dev wasn't quite as close but it was still freaking hugely biased towards one side: 27 (58.7%) for remain federated with them vs. 19 (41.3%) to defederation. The difference between them being 8 votes out of 46 = 17.4% - which is nowhere close to a tie. Unless you are an HB admin I suppose and then:
The end vote for programming.dev and aussie.zone was a tie, so we decided to break the tie in favor of defederation.
This is... just... wow. >91% wanted to remain federated with lemm.ee, and 59% to remain federated with programming.dev, but screw the users - what do you think this is, a vote? Oh wait... :-(
And once again the comments in that post tell the REAL story. e.g. this one https://hexbear.net/post/1712067/4540345:
Multiple users legit left this site for months at a time multiple times due to those dumb struggle sessions. Hexbear even lost devs over some of them
devs!!! They are turning away their own programmers who provide the site that they all use to shit onto each one with!?!?! And given how Hexbear predates Lemmy, I think they actually meant "dev", rather than "admin" - i.e. someone who did the work of modifying the code, which is all the more relevant given how it is in Rust, which is not an easy language to learn, even for someone starting off with extensive knowledge of C++.
But speaking of admins, the admins themselves say things like:
however we consider providing a safer browsing experience for marginalized users more important than the opportunity to dunk.
THE OPPORTUNITY TO DUNK - not the opportunity to converse civilly will, not the opportunity to learn, to listen, to discourse, but TO DUNK.
And ofc the admins are not the only ones speaking thus - "Compromising the ability to spread leftist ideas to others in order to...", "They're reading what we're saying and the message is still getting spread. Our ideals are spread through interacting with people...", "you can't stop some users from seeing the ridiculous fascist takes", "Where do they think new users come from? They don't spontaneously appear from thin air they appear because other people are exposed to them in other spaces." - and here's one that literally uses the actual word "disrupt": "With Lemmy, it was about building something that was going to eventually create its own theatre-of-operations that disrupted existing ones, and hexbear was going to be connected to that so I could always justify it."
The only reason that Hexbear exists and is federated with any other instances at all, from the mouths of the very self-same admins that run it, is... again... "THE OPPORTUNITY TO DUNK".
So when e.g. Cowbee comes in, ignores 95% of what I say and hyper-focuses on one tiny little aspect, demanding that I show proof of all of my work, while not offering any for their own points and instead just saying "just trust me bro, and hit up my DMs where we can talk more" (but then forgetting I suppose that they said that, or presuming that I could not read it in the very self-same post, or more likely presuming that others would not take the time to do so, and then they claimed that they had never done such a thing at all, hrm........).
The Innuendo Studios series is absolutely one of the best series on YouTube that I have ever seen! I just presumed that you already knew of it, but yes if you haven't taken time to watch throuhg all of them, you absolutely would probably enjoy it! Everything he's done is amazing too, like the agency of protagony. Also the gamer-gate one, titled something like why is jack so angry, b/c it shows the historical development of those trends - but that was just a precursor to the ultimate one: The Alt-Right Playbook.
I see these same tactics played out over and over and over and over and over and over and over again by people like Cowbee, and it is just exhausting. I LOVED your take-down here, but that simply cannot keep up with the absolute TSUNAMI of bullshit that "they" are able to spew. It takes them two seconds to say something and move on, so even if it takes you only two minutes to reply, let alone two hours, then they "win". And either way they declare that they do so. As Trump is pretty much guaranteed to do so, if he does not outright win himself, in about one month from now.
So that's the thing: anybody can go in and read these comments, from the HB's very own mouths. The highly ironic thing is that they actually ARE behaving themselves quite well when they are out here!!!!! Compared to what they do inside there, that is. (have you seen the pig-poop link yet? ewww...) But who is going to spend that kind of time?! And yet, their messages are chosen to be spread all across the entire Fediverse, unless the instance takes the requisite steps to specifically defederate from them. Like a CSAM attack, this is a wave of hostility and more importantly childishness that festers inside their borders, but also explodes outwards to affect us all. Unless we go somewhere that has enacted defenses to keep it out.
At which point it becomes relevant that especially when they noticed that they were getting defederated from most of the major instances, and their admins chose to defederate even more other instances, many HB users fled to their alts, e.g. on Lemmy.ml. Even if those alts had existed prior to that, still, they became the new vehicle through which the HBs chose to spread their messages.
No wonder 100% of the people that I have told about Lemmy irl looks at me so oddly - one glance at the all feed, at the types of things coming out from like memes@lemmy.ml, and all the toxicity spewed from HBs and HBs under the guise of other alts, or others who were never on HB but act the same, is always enough to turn my irl friends away from Lemmy. And has finally done the same to me, now that places such as PieFed and Tesseract are available (but possibly would have been enough regardless).