This is an admin post, intended for blahaj lemmy users. Top level posts from members of other instances will be removed.
==
After recent events, it feels to me that sentiment has shifted and more people are asking for defederation of hexbear than previously.
I've been doing my best to try and mend bridges and keep us connected, as it's my hope that we can maintain trans solidarity and work with them, despite the friction, however, ultimately, I feel that this is an issue for the blahaj lemmy community to decide, not the admins alone.
So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to leave things as they are for a week. That will give time for things to calm down whilst we see if we can work together. After a week, I'll put up a vote and get a feel for where the community is at in regards to our continued federation with hexbear. That poll will run for a week. If there is a strong will to defederate (a clear majority), then that's what we will do.
I was fairly neutral after my first post and the admin response until I read that post. There are hexbear folks in that post explicitly saying “the whole point of federation is to dunk on people on other instances”. Also saying things like “you can’t have civil discussion with libs, you have to dunk on them”. Like they’re saying “we’re federated to be assholes to people who disagree with us”, which is a hard pass from me.
To be clear, it has nothing to to with being leftist. It has nothing to do with being trans. It has everything to do with them wanting to be assholes.
Hopefully their mods can reign stuff in to prevent that kind of behavior.
Tbf, this is pretty consistent with my experience engaging with liberals on the fediverse. They almost invariably treat leftists like we're naively ignorant of how political systems work while never entertaining the possibility they might be wrong.
You were hardly neutral when you made the request in the first place.
Correct, I was not. Ada’s response moved me to neutral because it brought understanding to why we federated in the first place, and I was ok just blocking their communities and moving on with my life.
And then their users started in on the thread.
As could very easily be expected. As has happened before and likely will again. Judging anything based on people upset when you bring up an inflammatory topic about them is no basis for a sound judgement.
We’ve had two other threads that they can easily see and they have not touched (except voting, presumably). That seems like the particular problem was solved.
As I said previously, if they wanted to defend themselves they were free to do so. But they instead attacked our admins and the instance as a whole.
Plus if they bothered to read, they'd have seen Ada saying defederation wouldn't happen