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CARCOSA [mirror/your pronouns] @hexbear.net

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

  • Three people hold a vote on which restaurant they will all eat at. Person one and two ever so slightly prefer thai, person three is deathly allergic to peanuts and shellfish and can't safely eat thai. The median vote is upheld and democracy prevails! Person three awkwardly goes home wondering what the fuck is wrong with their "friends"

    Not saying for certain that this is the landscape but you cannot deny that it looks that it might be considering the evidence presented. Please consider the limitations of simple democracy, and the very open humble dialogue Carcosa is having with you before you start complaining without substance.

    • There is a question on the substance though, I'll paste what I put further down the thread:

      I've scoured the modlogs, I see a grand total of 1 account from .ee banned for transphobia in the past 2 months. And 1 temp ban from traa due to a cryptic emoji-laden comment, over the same period. Are there accounts doing transphobic harassment and going un-banned by our mods, or is this just not a real problem of any reasonable scale? Or is 1 straggler every couple months simply untenable and too many? Because we see more wrecker accounts simply made directly here on-site than that by a long shot but we aren't shutting off registrations...

      If this were a common issue I'd say yeah, the harm outweighs any possible benefit, but looking at the modlog that's not the picture I get

      • I'm cis so I'm going to leave that discussion to other comrades. This has substance and isn't the sort of comment I was referring to. This was directed at the sort of comment which implies that the decision was arbitrary when the reasoning was clearly stated.

      • Just a day before the vote, an .ee user got banned from one of our trans boards for a lenghty post where he boiled down a thoughtful, complex article about a trans masc person's difficult relation to masculinity to literally saying "not all men" and argued that feminists should stfu about pointing out male privilege. I can't say he was being outright transphobic, i reported him for his sexism apologia and that's what he got banned for, but it still hurts to see discussions in trans spaces being taken over by antifeminist dweebs who completely ignore anything trans related about the discussion and use it as a jumping off point for spreading mysogyny.

        A day before that, we had another ban of an .ee user for a completely unhinged slava ukraini diatribe about hexbear doing Russian "ampliganda". Apparently this ampliganda thing is "propaganda" were you say things that are actually 100% true and correct, but you say them so often and so loudly that they disturb the state department narrative. This kind of western chauvinist redditor shit has always been extremely common with .ee, it's a large part of why the list of banned users from that instance is so long and we barely see engagement with them nowadays. Now you might say "see, we barely see engagement!", but that would be missing the point that engagement is so low because the site has such a widespread problem with violating our code of conduct.

        I understand the decision to refed once we have local only comms, i get that my hardline "defed everybody" stance is not a position i can enforce here, and i think it's a viable compromise to redesign the community so we can maintain both outreach, dunking and safer spaces at the same time, but for now, i prioritize the safety of women and queers and the safety of my comrades affected by western imperialism and national chauvinism over dubious promises of short-term growth, and i'm glad moderators agree with that approach.

        • That's 100% shitty, and I did miss counting that one because it was a site ban and didn't list transphobia in the reason, but one user showing up an being shitty like once a month, maybe twice, isn't very many... Like I said before we get more wreckers signing up for local hexbear accounts than that most months by far.

          The slava ukraini types again also suck, and its not like I value their input, but I don't think they're particularly harmful in small amounts... The value is about how we respond to them, and what other users from their instance see when we do (their boneheaded thought-terminating cliches getting both mocked and dismantled.) I don't see them as very harmful primarily because they're coming into our space where we have all the power to bully or insta-ban them, but as I'll expand on below, I do also believe we should have comms that are safe spaces away from them too

          I'm definitely in favor of local-only comms (though it really depends how it's implemented). I don't particularly want like, the majority of the site to be local-only. A middle-ground where outside instances can view the comm but not post without a hexbear acct would be great for certain comms, and obviously some should be local-only safe spaces.

          But something like !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net presents a dilemma where, ostensibly it's just memes and comradery and stuff, and that (IMO) should be open to other instances because those instances have trans people (maybe once every week or two we see one from .ee alone, and the fediverse as a whole has many more) and they'll probably not be very interested in our community if all the trans content is hidden away behind a registration questionaire and login screen, but we can't let them in on that comm without, once in a while, having some shitlord like the one you mention... Maybe that would be a good case for a view-only local comm, but idk.

          Given that this defed is temporary, and there is a bigger contingent that wants it than I ever expected, I'm fine with it, but I worry that safety concerns along similar lines (especially the slava ukraini types, I really don't think they are a safety issue in the same way, they're just doodoohead liberals) could end up killing the community here outright in the long run via user attrition and infighting and such, and I think that new people making accounts here and/or posting from other instances are more positive than they are negative. Yes, most of the ones we'd want to keep around will make an account here eventually, but 95% of them would just never be exposed to us if we were defedded.

          • Yeah, i see that !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net is reaching a lot of people and i fully agree that this presents a dilemma because i think it's a good and valuable thing both that trans people from other instances, especially eggs that need a cracking, get to see us and that we confront cis people with actual trans points of view. Making cis people listen in on us authentically talking about our own experience among ourselves instead of being talked about is an important part of normalizing queerness, i absolutely see the value in that. I think that under agitation and community building perspectives, it may be a good thing when that comm remains public-facing, but that's something trans comrades should decide on their own. Going local-only or not should be a decision the comms make for themselves. If that doesn't leave a public-facing trans comm, that means we should consider other options, whether it's a new comm for that purpose or crossposting to relevant fully open comms.

          • But something like !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net presents a dilemma where, ostensibly it's just memes and comradery and stuff, and that (IMO) should be open to other instances because those instances have trans people

            fwiw, the traa mod team is talking about ways to square this circle - mainly by building automod-like tools to help us by automatically remove comments from instances not on an internal whitelist while flagging the comment for restoration after manual review. that way we can keep the comm open to the wider fediverse, allow the instance to federate more openly without threatening our userbase, while still allowing us to approve users once we're reasonably certain they're trans. it remains to be seen if this is possible but we're going to give it a shot and hopefully it's a happy compromise for everyone, if it works out. this approach also means we don't have to wait on the lemmy dev cycle / put more work on our own very thinly stretched dev team. this may also be valuable to the other comms for marginalized comrades.

            generally, I think we can do a lot better than we currently are, if we develop better mod tooling.

    • Three people hold a vote on which restaurant they will all eat at. Person one and two ever so slightly prefer thai, person three is deathly allergic to peanuts and shellfish and can't safely eat thai. The median vote is upheld and democracy prevails! Person three awkwardly goes home wondering what the fuck is wrong with their "friends"

      Except we have cases of multiple people thinking about either quitting or cutting down time spend on this site because of this decision, so your analogy doesn't hold. This is more like person one having a strong preference for Thai, person two having a weak preference for Thai, and person three being deadly allergic to peanuts. Person two doesn't matter, so it's a question of whether you want to keep person one or person three with one person lukewarmly supporting person one. It makes the most sense to go to the Thai restaurant while giving person three a head's up that person one and person two are going to the Thai restaurant.

      Like I said in a previous comment, if the admins had another thread asking whether Hexbear should defed from lemmee, I bet a supermajority would want continued federation. If the pro-federation crowd truly didn't have a preference, this 200+ comment thread wouldn't have blown up, now would it?

250 comments