Hey folks
I have been receiving a lot of messages every single day about federation with hexbear. Some of our users are vehemently against it, others are in full support. The conversation does not seem to be dying down, rather, the volume of messages I receive about it seems to be increasing, so I am opening this public space where we can openly discuss the topic.
I am going to write a wall of text about my own thoughts on the situation, I’m sorry, but no tl;dr this time, and I ask anybody participating in this thread to first read through this post before commenting.
Before I go any further, I want to be clear that for anybody who participates here, it is required to focus on the quality of your posts. That means:
- Be kind to each other, even if you disagree
- Use arguments rather than calling people names
- Realize that this is a divisive topic, so your comments should be even more thoughtful than usual
With that out of the way, there are a few things I want to cover.
On defederation in general
First of all, I am a firm believer that defederation must be reserved only for cases where all other methods have failed. If defederation is used liberally, then a small group of malicious users can effectively completely shut down the federated network, by simply creating the type of drama between instances which would inevitably result in defederation. In my view, federation is the biggest strength of Lemmy compared to any centralized discussion forum, so naturally I think maintaining federation by default is an important goal in general.
I am also a believer in the value of deplatforming hateful content, but I think defederation is not the best way to do this. Banning individual users, banning communities and establishing a culture of mutual support between mods and admins of different instances should be the first line of defense against such content. There are some further steps that can be taken before defederation as well, but these are not really documented anywhere (in order to prevent circumvention). The point is: for myself, defederation is the absolute last resort, only to be used when it is completely clear that other methods are ineffective.
Finally, I am wary of creating a false expectation among lemm.ee users that lemm.ee admins endorse all users and communities and content on instances we are federated with. Here at lemm.ee, we use a blocklist for federation, which means our default apporach is to federate with all new instances. We do not have the resources (manpower, skills and knowledge) necessary to pass judgement on all instances which exist out there, as a result, users on lemm.ee are expected to curate their own content to quite a high degree. In addition to downvoting and/or reporting as necessary, individual lemm.ee users are also able to block specific users and communities, and the ability to block entire instances is coming very soon as well.
Having said all that, in a situation where all other methods do indeed fail, defederation is not out of the question. Making such a call is up to the discretion of lemm.ee admins, and doing it as a last resort is completely in line with our federation policy.
Regarding hexbear
Hexbear is an established Lemmy instance, focused on many flavors of leftism. They have quite a large userbase who are very active on Lemmy (often so active that they leave the impression brigading all popular Lemmy posts). One important thing to note is that while some forms of bigotry seem to be quite accepted by many hexbear users (but seemingly not by mods - more on that below), they at least are very protective of LGBT rights (and yes, I am quite certain that they are not just pretending to do this, as many users seem to believe). Additionally, while I have noticed quite high quality posts from hexbear users, there are also several users there who seem to really enjoy trolling and baiting (very reminiscent of 4chan-type “for the lulz” posting), and it’s important to note that this kind of posting is in general allowed on hexbear itself.
The reason this whole topic is important to so many people right now (despite hexbear being a relatively old instance), is that hexbear only recently enabled federation. A combination of their volume of posts, their strong convictions, the excitement about federation, and the aforementioned trolling has made them very visible to almost all Lemmy users, and this has sparked discussions about the value of federation with hexbear on a lot of Lemmy instances.
My own experience with hexbear
I want to write down my own experience with interacting with hexbear users, mods, and admins over the past few days. I believe this experience will highlight why I am hesitant to advocate for immediate full defederation from hexbear at this point in time, and am for now still more in favor of taking action on a more individual user basis. Please read and see how you feel about the situation afterwards.
Background
My first real contact with hexbear users was in the comments section of a post in this meta community requesting defederation from hexbear by @[email protected]. That post is now locked, because several hexbear users very quickly started doing the aforementioned “for the lulz” type spamming of meme images in the comments (these are actually just emojis, but they are rendered as full-size images on all instances other than the source instance, due to a current Lemmy bug).
I did not want to take further actions in that thread in general (for archival purposes), but I did take one action, which in retrospect was a mistake: I removed a comment which contained the hammer and sickle symbol. I ignorantly associated this symbolism with Kremlin propaganda, and the atrocities my own people suffered at the hands of the soviet union during the previous century. Many users (including hexbear users) correctly (and politely) pointed out to me in DMs that the symbol has a much broader use than just as the symbol of the USSR, and people elsewhere in the world may not associate it with the USSR at all. I am grateful for users who pointed this out to me without resorting to personal attacks.
Let me be clear here: while I do not have anything against leftism or communist ideas in general (in fact in today’s world, I think discussion of such ideas is quite necessary), Kremlin propaganda has no place on lemm.ee. Any dehumanizing talking points of the Kremlin on lemm.ee are treated as any other bigotry, and if communist symbolism is used in context of Kremlin propaganda (that is the context in which I have been exposed to it throughout my whole life), then it will still be removed. But there is no blanket ban on communist symbolism in general on lemm.ee, and discussing and advocating for leftist and communist topics (as distinct from the imperialist and dehumanizing policies of the Kremlin) is certainly allowed on lemm.ee.
Hexbear user response
Coming back to the events of the past few days: soon after my removal of the comment containing the symbol from the meta thread, two posts popped up on hexbear. One was focused on insulting and spreading lies about me personally. Another was focused on diminishing the horrors of the soviet occupation in my country. In the comments under both of these posts (and in a few other threads on hexbear), I noticed some seriously disturbing bigotry against my people. There were comments which reflected the anti-Estonian propaganda of the current Russian state, things like:
- Suggesting that my people has no right to exist
- Stating that my people (and other Baltic nations) are subhuman
- Claiming that anybody critical of both nazi and soviet occupations is themselves a nazi and a holocaust denier
I expect to hear such statements from the Russian state - here in Estonia, we are subjected to this and other kinds of bigotry constantly from Russian media - but to see it spread openly in non-Russian channels is extremely disturbing. Such bigotry is completely against lemm.ee rules in general. Additionally, my identity is public information, because I feel it’s important for the integrity of lemm.ee that I don’t hide behind anonymity. Considering this, I’m sure you can understand why I am very worried about my own safety when people leave comments in many unrelated threads (where my original posts are not even visible), baselessly calling me a nazi and a holocaust denier.
Note that the goal of this post is not to start a new debate in the comments about the the repressions of the soviet union in Estonia or other occupied territories, but if the topic interests any users, I can recommend the 2006 documentary The Singing Revolution (imdb). The trailer is a bit cheesy, but the actual film contains lots of historical footage from the soviet occupation, and also many interviews with people who experienced it, who share stories which are deeply familiar to all Estonians. If anybody is interested in further discussion, then I suggest making a post about it in the Estonian community here: [email protected].
Hexbear admin response
After the above events had played out, I reached out to hexbear admins for clarification on their moderation policies and how they handle such cases. I was actually very happy with their response:
- They immediately removed the personal attacks and dehumanizing comments containing Kremlin propaganda from Hexbear, and assured me that such content is always handled by mods
- They told me that while there are all kinds of leftists on hexbear, Russian disinformation is generally either refuted in comments or removed by mods
- They implemented some additional rules on hexbear to try and reduce the trolling experienced by many other instances, including ours: https://hexbear.net/post/352119
My personal take-aways
Let me play the devil’s advocate here and employ some “self-whataboutism”: among all users that have been banned on lemm.ee for bigotry, the majority were actually not users from other instances, and in fact people with lemm.ee accounts. If we judge any larger instance only by bigoted posts that some of its users make, then we might as well declare all instances as cesspools and close down Lemmy completely. I believe it’s far more useful to judge instances based on moderation in response to such content. Just as we remove bigoted content from lemm.ee, I have also witnessed bigoted content being removed from hexbear.
At the same time, I am aware of some internal conflict between hexbear users over the more strict moderation they are now starting to employ, and I am definitely keeping an eye on that situation and how admins handle it.
I am also still quite worried about the amount of distinct users on hexbear who have posted Kremlin propaganda. I so far don’t have reason to believe that these users are employed by the Russian state, but the fact that they are spreading the same hateful content which can be seen on Russian television seems problematic to say the least, and it remains to be seen if moderators can truly keep up with such content.
Where thing stand right now
I am not convinced that we are currently at a point where the “last resort” of defederation is necessary. This is based on the presumption that our moderation workload at lemm.ee will not get out of hand just due to users from that particular instance. My current expectation is that as the excitement of federation calms down (and as new rules on hexbear go into effect), the currently relatively high volume of low effort trolling will be replaced by more thoughtful posts. If this is not the case then we will certainly need to re-evaluate things.
Additionally, nothing is changing about our own rules regarding bigotry. Especially relevant in the context of Kremlin propaganda, I want to say that dehumanizing anybody is not allowed on lemm.ee (hopefully I do not have to spell it out, but this of course includes Ukrainians, LGBT folks, and others that the Kremlin despises), and action will be taken against any users who do this, regardless of what instance they are posting from.
Finally, I am very interested to hear thoughts and responses from our own users. I am super grateful to anybody who actually took the time to read through this massive dump of my own thoughts, and I am very interested to get a proper understanding of how our users feel about what I’ve written here. Please share any thoughts in the comments.
Hexbear has been around for three years, all the while dealing with a constant stream of bad faith wreckers and doxxers from 4chan and the like. Ultimately our goal is to foster a broad-tent leftist culture, with primary focus on LGBTQ+ and anti-US-imperialism. Within those two focuses we have a wide range of leftist tendencies, from anarchist (syndicalist, ancom, etc) to Marxist (trotskyist, leftcom, ML, etc). We, I personally, see good-faith disagreement as tremendously valuable and necessary for growth of ideas. We do our best to discourage sectarianism (within the bounds of anti-imperialist, pro-LGBTQ+ leftism) while encouraging discussion.
I really dislike the idea of defederating for difference in political opinions. That kind of thing merely recreats the kind of echo chambers found on corporate social media. I believe Lemmy has potential to be better than that. Differences in philosophy and politics and culture should be moderated at the community and personal level rather than broadly sweeping instance blocks. This leaves the agency up to communities to set rules and define their cultures, banning people as needed at this level rather than simply cutting off entire communities. It also gives users the agency to choose whether to block instances, communities, or users they’d rather not interact with (instance blocking on a user level is coming soon I believe).
The other reasons people give for defederating us (although I believe politics is primary) are spamming and brigading. The former is due to: the oversized emoji bug in Lemmy (we’re sorry for this, on our side the emojis are normal sized so we don’t even realize they’re spamming) as well as the novelty of federation and lack of clear delineation between local and federated posts. The emoji bug will be fixed, and in the mean time we’re on notice to try and avoid using them while on other instances. The novelty will quickly wear off. As for delineation between local and federated, this is a mistake that’s gone both ways: lemm.ee users stumbling upon a hexbear post and not understanding why they’re being responded to differently, as well as hexbear users stumbling upon a lemm.ee post and commenting/meming as if they’re on their home turf. In either case, the rules of the given instance and community should be followed and enforced through bans rather than defederation, and ideally there’d be some CSS to make it obvious when someone’s on another instance to make it easier to follow said rules. Defederating because of this happening would be like a person on Reddit posting their /r/NSFW stuff on /r/awww by mistake, and /r/awww unilaterally blocking all /r/NSFW users, as if there’s no overlapping userbase.
As for brigading, by and large I think people are overreacting because they’re used to the walled garden Reddit has become in its profit-seeking attempts to ban wrongthink. Keep in mind that Hexbear users have no ability to downvote (literally removed from the site for other reasons a while ago), so at most a “brigade” (or most often simply seeing a post on our front page) will be a bunch of (soon-to-be normal-sized) emojis and opinions you may disagree with. If a user is breaking a comm or instance rule they can be banned. If they’re engaging in bad faith or spamming they can be blocked. Hell, even if they’re engaging in good faith they can be blocked if a person simply doesn’t want to see takes they disagree with. But ultimately it seems like a non-issue to me. Allow those of us that want to engage with diverse opinions to do so, and allow the rest to block as they see fit.
Why specifically anti-US imperialism and not anti-imperialism everywhere?
Because it’s bad only if someone I don’t like does it
My point exactly. It’s just a stand in for things they don’t like.
You say you’re trying to create a “broad tent” left wing culture. Yet I’ve voted left wing all my life, I’m very much a democratic socialist who believes we need better distribution of wealth and support for the vulnerable in society. I simply don’t think violence and revolution are the path to said society and would prefer to win hearts and minds at the ballot box.
Yet I’ve made some fairly benign comments to that end, only to be attacked by your user and called things like an “indoctrinated liberal” for them, that’s if they bothered to even type anything and didnt just spam me with rude emoticons. It doesn’t feel like you’re after a broad tent with that behaviour if I’m honest.
By left wing, we usually mean anti-capitalists.
I don’t really want to relitigate your experiences and these issues in this thread (especially because I’m a visitor on lemm.ee), so I’ll try to be succinct. But I’m happy to continue elsewhere if you want.
What we mean by “broad tent” or nonsectarian is that diverse opinions aren’t explicitly banned or removed (as long as they aren’t pro western imperialism or anti LGBTQ+). That means shitflinging and low effort sectarianism (ideally) isn’t allowed. It doesn’t mean people aren’t allowed to voice disagreement about ideologies and geopolitics. And since we don’t have downvotes, we aren’t afraid to voice disagreement, unlike Reddit where you just anonymously downvote and move on. This difference is certainly a culture shock at first, but I’ve come to prefer it. Even if everyone else disagrees with you, you still have a voice, rather than getting buried in downvotes and hidden.
As much as our users call people liberals derogatorily, in equal amounts we get called bots and shills and tankies (which is especially funny when directed at our anarchist users). I’d personally rather name calling be avoided in favor of good faith discussion, but it’s difficult to assume good faith on the internet.
I get the feeling that" pro-western imperialism" is a stand-in for any opinions that Leninists don’t like.
What does this even mean? Obviously Leninists are going to dislike opinions that are pro-imperialism, because Marxism-Leninism is inherently anti-imperialist. There are plenty of other opinions we dislike that are not related to imperialism at all. As principled communists we tend to be able and willing to explain why we disagree, though it’s tiring to have to explain the same things a million times to people who aren’t even really listening (thus the occasional pig-poop-balls). We’re only human. Try to keep an open mind and entertain the thought that our opinions might actually be sincere.
Sure, and I might win the lotto. I am officially done with anyone with the @Hexbear extention, because y’all have managed to convince me there’s nothing valuable in your words.
Our anarchist users are also vocally against western imperialism. Leninists will voice their opinions through their Leninist lens, or perhaps their experience of the world will lead them to preferring a Leninist analysis. But the same is true for our anarchists, trotskyists, syndicalists, whatever.
It’s more that people who are used to a small or different Overton window will group all anti-western-imperialism stances as “Leninist” (or more accurately, they’ll group and dismiss them all as “tankie”) because they don’t yet understand the nuances.
I know this is really off topic, but you should consider getting involved in labor or tenants unions. Voting is easily marginalized, is only able to act at periodic intervals and doesn’t build organization.
Without building working class institutions (like unions), we will never overcome the capitalists.
I work in the public sector in the UK so I’ve been part of the GMB Union for fifteen odd years at this point, was a rep for them for five years in my last office and was debating signing up to do it again.
Don’t know about a tenants union as I own my flat, although I did do years of renting prior to that an I’m well aware of how hard it is for renters.
Hell yeah 😎
Do you believe the rich and powerful will submit to being voted out of power? Do you think they won’t ratfuck anyone who gets close and buy off, intimidate, or assassinate anyone who gets in? We’ve seen what that looks like internationally, it looks like coups and the slaughter of peaceful actors. Do you think that, with such violence used to protect the appendages of capitalism, they will roll over and allow you to claim their beating heart?
Genuine question: What would the alternative be then?
Socialism has only become slightly popular in recent years and it’s still incredibly niche. There isn’t enough support for a revolution and it’s highly unlikely there ever will unless conditions change massively. And even if a revolution happens anarchist will not (or at least should not) work with MLs as authoritarianism is everything I (and hopefully we) stand against. A ruling class will never share the same class interests as the workers.
But we have gotten stuff pushed though with a local anarchist group and the only time that will work is when liberals are in power (hopefully along with the more left parties as is the case usually). Also changing the minds of liberals is a lot easier than conservatives and the best way has been to show them that socialist policies will work better. If our nationalist, conservative and fascist parties form a coalition all we get is to lose right, our platform gets a lot smaller and weaker and we are just stuck loosing power until the next election.
An added bonus is that you can actually do both. While advocating for socialist policies we can get support for a revolution if needed in the future as good policies will move liberals over more as capitalism fails them but if right wing parties are in power it’s much harder to build any support for anything.
It’s quite disingenuous to say defederating because of political differences. It because you guys are intolerable and intolerant trolls who go on the attack at the drop of a hat at every opportunity. I haven’t seen hexbear ever participate in good faith outside of this very thread. You’re only nice and capable of calm, rational, reasoned discussion when you’re being threatened with consequences. Ironically a luxury that communist nations would not provide you with.
Ok, Jesus.
You have a cool art comm here I’ve been posting in. I posted a pretty wild George Grosz painting you might like.
As for good faith commenting outside this thread, how about these…?
Are you telling on me? like a child. Love to see how you included the context that show that these were all in response to the exact sort of behavior at issue in this thread. Enjoy your defederation. and enjoy your life where you’re such an insufferable person that people are literally fighting about how to best not be anywhere near you. You must be proud.
It was just a simple way to demonstrate to the people reading, that your concerns about Hexbear users acting in good faith were obviously nonsense, since the tone of all your posts have been… well… exactly like the one you just made.
This is patently false. Sorry. I’ve witnessed and participated in plenty of civil discussions across the federated space. And I’m also plenty critical of Hexbear from the inside.
Not to be reductive but your compaints read as, “Hexbear is a large instance, Hexbear is vocal, and I don’t like it.”
I don’t particularly want Lemmy instances to become echo-chambers, but “good faith disagreement” require a degree of trust between people.
Here in this thread, we see Hexbear users worried to be silenced because of political opinion, while Lemm.ee users seems to be mightily annoyed by Hexbear users as they act in in way that would be at home on 4Chan.
I’m not convinced that these actions are one of a minority within HB, but even if it is the case, it’s going to be difficult to establish a basis of trust for these discussions…