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Federation Discussion completed

Hello Users of Hexbear I wanted to have a featured post discussing the next steps for federation. We have discussed this at length among the mod team, and it is pretty much evenly split between federating based on a "block-list" or federating based on an "allow-list". While the mod team slightly skewed in favor of federating using a block-list, meaning that any instance not specifically blocked will be able to link with hexbear.net, we will be starting with an allow-list.

What this means is that only instances specifically on our allow-list will be able to link with us, there are a few reasons for this. We wanted to slowly integrate into the fediverse to see what it would mean for hexbear.net's culture as well as how we fit into the wider fediverse. We also wanted to minimize the instances have not blocked threads, or does not block the reactionary/fash/pedo instances.

I was honestly suprised to discover that most lemmy instances block lemmygrad.ml but do not block the reactionary/pedo instances, sad.

Here is a tenative list of what our allow-list would look like: lemmy.world/instances , https://possumpat.io/instances , https://lemmy.ml/instances , https://sopuli.xyz/instances , https://discuss.tchncs.de/instances , https://lemmygrad.ml/instances , https://mander.xyz/instances , https://lemm.ee/instances , toots.matapocos.dog

a block-list would be massive and exhaustive to ensure that we do not federate with any pornographic, reactionary, fascist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, or csam-adjacent instances.

We will be creating a pinned post in c/hexbear where additional instances can be nominated for addition to the allow-list. https://hexbear.net/post/277506

Please see these previous posts by Nagarjuna regarding federation: https://hexbear.net/post/273407 and https://hexbear.net/post/273404

If you would like to officially put down your opinion on federation, please make a comment with 🧱 if you'd like to federate based on a block-list, a ✅ if you'd like to federate based on an allow-list, or a 🚫 if you do not with to federate at all, this is a temprature check and not a binding vote. Thank you and as usual off-topic comments will be removed.

Thank you for the feedback and apologies for the original emojis chosen, the final count is 58 🧱 111 ✅ 45 🚫, please correct me if that is wrong

360 comments

  • Soft ⬛️.

    Honestly, I just think there's more potential humor if hexbear is federated with a bunch of neolib servers.

    I'm not like some hardcore hexbear nerd tho. I'm just an old r/cth and chapo.chat poster who came back here recently. I understand there are probably people who value drama-free existence here. Their votes should probably count more.

    I just thought r/cth was at its funniest when it had to engage in a fishtank with a bunch of "well ackshully" redditors. It was funnest when people would whisper the subreddit's name like it was a curse word.

  • ⬛ half measures are liberalism.

    Only block the porn and csam. Reactionary instances should be handled via adventurism, not blocked.

    To hear incorrect views without rebutting them and even to hear counter-revolutionary remarks without reporting them, but instead to take them calmly as if nothing had happened. This is a sixth type.

    To be among the masses and fail to conduct propaganda and agitation or speak at meetings or conduct investigations and inquiries among them, and instead to be indifferent to them and show no concern for their well-being, forgetting that one is a Communist and behaving as if one were an ordinary non-Communist. This is a seventh type.

    To see someone harming the interests of the masses and yet not feel indignant, or dissuade or stop him or reason with him, but to allow him to continue. This is an eighth type.

    Mao would want us to post more, and I say that as an anarchist

  • 🚫

    With the latest round of hacking and account compromise we need to shut it down, shut it all down until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

    Lemmy is a mess, okay, a big mess. I know it, you know it, everybody knows it

    And you know it wasn't like that until Sleepy Joe took over. When I left office after the stolen election, we had the tightest most secure servers, the best servers, we had millions of hexbear users, good posters all of them, the greatest posters, and they all slept cozy in their beds with their blahajs and wippets until the radical democrats took over, now you can't even round the corner without seeing an MS-13 cartel account posting dead animals

  • Oh noice.

    Federate. Communsits shouldn't be hiding themselves, should be engaging, and honestly Hexbears can do a shitload of good by engaging. There's also some pretty cool people over on lemmyworld I've been having an alright time there.

    ⬛️ for 1 month then re-evaluate. Gives people enough time to get used to it, for teething problems to settle, etc etc, obviously block all the shit ones as thigns go along, blah blah. If it's still a problem at that point then I would support other action.

    I don't want to start out with an allow-list, we will never ever change that if it's how we start. We should at least TRY being open and engaging instead of being awkward shut ins. If it goes badly there's plenty of room to change the experiment, whereas there isn't the other way around.

    EDIT: Looking through the responses I think some people are confused about what black vs white are.

    EDIT2: Why isn't lemmy.world on the allow list? I'm super against the allow list it doesn't even include the biggest instance. Just yolo it then block all the shit ones it won't be that difficult to manage.

    EDIT3: Oh scratch that the allow list isn't an allow list but an example of where these other lemmys are allowing.

    EDIT4: Commun-sits is a funny typo.

    • Same opinion here. Propaganda is most effective on the internet in developed regions because of the reach and scale. Just look at capitalist propaganda for proof. You can write a post and have it reach thousands, if not potentially millions of people. In real life, you can only talk to one person at a time

      Posts are also stored forever, and anybody can view them at any time. In real life, you have to repeat the same information over and over

      People are also much willing to browse the internet and read something for hours and hours every week. Good luck trying to talk to the same person for hours every week about the exact same subject

      You can also link sources on the internet. Have you guys every tried to educate a person IRL on why revolution and ML works? It's basically impossible because you'll just seem like a genocide denier trying to point to USSR and China as successful examples and you can't disprove anything without links

    • If we don't federate, then Hexbear is nothing more than some shitty Reddit clone. We ought to do everything we can to de-Redditfy Hexbear, and federation represents a step towards de-Redditfication. If we don't federate Hexbear, we might as well just jettison Lemmy altogether and use an old-school php forum instead. Some random php forum has more functionality than Lemmy by virtue of being mature software, cutting down on the amount of time admins spend to maintain this website. We still can't even have sigs, instead having some half-assed bio instead. Plus, forum ettiquette and management are also decades old at this point where weird edge cases on how to manage a forum have long since been explored. For example, let's say there's a 300+ post thread about sailing where 200+ of them are devoted to arguing the ethics of hunting. Forum mods are able to create a new "Ethics of hunting" thread and move the 200+ posts from the sailboat thread to the newly created thread so you would have two threads, a sub-100 post thread about sailboats and a 200+ thread about ethics of hunting. Depending on how anger people get, the 200+ thread could be moved into a subforum where only old accounts can comment in order to cut down on day-old wrecker alts. Reddit was such a major step backwards in terms of features and functionality, and if we're not using the one major feature that forums don't have, then what's the point of using Lemmy?

      And this is not getting into the part of using our time spend online agitating bystanders and shitting on libs and the fash, which I 100% agree with you.

    • I'm currently unsure if I agree on the block list stance but I absolutely agree that lemmy.world should be on the initial allow-list outlined in the post.

      We should absolutely be challenging the largest liberal instance and not letting it devolve into reddit 2.0.

      Without, bluntly, relentless bullying on reddit I never would have discovered r/cth which absolutely provided the space at the time that, along with experiencing deteriorating material conditions and my general interest in politics would never have pushed me further and further left.

      I think it's possibly the most important instance (outside of something like beehaw which will never federate with us unfortunately) to have our users post in.

      I also don't see federation lasting long with Lemmy.world, but I've been generally happy to see the general aversion towards capitalism on a lot of posts there so hopefully I'm wrong on that front.

      • I also don't see federation lasting long with Lemmy.world, but I've been generally happy to see the general aversion towards capitalism on a lot of posts there so hopefully I'm wrong on that front.

        I think it will work. Look at my response here to someone doing the "tankie" routine and look at the votes.

        This is not reddit. We have a much larger advantage here without the far right and the astroturfing.

      • We should absolutely be challenging the largest liberal instance and not letting it devolve into reddit 2.0.

        I've honestly had a good time on it so far. People engage reasonably well, I even got upvoted heavily on this post where I said I don't give a shit about the historic events between MLs and whatever I care about actually achieving shit, when someone was doing the "you're a tankie" routine. This gives me quite a lot of hope that we can in fact move these people if our rhetoric is good. Most of them are apolitical left leaning libs, and A LOT are tech mega-nerds, the early adopter crowd. The fact that they're tech meganerds actually makes them an easier target in my opinion, they are mature and willing to read large amounts of text, they enjoy high quality conversations, they have attention spans, these are all factors that make what we say effective with them. If our arguments are rational, intelligent and well put they like them. This contrasts heavily with reddit where it is massively astroturfed. We have a clean playground for once. It won't stay that way forever but we have the advantage here.

    • we did not include any instances that are not blocking threads.net, it is a tenative allow-list and there is a post featured in !hexbear@hexbear.net and linked in the original post to a place where instances can be nominated to be added to the allow-list or block-list

      • I don't really think this matters until threads actually makes a decision to try and become interoperable with lemmy. It doesn't even have federation yet and has been postponed for probably months, their focus is going to be twitter and bluesky. There's no guarantee that they will even ever bother to make interoperability with lemmy given that they're a twitter app I honestly doubt they will.

        All the largest instances should be included, for now at least.

    • 🧱

  • 🚫 Bullying libs is fun but you can do that literally anywhere else on the internet. Hexbear has a friendly, positive and comfy vibe that you can't find anywhere else. It's by far the best online community I've been a part of. It would be a shame to lose that vibe.

  • 🚫

    I share the a lot of the same sentiment as other no voters here in that this place has been through a lot to cultivate the unique welcoming and positive site culture it has, and I would be worried that federation would destabilize that. I remember federation being talking about for a long time, but to be honest I don't see all that much utility from it. That being said, if we were to federate, I would much prefer a very tightly curated allow-list. To be fair, I was only a lurker during the r/cth days so I don't really get the impulse to federate just to agitate on other instances, but my opinion is that there is a lot more to lose now than just a simple subreddit as a lot of work as gone into developing, maintaining, and moderating this site into what it is nearly 3 years later (also wtf, time flies by).

  • Anything but 🚫 is gonna have a wild resurgence in struggle sessions, I think. Even somewhere like Lemmygrad has a different culture, being explicitly ML while Hexbear is (to my knowledge) just generally leftist. I'm not totally against it, in the sense that nothing online really matters and I can just ignore the sessions, but I imagine the extra workload for mods will be significant.

  • ✅

    People are arguing for a blocklist based on how the old subreddit used to be, but I think a whitelist is better even for lib bullying purposes. A blacklist would result in many places blocking us after the first couple posters get in a fight there. It's much more effective to whitelist instances one at a time to make sure we maintain good concentrated posting pressure, even if it is just for a moment. It's not like we are going to run out of libs.

  • ⬜️ I think even this is gonna cause a lot of drama, because a lot of the users here (I guess) can't let stuff go. perhaps make a rule that you can't complain about or dunk tank stuff that's on federated instances, except in some particular place that's conveniently easy to ignore.

    I also don't really like how instances say they enforce their rules on comments made on other instances. is extraterritoriality socialist? that could be a cool, tongue-in-cheek struggle session that's different from the cringe ones we normally have, but if you federate with a sectarian instance, and then ban me for the mad sectarianism I post there, what's the point? sounds like we still need separate accounts anyway.

  • As someone who browsed fediverse for years, i'm in favor of 🧱.

    1. Don't be intimidated by the number of updoots on larger instances. I know internet, they'll crawl back to
      soon enough. It was only a
      *latest fad, most of that wave already did.
    2. Worst of them will block us themselves.
    3. We have a duty to combat liberalism.
    4. We will still have our [local].

  • 🚫

    this kinda feels like federation for the sake of federation and i don't really see any benefits to it. we have a good thing here and i don't think other instances offer anything that we don't have

  • i like the idea of starting of with a ⬜️ to protect us from the detestable parts of the fediverse, but i also think we should work toward building a block list over the next few months and switch to ⬛️ to unleash ourselves on the libs

  • 🚫(in the case of that not being an option, I would much rather have ⬜️ than ⬛️)

    Some points:

    • The benefits of federation seem minor at best. Is not having to make a new account for another instance that useful? Consider that new Lemmy apps like Sync currently under development might make non-federated use so easy as to make federation moot.
    • Are we ready for the potential struggle sessions that the federation process will unleash? Previous mass integrations of off-site groups haven't been the smoothest, and while this isn't quite the same thing I am nonetheless not really interested in discourse about why the redfash/anarkiddie/bloodmouth/ultravegan mods are refusing to federate with X instance and proving themselves to be liberals.
    • If the rate of federation increases, am I going to have to root out random instances that keep popping into my feed because the admins thought they might be cool? The way I've heard it pitched we'd have to opt-out of seeing instances Hexbear has federated with, and the talk of very specific instances like PoE forums and stuff makes me think there's a lot of opting-out I'd have to do.
    • Finally - Is it worth potentially messing up a good thing, right this very minute? Things are moving fast in the fediverse, and I don't see the need to get stuck in at the moment. Let the "How federation tore this lemmy instance apart" articles get written so we can see what not to do.

  • Whatever we end up with, thanks for maintaining a happy healthy place to post. Hexbear is one of the nicest places on the internet entirely because you're putting in the legwork.

  • I vote for ⬜️ with a relatively small list, with a very explicit experiment federating with one lib instance to see how it goes. If that goes well, keep adding instances or eventually just use ⬛️.

    I'd personally be excited to dunk on some libs, but I also don't want that more than I want my comrades here sticking around and enjoying this space. I think an attempt where we dip our toes is the least likely to drive people away while getting feedback on what is good and what is bad.

    PS thank you!

  • 🚫

    Among the things we really have going for us are strict segregation from all flavors of

    eralism and a cohesive community culture that's increasingly independent of the influence of
    social media. I think that's been great for all of our mental health. No need to futz with a formula that's working.

  • I'm very disappointed with the amount of no federate options here

    ⬜️ for me. It's useful to have more visibility from non-communists so that they can be exposed and potentially change their minds

    I know many people on Reddit became converted because they would peer into GZD and read the posts out of curiosity and learned a lot. I think I personally got converted because of r/communism

    Now, Hexbear has like, very little educational content that could help convert people (I'm so sad my effort post was ignored compared to memes) unlike GZD and especially lemmygrad but GZD is dead and lemmygrad is mass blocked, so something is better than nothing

    • lemmygrad is mass blocked

      We will be too, especially once we start appearing in lib instance comment sections en mass lmao.

    • (I'm so sad my effort post was ignored compared to memes)

      Is that the one in c/finance ? Would do better in a comm with more subscribers, it probably wasn't seen by many because that comm only has 784 subscribers. I'd repost it in one of the large default comms.

      • I actually posted in it CTH at first and it did even worse there LOL. The /c/finance one was a repost

        I figured the CTH post got buried because it's competing against easy to consume memes so I thought /c/finance would be better since it's a targeted interest. Then I realized the most popular /c/finance posts are actually mostly just memes and dunking on capitalists as well

        I think it's a cultural thing where hexbear is a super casual "hangout" site. Even on places like r/wallstreetbets where everybody is dumb, long effort posts commonly reach the top because the culture even there is more educational

    • ✅

  • As a LLC in Delaware, I am casting this vote a hundred times over. 🚫

    I come to this site specifically so I don’t have to see a raging, genocidal liberal say you’re literally Hitler if you don’t support nuking Moscow. I come here specifically so I don’t have to deal with petty internet drama. Which we already have wrt struggle sessions, do we really want to make it worse?

    I don’t see why we should ruin the less-shitty nature of this site just so we can yell at liberals who will just block us. (They will be so owned for the one minute before your comment is removed.) If you want to get into fights on another forum sign up for an account on another forum. Many people like the site because it’s a safe space from reddit bros and their reddit bro takes. Just because some people think it would be funny to have libs show up here to be bullied doesn’t mean we should just can the years of curation and fine tuning. It’s an extra two minutes for you to go to beehaw or whatever and get into useless fights where it’s just you and the other guy telling each other to kill themselves.

    Pretending that telling libs to post hog on the internet is some kind of revolutionary praxis and quoting Mao about it is just kinda sad, if not incredibly funny. Pretending that it will effect any change at all is even funnier. Applying a text written in the 1930s about interparty disciplinary policy to your dumb online fights is some real brain genius shit. It’s such a perfect encapsulation of the western left. Terminally online event horizon.

  • 🚫

    the allow list seems nice but it'd be less effort to just not do it. i dunno, im personally not going to interact with anything else

    also i am moderately worried about getting posting anxiety due to a lot of reddit brained people showing up, idk how likely that is to happen but it's nice that i currently don't feel anxious posting on this site so-

  • 🚫 The moderators aren't able to stop misinformed tracts about anarchism and complaints about left unity when there's only like five lemmygrad users, I don't mean it in a disrespectful way but I have no faith that this problem would somehow be magically fixed with it being increased by 50x with federation

    If I wanted to post on other boards I would simply just make an account there

  • 🚫 i think we worked really hard to get through many struggle sessions and i really appreciate the vibe here the way it is. i don't think the benefits of federation are anywhere near enough to be worth trying

360 comments