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.
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.
They chose to be admins and moderators. Perhaps they should be expected to administrate and moderate.
In another very real sense, their users chose the instance they’re on. People were asking at the beginning what the difference between each instance was. This is how the admins have chosen to administrate and moderate. Maybe it’s the users who should recognise that the shoe is on the other foot.
Fwiw though, I don’t disagree with the choice to defederate.
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tbf all costs (besides probably labor, which isn’t insignificant, but harder to quantify from the outside) are paid by donations, so it isn’t just the kindness of their hearts opening their servers to us. They also chose to present their server as a general purpose one where everyone is welcome (within reason)
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…
As others have pointed out, the population of the whole fediverse is currently less than a bunch of subreddits with far less than 4.3 million users. Mod/admin energy shouldn’t be taken for granted, but people are way overstating the potential for issues.
A game thread on any popular sporting event has way more comments and problems than basically any post in the history of this place.
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.
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.
Well said.
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.
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.
Unfortunately for you, the userbase of Hexbear is predominantly non-Russian! Ergo, your conclusion is incorrect!
russian trolls aren’t necessarily russian… remember that donald trump guy?
Oy vey. Conspiracy theories are against the Code of Conduct! Rule 3. I’ll leave you with a warning.
Well, okay, tankie scum. Happy with that label?
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
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).
Wasn’t The_Donald already abandoned by its members before Reddit banned them to make it look like they were being neutral?
Concerning
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.
Seconded
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.
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.
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.
There is nothing wrong with following the rules and being “subversive.” That is literally just challenging people’s ideas.
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.
As always, the limits of tolerance are met when it comes to suggesting we tolerate intolerance. The boundary must be set there.