Skip Navigation
Remote View
hexbear @hexbear.net
Nagarjuna [he/him] @hexbear.net

What instances would you want to federate with?

Post the links in the comments so folks can explore them and give their own input!

147 comments

  • Almost all of them, but I think we'd have to do it in stages with more similar instances first so users can grasp the concept of federation themselves and avoid torpedoing the federation concept or destroying hexbears reputation on the fediverse.

    So probably lemmygrad first, and we'll see from there. Federating with instances that have sports, hobby and fitness communities would be really nice in my opinion.

    • I would prefer an open approach as well (but idgaf what we do as long as most people here are happy). Presumably the first week or so will be chaos, but we will eventually ban the troublemakers, get blocked by a couple dozen instances, block a handful ourselves, and find an equilibrium. The fact that we could just pull the plug at any time is reassuring. If it turns out to be a mistake, we return to the status quo. We are in an extremely unusual situation of being willing to federate and simply not having done so.

      If we are going to do it one by one, we should probably be diplomatic about it and actually talk with these peer instance operators. Do a proper introduction, establish some mutual expectations, etc. Like you said, taking a few small steps at first is probably a good way to get acclimated.

      • If we are going to do it one by one, we should probably be diplomatic about it and actually talk with these peer instance operators. Do a proper introduction, establish some mutual expectations, etc.

        Yeah we're going to have to do that.

  • Everyone that isn't fash, but we should take our time to make sure we don't completely implode. Let's join just lemmygrad for, idk, a few days with an announcement reminding people to play nice with our comrades, then branch out to smaller commie instances and then push rightward (in terms of the leaning of cites we federated with) until we have all the non-fash (non-criminal/loli/snuff/etc) instances.

    It's my impression that even federating with a porn instance creates legal liability, but I think that's a different topic.

    People are viewing our sites culture as fragile. That is false. It can be killed if we tremendously fuck up, but our history on cth proves that it is a vector of infection at least as much as it is a victim. The libs have more to worry about from our culture than we do theirs.

    • site culture isn't a hearts of iron game where you slowly color the lemmy map red. even just federating with lemmygrad would lead to an influx of anti-anarchist sectarian swerfs to the community, which is going to be a headache both for users and for the moderators and is a permanent irreconcilable point for large sections of both sites

      unlike reddit, everybody is specifically going out of their way to go to lemmy. there is no spectre, there is no constant influx of chuds that don't know about hogposting

      if your goal was to agitate over the internet and send people towards hexbear you would be making accounts on reddit and other social media, not imagining converting sites the size of less popular CS:GO servers

  • Clearly there's a lot of back-and-forth between essentially two different philosophies towards the purpose of this site.

    The first one says: we are loud-and-proud communists who disdain to conceal our views and aims, therefore we should federate with as many instances as possible to educate and agitate. That means engaging with libs/chuds/reactionaries of all stripes and allowing them to flood in to be dunked on (and allow us to flood out). There's greater potential for us than just being a uniquely left-unity enclave in the broader internet. You can call this the "Blacklist philosophy".

    The second one says: it's taken 3 years and a lot of struggles and purges to cultivate this space into such a positive, welcoming one, and the main reason people keep coming back here is because of that. Opening the floodgates to the majority of Lemmy instances would do potentially huge damage to the vibes of HB and alienate many of our comrades. Sure, people are free to block any comms or users they want, but that's already demanding effort from our users who simply don't want to be exposed to reactionary garbage in the first place. We worked hard to purge the bigotry, why allow any of it back in? This is the "Whitelist philosophy".

    I'm inclined more towards the WL philosophy myself, especially after seeing so many people say that this is essentially the only social media they use because everywhere else sucks.

    e: mixed up BL and WL

  • R/cremposting is thinking of going to Lemmy. We should federate with them so I don't need to make a new account.

    Anyone who disagrees with this is an fed. Thank you for reading

147 comments