On sh.itsfulla.chuds, and the plan going forward

Greetings gamers and those who wisely abstain,

It has become clear to us that even in the short while we’ve federated, the situation with sh.itholefor.nazis is entirely untenable and we will be defederating immediately. Multiple instances of ableist and homophobic slurs directed at our users, overwhelming litigiousness against even the most innocuous comments by our users, and just a general ethos of reactionary behavior. We’re done and out.

One of the concerns with embracing TC69 thought on site bans with federation is that the user would basically be just hexbear-side hidden and blocked from our comms, free to post reactionary content without the fear of Lenin behind them. That was a silly concern. We will resume our pre-federation policies regarding site bans.

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Disappointing. We picked up real support among some there.
All we are doing is isolating ourselves from ideological participation, and thus leaving the npc libs that are otherwise amenable to hearing our side at the mercy of fascists without opposition.
My position is that time should be allowed to play out to ban the fascists and clear house, this is a process that takes time when federating because initially there are a lot of them and they don't all make themselves known at the same time. As time goes on however and more and more get added to the banlist the issue would die down, leaving out the fascists while leaving the npc libs still capable of hearing what the left has to say.
- My position is that you cannot federate with an instance full of fascists if you're operating a safe space for trans people. The shit that we had to endure during last few days made me seriously consider to leave the site, and i'm still unsure if this is the right place for me when people think we should grow our userbase with recovering nazis. If this repeats itself, i'm definitely gone.
  
  And mine is the same as it has always been, I participated here with the expectation we were aiming to build a pipeline to create socialists, just as we had done in many spaces on reddit. While simultaneously at the same time taking advantage of the slow downfall of reddit and setting up a future of non-corporate spaces off-reddit.
  I've said many times before, I'm not here to create a socialist play house. I want to create socialists. And if this place is just creating an insular distraction for socialists to hide themselves away from capitalism on the internet then it is not something I will support. I get why some people want that, but I don't see it as good for socialism. I have the same negative attitude towards most communes, where people just end up building them for escapism from capitalism, not for influencing society and building real socialism. I don't want a digital commune for escapism. I'm not really sure where I'm at with it right now, but I do feel quite negative and like I'm edging close to leaving, I keep asking what the point of being here is, how it's productive for socialism, and I can't answer that anymore. I'd end up going to any spaces that are simply connected to as much as possible where I can do influence, but if many of us do that also we just become considerably weakened without the large collective of people that is considerably weakened in strength.
  
  I totally see where you're coming from, and mostly agree. However, when I'm having a poor mental health day, it's nice to come here and know I won't run into the stuff that crushes my soul. I would be interested in all of us having a discussion about how best to mint new leftists
  I think federation has netted us a decent handful of people though. Glad that happened.
  
  I think one of the more significant things that worries me is that the existence of lemmygrad and hexbear on lemmy as defederated socialist spaces actually sucks socialists out of the rest of lemmy.
  If you're a socialist these are attractive, you move to them, and you stop participating in the parts of lemmy that are defederated.
  This essentially reduces the pool of socialists in the rest of lemmy, and fundamentally makes starting a socialist space anywhere else on lemmy with impact less successful because all the socialists are here instead.
  If I leave hexbear I probably drop lemmy entirely because it just wouldn't be worth starting socialist spaces on the other instances, it would just be too slow and as soon as socialists get wind of hexbear or lemmygrad they'd abandon ship anyway. I'm still doing stuff on stormfront of course, I guess more of my effort would end up there.
  I dunno. I'm not really sure about the matter. I feel very drained and flakey over the systematic isolation the bear has gone through though, through both internal and external forces.
  
  By far the biggest obstacle to me is that the vast majority of Redditor refugees are Ledditors, people addicted to Reddit who are only here because spez took away their third-party app, more Redditor than your average Redditor. This means that ideologically speaking, they are far more likely to be on that pro-NATO Slava Ukraini bullshit than your average Redditor, who's already more on that pro-NATO Slava Ukraini bullshit than your average person walking down the street. Talking to them is basically talking to a wall. There's a slim chance in hell we'll actually meaningfully convert Ledditors.
  Besides their greater ideological commitment to the liberal status quo, Ledditors also just want Lemmy to be Reddit 2.0. They are rather explicit in their political project, if you can call it that. They just want Reddit without spez. That's literally the extent of their "vision." They treat instances as backup servers so if one instance's /c/games goes down, they can make the same "Steam sales backlog" joke in another server's /c/games. And since Reddit is fundamentally anti-communist, their Ledditor monoculture will also be anti-communist.
  Spez will continue to fuck up, but I don't think he'll fuck up to the point where people who aren't chronically addicted to Reddit will also leave Reddit, with some inevitably migrating to Lemmy. If he takes away old.reddit or RES, sure there will be another Reddit exodus, but it'll just be more Ledditor losers because your average person doesn't know what old.reddit or RES is.
  Until the fediverse reaches a point where it can attract people who aren't chronic Redditors with Reddit brainworms, we'll be forever stuck with this cycle of Ledditors filling the fediverse with their Reddit bullshit after spez fucked them over before crawling back to spez after jonesing for updoots.
  We are easily the biggest (and arguably only) instance that has formed a distinct culture away from Reddit bullshit, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. (Hexbear's culture is basically some bizarre Reddit/Twitter hybrid with Twitch chat emote spam characteristics.) I don't think any instance could easily form that would simultaneously not be absorbed by us nor be drowned by Ledditors trying to recreate Reddit on their instance. I think to solve the Ledditor problem, we have to be more creative in how and who to outreach. For example, there can effort towards getting /r/thedeprogram or various leftist Discords to create a Lemmy instance.
  I guess the fundamental question is we want more socialists on Lemmy, but would onboarding an existing community like /r/thedeprogram or having Hexbear spinoff instances like a veganhexbear count or does it only count when we convert pre-existing liberals into socialists?
  
  I have faith in the mods here. They will always have your back. We have a great little community here
  
  I trust the mods and i know they have my back, but creating and maintaining a safe space isn't just about removing harmful content in time, it's about not giving the userbase the feeling they have to worry about that kind of thing.
  
  I fully agree. One of my favorite things about being here is I don't have to encounter chuddery. When I'm having an especially tough mental health day, it's nice to come here and shit on libs with y'all
- The main problem is that shitjustworks was too reactionary. It's probably the most reactionary instance we had federated thus far. Like, their entire name is "lolol we call ourselves SJW lololol." It's one thing to have an anti-communist userbase with "apolitical" management that we can push back and draw people on our side and to our site (this is basically lemmee), but once you have anti-communist mods running around hiding their power level while subtly trying to get people on board with the fascist pipeline where even the lemmee Ledditor noticed something fishy, it's time to write off the instance as a loss and pull the plug. Just look at how Goat acts and how they're pretty good at having plausible deniability even when the mask slips sometimes. They aren't just some clueless sinophobic Ledditor, but is 100% a fascist hiding their power level. They're an opp and should be treated as such.
  For me, I'm still of the mind that people should defederate from us rather than we defederate from them, but I'm not going to miss them at all. None of the rank and file added value to Hexbear at all and unlike blahaj, they don't have any real people from marginalized communities to onboard. They're just a bunch of Canadian Ledditors who think an instance called SJW is top kek, so they can all get fucked.
  
  ngl seeing goat's meanwhileongrad efforts really made the whole thing laughable for me. Yes they're an unrepentant fascist but they have no audience even amongst their own users
  
  I thought the name was a reference to an old Microsoft slogan/design philosophy
  
  I think it's actually a reference to something Todd Howard said during the showcase for Fallout 4 that became a meme.
- I don't disagree with the idea, but having seen some of the vile DM's our users have been receiving, protecting this space for marginalized comrades was the right call.
  
  I and others received those DMs from Lemm.ee users too. Real nasty stuff, but it died off. In part I think because @sunaurus@lemm.ee was happy to permaban people for sending such PMs. As long as the SJW admins were doing that I would expect it to die down after some time cleaning house. The benefit here is that our presence in federation would also get the people behaving this way permabanned and act as a suppressing effect for that kind of behaviour - positively improving SJW. Assuming they actually take the action on it like Sun did/does.
  If however they weren't taking those actions then the whole post and reason for defederation would be different in my mind, because it wouldn't just be about bad users it would be about bad administration protecting that behaviour and by extension fostering it (the same issue as blahaj).
  
  Mods were blanket-removing Hexbear posts/comments, even innocuous ones. Signal enough they were unwilling to cooperate
  
  Sometimes it was funny though, and we should acknowledge that
  
  it was a moral good
  
  downloaded both
  
  https://hexbear.net/post/499558?scrollToComments=false
  
  The benefit here is that our presence in federation would also get the people behaving this way permabanned and act as a suppressing effect for that kind of behaviour - positively improving SJW
  let's be clear that this would be at the expense of trans comrades who may not be in the headspace to deal with harassment like this. if we're truly a place that values our queer comrades, this is 100% at odds with that
- they've been targeting trans women to DM nasty stuff to. dunking and re-educating is all well and good but targeted harassment is a step too far.
- I think some federation leftover is good, but I also think that we ought to look at how we can deal with the contradiction of safe space for marginalized users who brought their perspectives up on one hand and the want to be a visible public force for anarcho and communist talking points.
  When we find a process for that we ought to see how hexbear wants to move forward (i.e. try again).
  I wouldn't mind a breathing or ocean like ebb and tide mechanism. Withdraw a bit (except from some instances), deal with technical and social means to stop the negatives, find a bit of unity and expand again.
  Though it seems to be good to be permanently federating with some instances, as there is habituation that hexbear is there, most of the problems seem to be in the first few days/weeks when our culture is accepted or a local interaction with it is created.
  
  the best idea I've heard is setting up a containment instance -- lib.rehab or whatever -- and have that instance federated widely while hexbear itself keeps federations more conservative. as long as the two hexbear instances stay federated, we're not splitting the userbase, and it gives people a way to get a reprieve when the sludge gets tiring.
  
  Yea if we are like federating it'll be good to mayb put up like a warning that we just federated with Y and shit might be annoying for a couple weeks before bans and avoidance settle. So there's no confusion about what type of space we actually want to maintain and how we want to integrate w new users. Plus it could help to explain like what federation and etiquette etc is expected during the federation period cuz I have no idea what's going on typically
- I didn't see myself or anybody gaining traction with anybody there. Maybe we could've in time but it would've meant going back to square 1 and relitigating all the conversations we've had with libs on other instances. Plus I felt like there was a good chance of it provoking a backlash towards defederating more broadly.
  Generally I agree with you but in this case I didn't get the impression that any of them were gonna listen.
  
  it would've meant going back to square 1 and relitigating all the conversations we've had with libs on other instances
  We can never stop explaining
  It is frustrating to have to have the same argument 10,000 times. But if we're going to get anywhere we need a whole lot more people on our side, which means talking to people and bringing them around.
  
  We need proof of concept and to focus our efforts on people who are somewhat more receptive and who we've already been talking to. There's still a very long way to go with the libs we already have, no need to bite off more than we can chew.
- All we are doing is isolating ourselves from ideological participation, and thus leaving the npc libs that are otherwise amenable to hearing our side at the mercy of fascists without opposition.
- The last expansion added lemmygrad, some hobbyists, and a bunch of liberals. The results were mixed but we could live with that I guess. This one exposed us to something resembling old edgy 4chan/IRC style debaters, it's a different sort of user, I haven't seen that style in a long time. We should at least have a deeper look at the instances we want to federate with in the future.
  Gotta wonder though.. when there's trolling against trans people even from small alternative communities that are supposed to have more refined 'protest users' against reddit or other media, what's the state of the anglosphere internet in general? Also it's funny how it maps that the countries lemmyverse people dislike happen to be the countries the collective west is in a cold war with right now.
- Yeah without federation hexbear probably dies. The past few months prior to federation were dire. So many pointless internal arguments and the amount of users and activity seemed to be dwindling. Getting back onto upstream Lemmy and some form of federation was desperately needed.

321 comments