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Lemmy.world Hexbear Statement

Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.

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Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.

Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.

The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:

  • “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.”
  • “The West's role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.”
  • “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term "rules-based international order." It is in the Left's interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”

The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to "dismantle western propaganda" and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.

In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.

Here are some examples:

“I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”

“All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”

Overall community comments:

To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.

We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.

1K comments
  • I'm not in favour of pre-emptive defederating. It feels like censorship doing so and that bothers me.

    1. Their note to their users specifically says to keep their anti establishment opinions and trolling to their own communities and don't spread it further for fear of defederation. It hardly sounds threatening to us.
    2. Defederating can happen at any point, and I think would be better kept as a reactive response and last resort rather than proactive.
    3. The more our large instances start fracturing and closing off from one another the less useful Lemmy will become. You're hardly blocking out an idealogy, if hexbear users wanted in they could just sign up and that would make it harder to find them. At least having them federated makes it easy to filter out @hexbear if we wanted.
    4. Practicing tolerance goes both ways. Calling communities 'them' vs 'us' and judging a group based on the noise of the few doesn't seem like the right approach. If hexbear became a problem and moderators complained of hate speech and conflict then absolutely we use the tools we have to keep things functioning, but filtering out groups because we don't like 'their' belief systems will make us judgemental and biased as a result. This is a platform to promote discussion not an echo chamber to gather like minded opinions and bounce them off each other in perpetuity.
    • These are very good points, imo. Preemtively banning a sizable community without even a dialogue beforehand will only stir more extreme opinions and division between instances.

      • (Previous comment looks like it was bugged or something. Reposting it)

        That's not the real danger. Anyone that thinks that isn't going to happen anyway is fooling themselves. All social networks trend toward individual clubhouses, and Lemmy's design is perfect for that. This is not a fault of technology, it's a people problem, it will be recreated everywhere one way or another.

        The danger with preemptive moderation of any kind is that it turns moderation into gate keeping, and we simply can't trust that to be even handed, no matter if they're left, right, or center. There perverse incentives to abuse that are too numerous.

        Whether it be users or instances, action should be taken after something has been done, not before. This is one of the slippiest slopes there is and it's troubling there's no standard, shared code of ethics admins are using that will prevent that

        All of that being said...when I read Hexbear's rules, the tone and obvious motivations of the admins there, I can't help but feel like this isn't unwarranted. For one very basic reason:

        Hexbear's motivation is openly about how it can affect other instances, and it's rules are basically just telling their users to "go forth and do the thing but don't get banned". That, more than anything else, should get a defederation. Instances should not exist for the purpose of influencing other instances. Full stop.

        Just....read that shit. Really take in the open contempt they have for other instances filled with people that don't toe the line. It's like a ship flying neutral colors coming up on the starboard side but the cannons are clearly loaded, and the deck is filled with peg legs and eye patches. It's painfully obvious what they want, no parley needed.

    • I’m not in favour of pre-emptive defederating.

      I agree, though I hesitate to call it "pre-emptive defederating". But I can see the viewpoint.

      To me, pre-emptive defederating is what was done by most Mastodon instances with Threads. Or how mastodon.art defederated from BBC. There was nothing to judge there. There was no content. Nobody could have said what kind of content would be seen on threads or the BBC instance. You could guess, sure. But you had absolutely no way of knowing.

      With hexbear, there is plenty content there to judge, and historically federated influence has always been the same as local, that is, the behavior of a fediverse community is not meaningfully different outside of their own instance. As a result, the admins of instance Y can judge what federation with instance X would look like, there is data there to look at.

      Pre-emptive to me would mean having no community content to judge at all, like the Threads and BBC examples.

      The more our large instances start fracturing and closing off from one another the less useful Lemmy will become.

      I will add that this is in the nature of the fediverse. It is inherently not useful as a replacement to social media centers such as Reddit, because it's decentralized nature implies the fracturization has to happen, and social media works best when everyone is in one giant garden party for chance meetings and spontaneous interactions.

      That's not necessarily a doom&gloom thing, it just means that by its very nature, software such as Lemmy cannot be useful to users who are seeking to replace Reddit. It can be Lemmy. Which is something else, albeit superficially similar in some regards.

      (edit)
      However, in general I do agree that they should probably have been allowed to federate and then re-evaluate based on how it works out. If their posts average X% downvotes, if Y% of local users end up filtering them or if a large portions of moderator actions are just from having to manage those users, they can still defederate.
      I looked over the instance, and I cannot see anything I'm missing out on, but I can understand why others would want to at least give them one chance.

    • I completely agree with this well thought-out comment. In fact, point 3 is evidenced in this very comment section.

    • Yeah, I'm really surprised with regards to point 1. "We have opinions that we recognize are unsavory to others so keep the especially unsavory stuff here so we don't piss people off" seems like a good thing. I feel like defederating this early may have been the wrong call, but I don't think regenerating now is the right call either. I suppose the argument is that they don't believe it will actually be contained.

  • What the fuck?

    I was assured by this server that it has no problem with socialists. This is worse than I expected it to be, I expected a half-hearted attempt to justify this action through means other than "they're socialists and hold socialist views".

    To the three points here:

    1. "Western propaganda" - Is capitalist propaganda. Of course socialists oppose it, we oppose capitalism.
    2. "Nato" - An anti-nato position is held by literally every single socialist organisation in Europe. You will not find a socialist org with a pro-nato position. Ffs just look at DiEM25's position on this, it's probably the most well known cross-nation alliance of socialist groups and parties in europe including people like Yanis Varoufakis, Jeremy Corbyn and Zizek to name a few but that really doesn't do the size of the DiEM organising alliance justice. Even Noam Chomsky is anti-nato ffs. What the fuck are you doing acting like this is a fringe position not held by a huge number of people over here in Europe and at the forefront of leftist politics on the continent? Taking the position "you're not allowed to be anti-nato" is blatant american imperialism.
    3. "It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished." - Duh? What the fuck do the liberals running this instance think socialists believe exactly? When Marx calls for revolution do you think that we mean to continue the organisations that existed prior? No, we seek to abolish them and create new socialist organisations that serve the new socialist state we seek to create.

    Absolutely mindblowing that this instance ever pretended it was going to play nicely with socialists. I'm disgusted.

    Every single take above is also the take you will get from every single socialist community over on reddit. The anarchist communities will also even have an anti-nato position. Like jesus christ. I expected this post to be bad but I didn't expect it to be "Yeah fuck socialists, oh and fuck what anarchists believe too".

    I'm flabbergasted that @ruud@lemmy.world just completely lied about not intending to block based on ideology, and it's extremely telling that Hexbear gets a pre-emptive defederation for this shit while literal actual nazis were a chore to get defederated.

  • Personally, I'd rather just block the stuff I don't like rather than have lemmy.world trying to decide "who's worthy of federation".

  • Good. I commented earlier about how horrible hexbear was. I signed up for hexbear, hoping to meet leftists, but these are not leftists. They just parrot Chinese/Russian propaganda. They have no original takes, no critical thinking. Call me whatever, but, I'm pro NATO. I don't give a shit about what bullshit propaganda you show me from a totalitarian regime. If the U.S. is bad, then the CCP is pure evil.

  • As a leftist can I just say how cringe it is to treat "fighting liberalism on the fediverse" like it's activism? Go outside.

  • Too bad this instance won't approach federation with Threads in the same manner; I don't think any positive outcomes could be expected from their behavior either.

  • I don't mind what the servers admins need to do. But please don't take quotes out of context.

    “With the cumulative updates Users may show/hide avatars, show/hide scores, show/hide NSFW content, show/hide read posts, show/hide notifications for new posts, block users, block communities, report direct messages, mods can distinguish a comment to sticky it to the top of a post. Users may set their feed in their account settings to determine if the default feed is local (hexbear.net only), subscribed (user subscribed communities only), or all (all posts on unblocked communities on federated instances).

    Hello users of Hexbear in the next couple of weeks (exact date will most likely be somewhere around the 5th of August) we will be taking the site down for approximately three hours to update to lemmy 0.18.3 and begin federation., as we prepare for federation we wanted to create a primer for etiquette when engaging in the fediverse.

    Please read and respect the rules of the community instance in which you are posting/commenting. Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated. Realize that you are a representative of the hexbear instance when you post on other instances.

    Know that your posts, comments, and DMs involving communities/users of other instances are stored on those instances databases, while delete requests are sent there is no guarantee they will be honored, especially if a different platform is involved (mastodon, etc).

    In addition, a reminder that you may set your feed or search to local/subscribed/all and block users/communities to have a greater control over what content you have. Local is Hexbear only, subscribed is communities from hexbear and federated instances that you have specifically subscribed to, and All is hexbear + all federated instances. There will be a pinned post in the !hexbear community where you can nominate instances for our allow-list or block-list.

    In closing, I want to remind everyone that the moderation policy of Hexbear communities will not change and will be strictly applied to any users from a federated instance. While we are not responsible for moderation policy of remote communities our admins do see reports you make of posts/comments on federated instances, and we are able to remove them, while not actually deleting the post/comment it does hide it so Hexbear users cannot see/interact with it.”

  • IDK, I don't think this is the right move at all... The announcement post and the comments you pointed out were cherry-picked and misinterpreted. They are an ideological instance. You wouldn't say blahaj.zone is trying to "spread" LGBTQ+ "ideas". They're just a specifically queer instance.

    Everything Hexbear said was, the way I read it, in the direction of "let's behave and be good with the federation". I think you're just confounding your own ideologies, and the way you think things should be done, with what the community at large wants.

    That being said, IDC that much, but I do disagree.

    PS: Posting from my lemm.ee account because this post doesn't show up on my lemmy.world account for some reason.

  • it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.

    For the sake of absolute transparency, and clarity, would you mind specifying exactly what rules would be violated if Hexbear were to be allowed to federate with Lemmy.world?

    Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.”

    This is a rather assumptive statement. You can only guess that this would happen, and have no tangible proof that it actually would -- the previous quotes that you provided outline your ideological differences, and not proof of conspiracy. You leave out the fact that in the Hexbear post that you linked they are telling their users to behave on other instances. In the quotes that you provided, you, quite conveniently, left out some important contextual information which changes the perceived intent -- the full version of the quotes that you pulled is as follows:

    Please read and respect the rules of the community instance in which you are posting/commenting. Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated. Realize that you are a representative of the hexbear instance when you post on other instances.

    While, yes, I agree that this is a rather uncouth way to word an official statement to the members of an instance, it shows quite the opposite for intent to spread harm to other instances.

    In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.

    Here are some examples:

    “I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”

    “All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”

    Your point here makes little sense to me. If anything, the examples that you just provided state otherwise. These quotes do not prove intent to cause harm on other instances through rule breaking. Your argument seems to be founded purely on an ideological difference.

    I have no issue at all with defederating with an instance if they are obviously harmful to the fediverse on the whole -- instances that promote spam, trolling, brigading, etc; however, hexbear, from what I see in the linked official post, shows no evidence of such intent. All I see is difference in ideology.

  • I'm not going to pretend to be unbiased, being a poster over on chapo.chat (or Hexbear as it's now [embarrassingly] called), but I hope those of you who support decision can at least understand how frustrating the purported justification is. The notion that hexbear has a consistent ideology to push beyond general amorphic leftism doesn't stand up to any scrutiny, so in the end the decision to defederate just comes down to "these people have opinions".

    • There are surely some decent people on Hexbear, the problem is that there are a lot that are not, and many have explicitly stated that they want to disrupt other instances. And the final nail in the coffin is IMHO that the admins on Hexbear have explicitly stated that they will not moderate their users for things they do on other instances (making the "be a good neighbor" part in their original announcement a fig leaf at best).

      The entire point of decentralized moderation in the fediverse is that instances are responsible for their member's conduct on other instances. Any instance that explicitly violates this (as Hexbear admins openly say) needs to be defederated as they actively harm the network.

      • the problem is that there are a lot that are not, and many have explicitly stated that they want to disrupt other instances

        It might seem that way but I don't actually think this extends much beyond young posters getting hyped up about how leftist they are, in the same way a 17 year old newly converted atheist is going to be mildly obnoxious to interact with in any online space.

        explicitly stated that they will not moderate their users for things they do on other instances

        See I saw that but I actually read it the other way; there's a lot of dumb ways to run afoul of moderation on hexbear, not liking vegans, complaining about certain users, just relatively easy to catch a ban for totally asinine stuff. So I took that to mean that they weren't going to hold everyone to account for hexbears code of conduct outside of hexbear spaces, so I wouldn't catch a ban over there for talking about the logical incoherence of certain arguments for veganism here.

        I can't imagine they mean to say they're willing to serve as a home base for disruptive and rule-breaking behavior on other instances, and they should absolutely be willing to impose bans for that (at the threat of defederating if not), and if they are saying that they should clearly reconsider, but I still think we should give these systems the opportunity to actually develop as opposed to preemptively siloing us all. lemmy.world admins should open up a dialogue with hexbear ones to see if there is some path forward if they actually do have considers that aren't just ideological disagreements.

  • I echo the dissatisfaction people have with this and won't be donating again. This is Lemmy.world not Lemmy.(we need a safe space from the communists)

    The fact you were upset about Beehaw's defederation but then turn around and do this is massive hypocrisy.

    This is you imposing your personal ideology on your users. The fact you lead with those 3 "concerning statements" tells us everything. You only like free speech when it aligns with your own beliefs.

    Shame.

  • I don't have any idea of who they are, but I don't get it: we're not preemptively defederating from Meta because it would be closed minded to do so (as per your admin decision), while Meta bad behavior is well documented (they've been fined by EU several times already), and we want to preemptively defederate from these people without even knowing how they will actually behave? Why? Shouldn't they be "innocent until proven guilty"?

  • Taking a glance at Hexbear, it looks ridiculously juvenile.

    Doesn't feel like it merits pre-emptive defederation, though.

  • As one authoritarian admin to another, I applaud you on the use of unilateral decision-making without any input from your mods or user base.

  • “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term “rules-based international order.” It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished.

    That's pro Putin propaganda, not leftist politics.

  • If this was a specific-purpose non-politics instance like many are, I'd say power to you. But for an general-purpose instance that advertises itself as being:

    A generic Lemmy server for everyone to use.

    Lemmy.world is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use.

    ...then there's a need for some serious self-examination. Preemptively blocking thousands of users, and talking about blocking another long-lasting substantial community because some other community made comments about them? This is disappointing, this does not sound properly thought-out.

    You're right, defederation should only be considered as a last resort. Not as a broad-spectrum discriminatory first action.

  • What a spez move. Pre-emptively de-federating is just a bad move, no other way to look at it. They're a very diverse group and generally much kinder than most lemmy users. At the very least you should've tested federation for a day or two to see how the interactions play out. But anybody here can go over there and see for themself how nice they can be even when disagreeing, which they do a lot among themselves.

    Also where in the Code of Conduct does it say the only ideology allowed is liberalism? Going the way of Reddit with vague justifications and arbitrary decisions will make the administration a lot of profit some day, but there's a reason people left that one.

1019 comments