Petition to defederate from hexbear.net

I was disagreeing with you until you mentioned the "new user" argument. I absolutely agree with that, if new users check out Lemmy and the first thing they see is the brainrot from hexbear or lemmy.ml, that would make a disastrous first impression.

Prior to the Rexodus, during the protests, after reading some articles about social media, I decided that I was going to leave Reddit to get away from the toxicity. I did not know yet if I would replace it with anything else online (as opposed to e.g. reading books & otherwise touching grass irl & offline), but I definitely had to get away from that as it was seeping its way into me, and I did not like who I had become (yet as a mod of a couple mid-sized gaming communities there, I couldn't exactly just not see such stuff as continued to come my way).

I truly do want to hear from a wide diversity of opinions - so long as they are offered in good faith. The lack of the latter though... why should someone else's right to speak infringe upon, even trounce (the better word might be "trump"?) my right to not have to listen?

Btw, we did have a heavily conservative (group of?) instances here, exploding-heads.com, although the entire Fediverse individually defederated from them, after which they ceased to exist (I have no idea if those are related somehow or if they simply fell upon themselves due to in-fighting; but either way newer ones did not spring back up, which is the important thing). Hexbear.net, and to a significantly lesser degree lemmy.ml (complicated by their admins also being the main developers of the Lemmy codebase), seems basically to be the leftist equivalent. And the admins of hexbear themselves know and admit to their users trolling the entire Fediverse, as reading my link to the hexbear statement and the links to similar statements within hexbear shows. Even so, they cannot - or will not - control their users. At which point it falls upon others to have to make the harder choices.

PieFed allows such - every single post involving Beehaw is given this message:

This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.

With that link going to the very own words that Beehaw chooses to say about their own platform, rather than words being said about them by someone else. However, Lemmy does not offer this capability, more's the pity. I hold out strong hopes that Sublinks will though, one day:-).

As you say, people will go turtle and refuse to engage, unless they feel that it is safe to do so, thus ironically in order to try to encourage additional content we need to block out content that is hindering that growth? :-)

Btw, your instance did not choose to defederate from beehaw, it was rather the other way around - here is the original notice. TLDR: those are 2 of the largest instances, and mainly they wanted to reduce their EXTREME moderation burden to have everything "just so" as they prefer things to be for them, though they seemed to have made an exception for lemm.ee for whatever reason - see also this recent discussion about it that mentions lemm.ee and discuss.online and in particular this interesting comment.

I would like to see the Fediverse grow, but for that to happen we need to prune some branches first.

Did SJW recently defederate from HB?

I specifically left because they were fighting very adamantly to stay federated.

Weird that they defeded with Beehaw, though.

Thank you for adding not just your vote but your voice.

Thank you for sharing your story - it helps to hear such perspectives:-).

I tried as well, until I realized the same.

The instance block feature is misnamed imho - it only blocks communities on that instance, but as you see the users can still reply to you, triggering notifications, and vote to influence the visibility of your content.

As it should be for any member of the Fediverse, except they do not abide by the rules set forth on most instances, nor are we able to block them, leaving defederation as the only, last resort.

They will still continue to come, via their alts, but it will still help a bit, like having a spam filter for Lemmy - every step helps.

Thank you for voicing your support.

That's a megathread so it makes a bit of sense to be written in a different style. The comments are... odd yes, but I don't care about "oddness" - I am weird myself and celebrate that fact!

AI or human, I only care if they are "toxic", i.e. follow our rules of behavior to encourage rather than shut down conversations.

Genuinely thank you for your input, particularly not in spite of but because it seems to run counter to the prevailing opinion of the moment. imho we strongly need that level of diversity of opinion that, like your answer here, is delivered in good faith 🙏:-).

The defederations happened just prior to me joining Lemmy, while I was still on Kbin, so while I have read about them far more extensively than most, I can only imagine what it must have been like at the time to live through. I do get a sense that what was known then about hexbear is different than today - there seemed to be more hope about it? While now even hexbears themselves seem to have lost that, knowing that even if someone manages to control themselves personally that so many others in their midst are still refusing to - they see it, and some are truly saddened by it, but they cannot control their instance admins anymore than the admins seem willing to control the users.

Fwiw I probably would have agreed with you, back then. In fact I know I would have, bc I said similar things back then about Lemmy.ml - "it's just a large instance, and people are humans so we're not perfect and this stuff will happen anywhere that has a sufficient number of people..." I have really changed my tune substantially since then, seeing it (Lemmy.ml still here) differently than I used to (as more of an institutional outcome of admin+moderation practices than individual decisions). Now back to hexbear: they really did deserve the benefit of the doubt too, at first. Before hearing e.g. about the instance admins lying to other instance admins. It was a grand experiment, to see if it would work.

Also, we hoped for more tools by now. Many of us hoped that Sublinks would be ready - I still do but obviously it's not here just at the moment - and we were promised instance blocking, which turned out to be such a disappointment, plus it makes hexbear opt-out rather than opt-in which I think is so very damaging for new users. If hexbear could just be opt-in, that would be someone's personal freedom of choice, but to federate it alongside all of the other content from the entire Fediverse as if it were the same, with zero warning despite how we know now how it is not being delivered in good faith... it's different now than it used to be, and the tools just simply aren't there to offer us any truly "good" options. It's either full acceptance of them, or full defederation, and that's not a great place to be in but it's where we are.

Lastly, new users are increasingly being steered away from Lemmy.World even if purely for centralization reasons - they may even start refusing new signups at some point, as they currently have ~80% of all users right now on that one server. It's too much load and it's causing problems sending content out to the other smaller instances, even here iirc (albeit much more rarely than most instances).despite how fantastic the uptime has been. And there is a need for a general-purpose USA-based instance, to perhaps host communities such as an AskUSA. So I for one hope that things here as well differ from the past, and that people do not simply jump onto Lemmy.World, but rather that the Fediverse would be more diversified by being spread across more instances such as this one.

Thank you again for sharing your perspective.

Lemm.ee and lemmy.zip have very short defederation lists if that's your thing

One reason not to is that it would block access to such high-profile communities as !Firefox@lemmy.ml. It looks like at least one person on this instance is subscribed to that community. Then again, new users are constantly getting themselves banned for no reason that they can fathom - perhaps mentioning China or Russia or North Korea in a not-favorable-enough light? - and it's very confusing and off-putting to them, which like hexbear.net can drive them away from interacting on the Fediverse. Ofc that instance can do as it pleases, but so too can we and why choose to host such content here when the admin practices are so confusing, lacking transparency? Also many hexbears have alts there that they use to troll with (though tbf if a bunch of places started defederating from lemmy.ml, they would simply move elsewhere - but still, it would help somewhat even if not perfectly!).

The real trick is that there, far more so than on hexbear, many innocent users exist that would get caught up in the sweep. Ideally we could turn off access to it by default, but then allow people to opt-in to it if they wanted? And/or at least provide a warning label so that new users are not taken unawares when trying to comment in communities located on that instance - bc once you know the rules, to avoid discussing anything even remotely political, then it's fine? Except neither of those is functionality that exists on Lemmy.

So yeah, I am strongly in favor of defederating it too. Not as a punitive measure but a supportive one to maximize welcoming new users to the Fediverse. I wholly support the decision of e.g. lemm.ee to not defederate from lemmy.ml - bc that's what best implements their own vision of maximizing not welcomingness but total access to as much of the Fediverse from one account as possible - but at the same time, that's not what we are about here. The mission of Discuss.Online is very different, and for us (again, for new users of this instance) it seems to me to make sense, to defederate from lemmy.ml? But I will support whatever our fearless leaders - who do literally all of the admin work:-P - decide in this regard (but I will indeed hold out hope for this outcome!:-).

It was something that I considered innocuous - probably along the lines of "at least Biden lowered gas prices, which [implication: while not everything] at least is not nothing". Ofc they were having none of that.

And it might have been in the_dunk_tank rather than CTH.

Anyway your question presumes that "weeks" is something that would be shown in the Lemmy UI - but it is not, so all of them will just say "xyz months ago".

Nor, if they somehow did show a period of multiple weeks, would that even be a bad thing? The sidebar of CTH (and TDT) literally says how e.g. "This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes." Their replying in this manner then is a strength - i.e. a match to what they say that they want to do - to "dunk on" people. Then again, the sidebar is hidden by default using the Lemmy web UI in a mobile browser... so how would people, discovering a post by browsing All (lets say by New), even know what they have managed to walk into?

Mind you, like porn, I have absolutely zero desire to stop the content itself, in this case them from "dunking" on one another, my beef was how then that content gets shared across the entire Fediverse, despite it being not a good "fit" with common standards of decency elsewhere. The community statement for discuss.online says:

A general purpose Lemmy instance for discovery, fun, & sharing. It's a Lemmy place for all.

A community for anything and everything that’s not terrible.

Let’s talk! But not like in a “your partner saw you looking up bunnies with pancakes on their heads” talk. Let’s talk about anything and everything. Like how much we love bunnies with pancakes on their heads!

And Lemmy.World's statement says:

Be polite and follow the rules ⚖ https://legal.lemmy.world/tos

and among them is:

Everyone has a right to browse and interact with Lemmy.World and other federated instances free of harassment and/or threats of violence. Please try and be kind to your fellow human, or at least civil. Trolling users is only funny if both parties find it funny. Trolling mods and/or site admins is ill-advised. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang)#Concern_troll

TLDR: remember the human.

BTW, let us not forget that my post has nothing to do with myself as a single user, but rather that of hexbear admins having lied to admins of other instances, and of a lemmy.ml moderator with the backing of those admins telling a user that they want to kill them and hope that they die soon. With those as the chief matters of concern, what possible use could my own experiences be, except as merely yet one more occurrence, shared by thousands across the entire Fediverse who had to discover the hard way what happens on hexbear? (along with untold others who did not stick around long enough to tell their stories)

Search up the sources they provide and research the event and the events surrounding it. They provide some of the most ahistorical "evidence" I've ever seen on lemmy.

The fact they use liberal as a negative should be enough for any reasonable person to write them off.

Yeah those communities would work great if marked as "local-only". I thought the admins there even said somewhere that they wanted to explore doing that. However, "local-only" communities have been possible for quite awhile now - next week it will have been fully half a year - and seeing as how hexbear is not willing to make that switch... it comes down to other instances making that trolly-problem decision to either allow all of their content, vs. none of it by defederation.

I also saw some instances (such as StarTrek.Website) attempt to try out intermediate experimental solutions on their own (blocking solely those 2 communities while allowing all others from the instance to be federated), only to have them be terribly confusing to users and later abandon them and just defederate with them entirely.

I think it boils down to: when people engage in good faith, a solution can be found, but when e.g. even instance admins will lie boldly to the face of other instance admins, what possible agreement could be reached that would satisfy anybody?

Preemptively I will say that it sucks that people will get caught up in all of this who even on that instance avoid those troublesome communities. On the other hand, good fences make good neighbors, and if you feel bad for them you can create an account and go talk with them - an "opt-in" procedure like that is fantastic, maximizing the freedom of choices for both you and the other party involved.

The problem comes when features are made to be "opt-out", and moreover, buried beneath several layers of complexity to accomplish a block (assuming that's even possible - right now on Lemmy it's really not, as even after blocking an instance, its users can still troll you, replying to you and generating notifications, plus vote on and thereby influence the visibility of your content). Exactly like how Windows is enshittifying itself, making procedures be "opt-out" like that tends to drive people away - even if good users get caught up in the ongoing struggles. In fact it's rather like taking hostages - "you don't dare defederate from us or all of these innocents will get hurt!" - and yet giving in to the absolute worst behaviors simply offers tacit approval of them, and allows them to spread still further.

And to be clear, yes I am absolutely talking about making the Fediverse more welcoming to mainstream normies - which is not merely leftits who aren't leftist hard enough, but even centrists, and possibly even some less-vitriolic-and-well-behaving (if any such exist) conservatives. If we want to grow the Fediverse, to where it will be welcoming to ALL, then we need to make sure that ALL feel welcome - at least, those willing to behave and play by the set of mutualy-agreed-upon rules. Though for those unwilling to abide by agreed-upon principles, their political stance does not matter to me in the slightest, as even the very people claiming to espouse them won't hold firm to them anyway.