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

Feels weird to me that the benefits of being federated anywhere are mostly being described as 'having people to dunk on' or to convert. As if other places can't possibly have good posts or anything worthwhile to say, they're only useful to us as a torment toy or if we can make them into something good. It's kinda gross that that's the only way people feel comfortable talking about it.
- I mean comrades at mander.xyz doing gods work tbh and post interesting stuff, lemm.ee (to me) are just more normal random selection of people, instead of cocooning in ideology, ask random questions and make me think (sometimes) (same with aussie.zone, its like local news channel of random shit in far away land, mildly interesting)
  
  Every single aussie.zone poster I've met were reactionary.
  On an unrelated note, I have a special hatred of Australia not only of the country, but of the people as well.
  
  I don't think i've seen even one, just observing their posts from the distance, but possibly, haven't looked too close
  
  All my interaction with them have been on lemmy.ml worldnews or various lemmygrad comment sections so it's not a representative sample.
  For the above interactions, even lemmy.world users were less ghoulish on average.
- IDK, this is just my personal take but the stuff I've seen from other instances is weak sauce Facebook boomer tier posts, or what you'd see on r/memes. And while I appreciate that Lemmy is libre so it's superior to Reddit in many respects, none of my niche interests have any representation on Lemmy, but they do on Reddit. So if I want funny posts or memes I'm SOL on Lemmy, and for discussion of the topics I find most interesting outside of left politics, also SOL. So, personally, I don't get much out of federation and am much more interested in protecting our marginalized comrades than seeing federated posts.
  
  the proliferation of Facebook-tier boomer memes on lemmy is weird as heck.
  
  i will say mtgzone.com has much more pleasant people than the magic subreddit, if you like nerd scratchers
- Well all the instances that actually host populated general interest comms are already defederated. I don't think there are any particularly popular lemme.ee local comms.
  So it's pretty much just the users, since there aren't any posts in lemm.ee comms.
- As if other places can't possibly have good posts or anything worthwhile to say
  I mean maybe they possibly could, but I haven't seen much evidence. You know how many awful meme comms I've blocked for being 9gag-tier?
- People on hexbear alone aren’t funny or smart enough to infiltrate a liberal instance so they rely on federation in hopes strays come in and start a ruckus so they can dog pile said liberal which makes them feel like they’ve accomplished something great. They’re no different to the people they dunk on because they would rather negative engagement to get their fix rather than focus on the safety and care of marginalized comrades.

250 comments