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

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360 comments

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.
- 🧱

360 comments