Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.
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Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.
Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.
The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:
- “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.”
- “The West’s role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.”
- “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term “rules-based international order.” It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”
The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to “dismantle western propaganda” and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.
In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.
Here are some examples:
“I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”
“All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”
- https://lemmy.world/comment/121850
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1487168
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1476084
- https://lemmy.world/comment/171595
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3648500
Overall community comments:
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526128
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526086
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3652828
To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.
- https://lemmygrad.ml/post/158656
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/882559
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/540170
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/446529
Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.
We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.
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I definitely appreciate the hesitation in defederation, but I’m in favor of defeding with both hexbear and lemmygrad.
I’ve seen more than enough “Stalin did nothing wrong posts” to know that discussions are pointless and would lead me only to frustration and a desire to drink.
Honestly the hardcore tankies initially soured me from joining the fediverse at first, until I understood how the fediverse functioned and realized it was just a loud minority that held extreme views. It’s still disturbing to read genocide denialism while openly supporting things such as authoritarianism and Russian imperialism.
Tankies are souring a lot of people from joining in my subjective experience. One of my friends questioned the presence of them and the views of the developers (and also why the “main” (not accurate but they haven’t even joined, so) instance lemmy.ml had the .ml domain to begin with) and I couldn’t give a satisfactory answer at the time, as I didn’t know enough about the place yet.
Upstanding instances should do their part to defederate from any tankie or fascist instances, so we can all distance ourselves from extremist rhetoric and make it seem like an actually OK place to hang out.
I moderate 8 subreddits with a combined userbase of 4.2million subscribers. And a bunch of small ones.
Originally I intended to bring those userbases over here. But the way this instance has been run and the interactions I and other mods have had with the team over PM trying to resolve various issues resulted in each and every one of the modteams I’m in saying “yeah fuck that” over time and getting to know the place. This would have resulted in stickyposts and bringing over thousands, perhaps 10s of thousands, in extremely enthusiastic waves. And this didn’t just affect the teams I’m part of, because everyone on those teams also shares links to many many other teams through all the backrooms.
Communists aren’t the problem. This instance’s policies - which started out looking incredibly promising and had everyone highly optimistic - has singlehandedly killed the interest of dozens and dozens of modteams and by extension the opportunity to bring across massively more people.
You do realize that you don’t need to join Lemmy.world, right? There’s plenty of other instances with different moderation policies that might suit you, or you could just make your own instance. That’s kind of the whole point of the fediverse. The reason why there’s so much contention around this post is because the people who have accounts here are somewhat stuck until account migration is added.
Of course I do have you read my username?
Apologies, I did not.
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(previous comment bugged, reposting it)
Given the way Hexbears own rules are written, the tone and very obvious motivations behind it, I’m not sure we’re missing much.
But would you care to share some examples of what the issues are?
Sorry what? I can’t read context so I don’t quite get what you’re trying to say. Could you maybe quote what you were responding to?
I’m not sure what the problem is with hexbear’s rules. It’s a socialist instance of course it aims to remain socialist. Do you look at the lgbt instances and say “how dare they have motivations to keep their community lgbt!” No of course you don’t. It’s a fundamentally absurd notion.
Hexbear’s goal is to be leftist and have a fucking laugh while doing it. Nothing more. This shit has created a mountain of entertainment, nothing changes for Hexbear but this instance has pissed and shit all over itself.
Yeah, I checked out Lemmy some time ago and noped out pretty quick after seeing it was mostly just Lemmygrad at the time. Happy to be here now that there’s a lot more going on and not super keen on that face of Lemmy gaining a bigger presence again.
Are you the PoppinKREAM from reddit?
Yes I am, hello o/
Whether it’s reddit or lemmy I’ve always blocked all politics and world/local news related communities, since they rarely seem to really be a place that’s been cordial in the comments. And I’ve moved onto RSS feeds anyways over user submission driven news feeds.
Seems to be what has kept me the most sane and happy using social media.
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Just block them bro.
I had enough of people like you, but you don’t see me asking that we defederate you.
I was demonstrating a point.
just admit you were wrong. It’s ok.
?
you high?
It’s because as a solid minority. That is often hated in the places they once had jurisdiction for good reason. You generally don’t get the chance. Or if you did, it would close you off in a tiny little Echo chamber that’s already far too strong. And I say this as someone who is supportive and open towards communism and abolishing Concepts such as private property and replacing with personal property. But I am sanctially against ml communism.
I absolutely think there can be a discussion about whether or not Vladimir Lenin’s Legacy on the whole was neutral. He definitely did some good things for russia. Though those same things were happening around the world regardless. So it is impossible to say that they wouldn’t have happened without him. But it is possible to say absolutely that a lot of death destruction and brutality were enabled by him. And his ideology single-handedly setback discussions of all left-wing Economic Development for a century or so. Those defending Stalin Mao or even Xi today. Well I don’t have anything diplomatic to say about them.
Freedom of speech does not constitute an obligation to listen.
Good for you!
Exactly. Freedom of speech != Freedom from social consequences
Well, in a truly “free” society, yes freedom of speech would constitute freedom from “social consequences.” However, the United States, and in fact, no Earth government, is a truly free society. There are rules and laws that exist, thus restricting freedoms. However, specifically regarding freedom of speech as it is mentioned in US law, it specifically is a protection for citizens from retaliation by the US government, and does not cover interactions between citizens.
So I wouldn’t say “freedom of speech doesnt mean freedom from social consequences,” but rather “freedom of speech does not include a requirement that others listen.” There are laws with regards to how other citizens can respond, including laws against assault and libel and such. But there is no law that says anyone must to listen to what you have to say simply because you have the freedom to say it. Thats quite a preposterous idea.
At least in the US, each citizen has the right to say what they choose within the constraints established by law, and to choose who they will listen to.
Well, in a truly “free” society, yes freedom of speech would constitute freedom from “social consequences.”
Just as people can refuse to listen, they also can refuse to interact with persons that say things that upset them. This is a social consequence, and one that would be still be present in a “truly free society”.
A truly free society would have no consequences, laws, or restraints on behaviour.
You can see a very obvious reason why that would be very bad. Thus there is no society on Earth that is truly free. Restrictions exist to protect people, that is the nature of things.
I think you’ve managed to define an oxymoron of a society.
Society does not exist without consequences. That’s what laws/rules/agreements are necessitated on. As in, a society with no consequences is not a society. I’d go so far to say that society is a system of consequences.
Even in a “lawless societies” hierarchies form, and then agreements turn to rules turn to defacto law.
This is like saying “I can never truly be free because gravity binds me to the ground”. Like, ok, sure, but you had to define freedom in a non-standard way to get to that conclusion (I’m trying make this make sense, is it landing well?)
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Well, in a truly “free” society, yes freedom of speech would constitute freedom from “social consequences.”
No? That would imply it’s not free, as the receivers aren’t free to act upon the given information freely?
If the society is truly “free”, as in, absolutist free, then if someone said something you didn’t like, you could just punch them in the face without consequence. But that means the original speech had a consequence based on the social interaction with you!
Now if only everyone would be so quick to defederate preemptively from Nazi instances.
Not really no. I have a pretty extensive defed list on my instance if you want to check, but it’s not all Nazis (bots as well).
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What a great sentence, well said. I’m going to use that in the future.
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I usually support that sentiment, but it only applies when it is in your hands whether we listen or not. In this case, the admins singlehandedly decided that none of us can. This is pretty much a form of censorship IMO
The admins don’t control you. You can have an account anywhere else you want to. So unless you’re paying for the servers here, you can deal with the Terms of Service or not use it.
As I said in another reply:
The people who own a lemmy instance have the right to associate (federate) with whatever other instances meet their guidelines.
If you don’t agree, then you are free to join a different lemmy instance that is federated with objectionable material.
You don’t have the right to demand that lemmy.one meets your standards. You don’t own it.
If you find that no other instance federates with what you want, you’re free to make your own, with blackjack, and hookers.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/e35AQK014tI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Try telling that to the lemmyers (lemmings?) In this Technology thread that were clowning mastodon.art for blocking social.bbc for BBC’s history of transphobic rhetoric, considering there are a decent amount of transgender people (and other LGBTQIA+ identifying people) are members of their instance. Same situation, definitely not the same reaction.
EDIT: It was in Technology on lemdro.id, not Fediverse. EDIT 2: Spelling
Yeah but there’s a big difference.
As people right fully call out in that thread, defederation from the BBC without them having had a fediverse presence to do anything worth defederating with is wild. It’s the same broken argument as pre-emptively defederating from threads was, barring worries about sync-load or something.
But in the case of Hexobear, they do have lots of content based upon which you can judge whether federation with the instance is worth the extra moderation effort for you as an admin or not. In this case the lemmy.world admins decided that it is not worth it, an defederated.
However, importantly they had something to judge what working with the communities from the instance would be like. With BBC or Threads, no one had that. And while every instance admin is of course free to do whatever they want, they’re also making a really good point against the fediverse as a technological solution if they act that way.
Consider that if it were a central site, defederating from tankybear is the equivalent of banning a community. The BBC/Threads thing is preemptively blocking a community from ever being created. There are very rare cases where the latter might be warranted, but it’s tough to imagine scenarios where it would have a meaningful reason.
I don’t agree that there’s a big difference, though. Yes, one has much more of a base for their claims than the other, but both defeds are based largely on the personal opinions of the administrators of the instances, whether they’re politically motivated or rooted in the desire to not have to moderate and micromanage the content posted from that instance. In that way, both of these are the same decision made on the same grounds.
but both defeds are based largely on the personal opinions of the administrators of the instances, whether they’re politically motivated or rooted in the desire to not have to moderate and micromanage the content posted from that instance
Hrm, an understandable POV (even though I personally disagree). But then I would also say, what is the alternative? Since a large part of the Fediverse is about everyone running their own custom instance if they want, naturally they’re also the one to decide if that place goes down or behaves differently. I wouldn’t really know how to truly improve upon this.
BBC is transphobic? Since when?
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/b4buJMMiwcg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I’m restating their reasoning. Not speaking firsthand on whether or not they are. Sorry, should have clarified.
What gives you the right to constrain what other people see? Just go ahead and ban them yourself if they offend you so.
I just created this new account because people like you see in themselves the right to constrain what I see.
The people who own a lemmy instance have the right to associate (federate) with whatever other instances meet their guidelines.
If you don’t agree, then you are free to join a different lemmy instance that is federated with objectionable material.
You don’t have the right to demand that lemmy.one meets your standards. You don’t own it.
If you find that no other instance federates with what you want, you’re free to make your own, with blackjack, and hookers.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/e35AQK014tI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
that is exactly what I did. I would much rather not associate with people like you. You appear to be horrible people.
My only regret is that I donated to this server.
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For example I don’t want to listen to you. Go away. Defederate yourself.
You totally have that ability… it’s under “Block User”.
That was my point.
Congratulation. You are the first user i have blocked.
I’m not in favour of pre-emptive defederating. It feels like censorship doing so and that bothers me.
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Their note to their users specifically says to keep their anti establishment opinions and trolling to their own communities and don’t spread it further for fear of defederation. It hardly sounds threatening to us.
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Defederating can happen at any point, and I think would be better kept as a reactive response and last resort rather than proactive.
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The more our large instances start fracturing and closing off from one another the less useful Lemmy will become. You’re hardly blocking out an idealogy, if hexbear users wanted in they could just sign up and that would make it harder to find them. At least having them federated makes it easy to filter out @hexbear if we wanted.
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Practicing tolerance goes both ways. Calling communities ‘them’ vs ‘us’ and judging a group based on the noise of the few doesn’t seem like the right approach. If hexbear became a problem and moderators complained of hate speech and conflict then absolutely we use the tools we have to keep things functioning, but filtering out groups because we don’t like ‘their’ belief systems will make us judgemental and biased as a result. This is a platform to promote discussion not an echo chamber to gather like minded opinions and bounce them off each other in perpetuity.
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okay this is freaking wild:
We need a sub dedicated to bot building, trolling and brigading effectively. Screw morals, or decency. They’re tools that maintain the status quo.
It’s so melodramatic, it sounds like a child’s attempt at satire. Like, try saying that out loud and not cringing.
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It’s the conspiracy theorist mindset:
They’re people who wish they were smart, and can’t handle that they’re not. So they latch onto ideas that most people agree are dumb. Then use that to convince themselves that they’re super geniuses who have realized the truth of something that even scientists couldn’t figure out.
Then when they’re challenged with evidence or facts, they double down and start insulting or even assaulting people in response. Because they don’t see it as evidence in an argument, they just think the other person is calling them stupid and that really strikes a nerve.
TL;DR: They’re in denial and project their own self-hatred onto others.
This is what true projection is.
“Everybody who disagrees with me is a moron who thinks they’re smarter than they really are. If only they were as smart as me”
It’s not so different from how most of us feels about reddit is it?
The OP didn’t make it clear that the post was about reddit, not Lemmy.world.
I can’t speak for everyone but, no actually. I think a lot of us just left and took our content with us (comment deletion). I couldn’t care less if people are creating bots or being trolls to “destroy reddit”, but no, I’m guessing that most of us aren’t going out of our way to pollute communities that we no longer enjoy.
Sounds pretty toxic honestly.
Though, I don’t agree with this pre-emptive federation. Seems premature.
And I think it could be the same on hexbear, that most users won’t go out of their way to pollute Lemmy.world.
But we will never know if we don’t try it.
That’s a different instance, though, right?
I find it hilarious that the tankies rail against “maintaining the status quo” but in practice all they do is shit on anyone making actual progress in favour of wanking about some glorious revolution that will never come.
That sounds an awful lot like ‘we know we’re a minority, so we have to cheat, otherwise it might also look like we are, and that would be unfair! (read: we might be rightfully ignored for our minority opinions)’
Your comment’s intent is rather dubious – why post a quote from Lemmygrad, when the original post was talking about Hexbear? I encourage you to state that your quote is from Lemmygrad within the comment itself, instead of hiding it behind a link.
Cause maybe lemmygrad should be defederated as well.
Be that as it may, the comment is rather misonformative, as it is currently written. It is evident that the main topic of conversation here is Hexbear; therefore, people scrolling through the comments are going to be expecting that all comments will be talking about Hexbear. The posted quote could very easily be interpreted as a quote from Hexbear, given the context, if read in passing by someone who doesn’t feel motivated enough to follow a link.
read the entire post, you’ll see this exact link being mentioned there as Lemmygrad defederation was also considered
I have lurked here for a long time, but I just don’t understand the logic here. I read the statement that was linked here, and it just seemed like they were saying that they should be respectful and follow our rules? … Isn’t dismantling propaganda… through “informed rhetoric” a good thing? Why are NATO, the IMF or World Bank automatically good? … Aren’t we just creating a bubble by preemptively blocking a large lemmy instance just because we don’t like their political speech? As far as I can tell they aren’t promoting racism or bigotry. Has lemmy.world preemptively banned nazi or right-wing instances?
Yea implying that we don’t have propaganda and narratives on our side of the wall is naive
If we want the truth then an open discussion is the path. There will be arguments in bad faith, sure. But that’s not limited to “them”. It’s a human discussion thing.
I read the statement that was linked here, and it just seemed like they were saying that they should be respectful and follow our rules?
Read through some of the first set of links if you haven’t. The same admin who’s trying to gently suggest they don’t troll is talking about how their instance won’t brigade lemmygrad because the energy is better focused on the wider war against liberalism in the fediverse. It calls into question exactly how real that suggestion is vs. just a pro-forma attempt to head off this exact result with a toothless suggestion they know no one is going to follow.
“informed rethoric” will be some of the most piss poor arguments you have ever seen in your life.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the arguments are made in bad faith.
This would be a lot more believable if your account wasn’t just 6 hours old.
Granted I only see the cherry picked statements in the post, but these things do not speak from a place of neutrality or at the very least openness. When all those things being bad is stated as close to fact, and them being against western propaganda,. They seem, to me, much less like a place that wants no propaganda and discussion of world organizations, and instead it sounds like a place that wants all of it gone and no place for western/left supportive discussion (which can be labeled propaganda, which may be a negative outlook on my side but any other site saying they do not want propaganda of one side usually isn’t very happy about arguments in favor of said side even when said thing is a fact or at least relevant to the discussion)
There were also comments very much critical of federation here because of some political joke posts. If shit post tier jokes on political figures aren’t ok things will work out. because it’s a Chinese communist it’s about, I’m also extremely sceptical of ho well.
With that said, I’m not completely against the federation, but it would require the mods to be vigilant and see if the federation doesn’t harm the general community over time. That might be a lot to ask for, since I do not know how much time and effort they already put into this already.
Because for these people “informed rhetoric” means quoting russian propaganda websites and repeating keywords to sound informed. They’re no different than flatearthers once you do some research, however. Unlike flatearthers, tho, these guys are trying to undermine progress so they are a lot more harmful
I hear the accusation thrown around about russian propaganda all the time, and it seems so spurious to me. It seems like a conspiracy theory unto itself. It is thought-terminating. Back when I used to go on reddit, I would get called a bot occasionally myself. It is something people throw out there so they don’t have to entertain any sort of cognitive dissonance. Like, if information is exposing a truth, but you don’t like source, that does not necessarily mean that it is untrue. Im sorry. That is a logical fallacy itself. it also ignores that the US, and US business entities in particular, are much more powerful and influential… I remember reading that US congress spend $300 billion to “counter the malign influence of the CCP” … that is close to what China spent on its military alone in 2022… The US also has a history of buying journalists and waging large internet influence campaigns, among other things… but I haven’t seen people calling other people shills or bots for repeated US-talking points… just looking it up now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
https://cyberscoop.com/meta-blames-u-s-military-for-information-operation/
https://theprint.in/tech/60-80-of-twitter-accounts-posting-on-russia-ukraine-war-bots-90-pro-ukraine-finds-new-study/1114878/I’m speaking from experience after wasting countless hours trying to have actual conversations. Even tried direct messages but whenever I did that, it felt like I was speaking to a whole different person. They would clam up and be like “sorry, don’t wanna talk about it” or something.
Good thing that never happens with the liberals here.
american propaganda is strong on the internet.
But quoting American propaganda is okay?
Do you speak disingenuously on purpose? Or are you just an idiot?
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Right, my bad, forgot to mention insults.
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Many things I don’t agree with, are **not ** part of Russian propaganda… You’re creating a strawman argument.
I have no idea who Hexbear is, but it’s well documented how th IMF and World Bank work to endebt developing countries to the US’s corporate rule and then steal all their resources… Are we… Not allowed to talk about that here?
Not in favour of this.
I chose Lemmy.world because I wanted an instance that would federate even with people I might disagree with. If it’s illegal and abusive, sure. But to defederate on ideological grounds? I was planning a recurring donation but this makes me consider setting up my own instance.
They’re welcome to whatever discussions they want to have on their instance. As long as they respect the rules of other instances when they’re here, then everybody wins.
As for their point about dismantling western propaganda - if they have documented sources then let’s have a conversation. It’s not like there isn’t western propaganda
I’m gonna come out and say, even with the statement, I’m not in favor of preemptive defederation like this.
I know the admins of an instance are hosting us basically out of the goodness of their own hearts, and I appreciate that. And I understand they can do whatever they want, and we can move to a different instance if we want. I get it.
But I joined .world because I wanted a neutral instance that would connect with pretty much everyone unless they were particularly problematic. Could hexbear be particularly problematic? Sure, maybe. But I think there’s a big difference between defederating in response to a problem and defederating in anticipation of a potential problem, especially since the users aren’t given a chance to discuss it. Like, I know we’re not technically entitled to give our input if we’re not admins, but I think it would be nice, y’know?
If it was just some small instance of trolls that’s one thing, but hexbear is actually quite a big instance, so this is a very impactful decision. I don’t like it being made preemptively behind the scenes like this.
Your desire to “connect with pretty much everyone unless they were particularly problematic” is admirable,. Just remember, please, that the wider the gates are opened, the more idiots wander in and the more work for mods and admins.
After dealing with the first thousand or so idiots, you can smell 'em coming. I’m with the admins on this.
Sure, I’m aware of idiots on the internet, but if we tried to avoid idiots on the site we wouldn’t federate with anyone. Lemmy.world is specifically billed as a “generic Lemmy server for everyone to use,” I want the gates to be open fairly wide, that’s why I’m here. Not for everyone, like I’m glad we defederated with exploding heads, but we still gave them a shot first and there was at least some more community discussion on it before that decision was made. That’s what would make me feel a lot better about this.
“Give them a shot first” is easy to say, but it’s hours or days of moderators and admins’ lives.
Avoiding echo chambering (is that a verb?) will take work. Admins and mods should be willing and ready to do that for the health of the fediverse.
Fwiw, I was a reddit mod for a sub of 4.3 million, so I’d like to think I’m not being naive about this, but I could be wrong…
I would like to start off with apologizing for if this comes off harshly.
I respect that you were a mod for a community that size, but I’m not really sure that I can give that much credit without knowing more. Reddit had all kinds of mods. Good mods, bad mods, sleeping mods, controlling mods, chill mods, etc. Reddit hasn’t exactly had much of a great reputation for many of it’s mods and admins, you know? I’ve seen some very bizarre things happen on that website in the past regarding certain mods, to put it one way.
Since this is a different platform with different groundwork, I would imagine that the tools would probably be at least a little bit different. Maybe the mods who used to moderate 24/7 have decided to spend more of their time on their hobbies or with their loved ones. Maybe they are on a different platform. Maybe they got bored of moderating, who knows.
I think that we should make sure that we keep human expectations for people if we want to keep our mods good and happy. I think that that’s another way that Reddit really messed up. Reddit’s 24/7 pressure to constantly moderate probably led to a lot of mods becoming burnt out. If people try to treat volunteers as employees, they’re likely to lose many of those volunteers. I mean, these people are already going our of their way to help contribute.
I have to say, I see a hell of a lot more "other people need to do xy " on this thread, than I see “I think x is missing. I’ll help add it!”.
Not harsh at all 🤝 I respect your perspective, but I stand by my comment. If we sign up for a job, we should do right by it. Also shameless plug: the community was r/streetwear and you can find us at [email protected]
P.S. feel free to peruse my history on r/streetwear to judge if I was a lazy/crazy mod
Non-federation with a CTH-successor certainly makes running a community on lemmy.world more desirable. Back on reddit, before the bannings about 1/3 of mod actions were from TD users, 1/3 were from CTH users, and the last 1/3 was just randos. It’s not like CTH was just a regular sub, they were the source of a lot of moderation.
You don’t welcome cancer in to your body because you support all life.
Nazis and Russian trolls are not here to debate or inform. Their sole purpose is to degrade trust in democracy, spread propaganda, and other heinous shit.
Defederation is our only defense and we owe it to users to fight hate and lies.
The thing is that kind of example assumes that it is cancer. Which is something I’m not happy assuming yet, especially without discussion.
Hexbear has over 20k users. I find it hard to believe they’re all Russian trolls, or even that most of them are.
Is joining hexbear an option for you? It’s not like we’re obligated to only have one account across the lemmyverse.
Sure, but having fewer accounts is easier: that’s the whole purpose of federation in the first place, isn’t it?
It’s fine now, but I haven’t been on Lemmy for that long, and I don’t want to have to make a new account every few months to see a new instance.
Maybe “federation” or something like it should actually take place on the client side, so you’d join instances with almost the ease of subscribing to communities. Then the client code would handle combining feeds, using the right credentials to post to a given place, funnelling DM’s from multiple instances to a single inbox, etc.
I think if we are here now, the fediverse vision has already failed. Defederation is a last resort yet this is the third round of drama in the 1 month past redditgeddon? Two actual defederations and one extended discussion set off by a single troll on another instance.
So, I think fediverse decentralization hasn’t yet gone far enough. Thus the idea of handling instance coordination on the client rather than leaving it up to server admins.
Well I think this is just the nature fediverse as well. You gotta respect the admin and it’s really not super hard to use multiple logins with different instances via an app.
If Lemmy starts to allow seamless migration of accounts across instances, this will become less of an issue. But I suspect creating multiple accounts isn’t going to be palatable to most users.
A single login solution is to find a third party that federates with both lemmy.world and hexbear. Hexbear’s list is pretty limited so it’d have to be one of those, but unless others follow lemmy.world’s choice you’ll be able to see and post on both instances.
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The more servers we defederate with, the fewer posts will show up in our feeds from everywhere. People aren’t going to make an account for everywhere. I’m not particularly sad about this server in particular, but in general the Lemmy.world admin trying to stop people running into content that isn’t illegal is annoying and him imposing his ideology on lemmy.world, which paints itself as neutral.
The more servers we defederate with, the fewer posts will show up in our feeds from everywhere. People aren’t going to make an account for everywhere. I’m not particularly sad about this server in particular, but in general the Lemmy.world admin trying to stop people running into content that isn’t illegal is annoying and him imposing his ideology on lemmy.world, which paints itself as neutral.
They specifically said they’re being trolls and going to brigade tbf.
That first bullet is saying “don’t do stuff that’s going to get us defederated” to their users, no? It’s a bit tongue in cheek but I feel like it’s not as aggressive as some people are describing. The whole server came from a subreddit that was very memey/shitpost.
I think their admins are doing an honest job trying to put out reminders for good behavior (**edit: I hadn’t originally followed the links to the admin’s comments elsewhere, I no longer think they’re doing an honest job), the problem is that the sub they grew from never heeded similar admonishments and their federation post explicitly says they will not be moderated for activity outside of hexbear, so it’s really just a suggestion, not a rule.
I don’t agree with anti-western ideology being a good reason for defederation, but I do expect hexbear to be a major source of trolling from past experience with r/CTH. Reddit post-Donald and post-CTH bans was a noticeably less trolly (NOT saying they’re even remotely equivalent, just both were sources of trolling and were banned at the same time).
A perfectly fair and balanced opinion. It’s ultimately up to the admins since they’ve effective got to clean the mess if it happens, but gauging community sentiment would always be nice
Well said.
Like, I know we’re not technically entitled to give our input if we’re not admins, but I think it would be nice, y’know?
Admins not bothering with users’ thoughts or opinions is what brought us here from Reddit. I wish they would poll us, even informally, before making these kinds of decisions.
Find another instance? That’s the beauty of the fediverse.
Well yeah, I already said I know that’s the go-to if you don’t like one instance. But I’d still like to be able to express my opinions before doing that. It’s not that big a deal but I’d still ideally rather not, y’know?
Well, you picked the wrong instance, then. Lemmy.world never claimed to be neutral. The goals have always been clearly stated, currently here: https://lemmy.world/legal
Well the server is described up at the top as a “generic Lemmy server for everyone to use,” which feels like it’s setting up to be a pretty neutral stance.
Hating tankies is a neutral stance, as is hating fascists and neo-confederates.
The users already made their intentions clear with their instance rules acting as proxy. It’s an aggressive stance and it is not conducive to fair and open conversations about anything.
This is exactly the thought process I went through while reading the post. Doing it preemptively can make it come across like you’re severing the connection due to opinions rather than rule breaking.
But still, THANK YOU to the admins, in general. I am not accusing you of anything negative like that. I trust that you thought it through way more than I did. Thanks for keeping this big general insurance of ours awesome.
I get your argument, but I’m with the admins. It’s not like a shop keeper closing their doors because they see someone coming with tattoos and a biker jacket. It’s more like they’re closing their doors because they heard the person saying they make their living shoplifting and they intend to shoplift in that store. Hexbear stated pretty explicitly that they intend to be a problem. No reason to wait for them to do that.
I’m not really seeing it to be honest. That first bullet point there seems pretty clearly saying to their users to not be a problem so that they don’t get defederated.
I’m sure you can find someone calling to brigade such and such on there somewhere but they have over 20 thousand users total. That’s a lot of people to rule out.
The message is pretty clear though: be as subversive as possible but don’t set off the alarms that will get us defederated. I don’t see them telling their users to be good, I see them telling them not to get caught.
If the rule is fifteen pieces of flair you shouldn’t need to be like pretty boy Bryan and wear thirty seven to be on the law’s good side.
Feels like a pretty big call to look at a place that has 20k users and think they’re all trolls and bots. I get that people aren’t interested in differing opinions / discourse nowadays, but defederation before even giving it a go feels a little weak.
Seconded
As always, the limits of tolerance are met when it comes to suggesting we tolerate intolerance. The boundary must be set there.
Good. I commented earlier about how horrible hexbear was. I signed up for hexbear, hoping to meet leftists, but these are not leftists. They just parrot Chinese/Russian propaganda. They have no original takes, no critical thinking. Call me whatever, but, I’m pro NATO. I don’t give a shit about what bullshit propaganda you show me from a totalitarian regime. If the U.S. is bad, then the CCP is pure evil.
Personally, I’d rather just block the stuff I don’t like rather than have lemmy.world trying to decide “who’s worthy of federation”.
Why is it wrong to be critical of western propaganda?
What the fuck?
I was assured by this server that it has no problem with socialists. This is worse than I expected it to be, I expected a half-hearted attempt to justify this action through means other than “they’re socialists and hold socialist views”.
To the three points here:
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“Western propaganda” - Is capitalist propaganda. Of course socialists oppose it, we oppose capitalism.
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“Nato” - An anti-nato position is held by literally every single socialist organisation in Europe. You will not find a socialist org with a pro-nato position. Ffs just look at DiEM25’s position on this, it’s probably the most well known cross-nation alliance of socialist groups and parties in europe including people like Yanis Varoufakis, Jeremy Corbyn and Zizek to name a few but that really doesn’t do the size of the DiEM organising alliance justice. Even Noam Chomsky is anti-nato ffs. What the fuck are you doing acting like this is a fringe position not held by a huge number of people over here in Europe and at the forefront of leftist politics on the continent? Taking the position “you’re not allowed to be anti-nato” is blatant american imperialism.
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“It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished.” - Duh? What the fuck do the liberals running this instance think socialists believe exactly? When Marx calls for revolution do you think that we mean to continue the organisations that existed prior? No, we seek to abolish them and create new socialist organisations that serve the new socialist state we seek to create.
Absolutely mindblowing that this instance ever pretended it was going to play nicely with socialists. I’m disgusted.
Every single take above is also the take you will get from every single socialist community over on reddit. The anarchist communities will also even have an anti-nato position. Like jesus christ. I expected this post to be bad but I didn’t expect it to be “Yeah fuck socialists, oh and fuck what anarchists believe too”.
I’m flabbergasted that @[email protected] just completely lied about not intending to block based on ideology, and it’s extremely telling that Hexbear gets a pre-emptive defederation for this shit while literal actual nazis were a chore to get defederated.
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Gotta say, pre-emptive defederation seems like a bit of an over reaction. There’s plenty of leftists in other instances, not just hexbear and lemmygrad. Hell, I’m an anarchist that regularly comments on political/social threads in this instance, it doesn’t seem to be an issue. Lemmy in general is pretty obviously far left leaning. I don’t see the harm in federating with hexbear, unless they show themselves to be actively harassing or trolling. But you’d have to federate first to find out if they will
This is entirely reasonable to me. I don’t believe there is any good reason to federate with instances that are intending to astroturf, censore dissenting information, and peddle propoganda. You can see their vote brigading in a post on c/fediverse discussing this situation.
Federating with such instances does more harm than good, providing an audience for propoganda aimed at fomenting extreme perspectives thru deviant misinformation and content/narrative control.
Creating those kind of fringe echo-chamer instances is how we end up with toxic and extreme groups like SRS and incels or the donald (on reddit). They can even start out as satire and then quickly devolve into toxic hate.
The argument that we want a diverse fediverse doesn’t mean that we should federate with toxic instances with bad intentions. That’s not the kind of diversity that we should be promoting. That’s the kind of toxic userbase that should be quarantined…
“Echo-chambers are bad, and that’s why I support defederating with instances that I disagree with”
EDIT: The reason Hexbear disabled downvotes is because we want people to talk to each other rather than downvote and move on.
What did I say that was wrong?
Sorry brother, the hive mind detected wrongthink and you have been punished for it.
You summed a lot of their points up into one blunt sentence, which also implies that you were not actually looking for discussion here.
Comments like this are almost like a different flavour of a downvote.
Your comment had no counter arguments, no questions, no sources or reasonings, no related points, but instead it’s just a very shortened “quote” of what you were responding to.
Your comment also didn’t really actually add anything to the discussion other than showing that you think of that person’s comment negatively, just like a downvote would have shown.
Irony, imo.
I think the point I was making was obvious. You’re just being obtuse on purpose.
To spell it out:
Hexbear is going out of its way to avoid becoming an echo chamber by federating with liberal instances. Blocking Hexbear is obviously more echo chamber-like than allowing it, and opposing echo chambers is clearly a nonsense reason to defederate.
What you said wrong was provide a false equivalent.
Protecting users from toxic instances is not a bad thing, and is not counterintuitive to producing a healthy and diverse fediverse.
Whereas lemmy.world allows criticism of all governments and governing styles. The only anti-free speech instance in this discussion is hexbear.
What have they actually done?
I’m all for defederating from instances that cause problems but all the quotes above basically seem to say, “I know you want a revolution but you still gotta follow the rules of whatever instance you’re posting on.”
It’s your server so your under no obligation to provide a reason for defederating beyond disagreeing with them but it leaves me wondering if there’s anything else or if it’s just a matter of disliking them?
