Hello users of Hexbear, we wanted to do a federation check-in.

So far these are the instances in question but please use this post as a suggestion for other instances to either federate with or defederate from or to comment your thoughts on federation in general.

aussie.zone

lemm.ee

programming.dev

lemmy.blahaj.zone

kbin.social / fedia.io

Please comment to vote:

dean-smile indicates you want to federate with all the instances listed above

dean-frown indicates you want to defederate with all the instances listed above

walter-shock indicates you would like to defederate with some and federate with others (please include what instances you want for each)

Here are some relevant posts/comments:

https://hexbear.net/comment/4515862

https://hexbear.net/comment/4510892

(Nath is an aussie.zone admin)

https://hexbear.net/post/1592684

https://hexbear.net/post/369410

(we would selectively not federate with their /c/196 community)

kbin.social and fedia.io are kbin and mbin respectively which is very similar but also distinct from lemmy. These are the two largest instances but we may look to add more in the future. There is an issue with those two as they deanonymize the modlog and allow users to inspect the upvotes for a post/comment. If users vote to federate with kbin/mbin instances and we experience moderator harassment they will be defederated from immediately.

My personal opinion follows:

I think that lemm.ee primary worth is the 1.7k daily active users.

programming.dev has active programming communities

aussie.zone has a lot of australia specific communities

lemmy.blahaj.zone has specific queer communities

kbin.social and fedia.io value is from userbase

https://the-federation.info/platform/184

https://the-federation.info/platform/290

https://the-federation.info/platform/73

hexbear is 1.75k users per month compared to .ee 3.6k and kbin.social 4.6k

Removed kbin and mbin due to moderation / user self-deletion federation problems

  • Sinistar
    ·
    10 months ago

    dean-frown I don't think federation adds anything of value to this website. What, so every now and then we get a confused lib in the comments of one of our posts and we all dunk on them? That's not reaching out to other communities or educating anybody, it's just a ritual where we all demonstrate our beliefs to one other and nobody learns anything. The idea that connecting with websites that have a higher user count will grow our own community has proven to be a fantasy, as we've lost two good users for every one we've added via federation, and I think we need to either change strategies or just accept that we're a weird, hyper-specific corner of the internet and like every other forum like ours we're gonna stay small and slowly fade out over time.

    • DengistDonnieDarko [he/him]
      ·
      10 months ago

      I will say, I've learned so much being an observer to lib dunking. They'll say something dumb, an educated Hexbear will come in, mock and correct them, and then boom, I've learned something new! This has happened multiple times. Dunks are a good vector for education for curious onlookers.