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.
kbin.social / fedia.io
Please comment to vote:
indicates you want to federate with all the instances listed above
indicates you want to defederate with all the instances listed above
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
How do I interpret this? Are we gonna defed all as it stands? Fed lemm.ee but nothing else?
Drama has pretty much died as federation has normalised. The only thing that happens now is that we get a gentle amount of chuds with dogshit opinions, and expose our views to some quiet lurkers that have later on months down the line talked about how influential we've been on them.
The dogshit opinions are good additions to the hex because they're not overpowering and they inspire useful actual answers to their dogshit takes. These answers are useful to onlooking lurkers still learning.
The influence is good and valid.
Sources of new users are thin on the ground and should not be limited.
There will be an initial wave of shit until the worst users are banned. But that will taper off into something good overall.
We should not re-federate with blahaj (or any server) unless they have corrected the things that caused our defed. Doing so will significantly agitate users here that wanted it and cause lasting bad blood that harms Hexbear. It's not an option at all until something drastic is taken from their side to address the original issues that caused it.
I think this is what all the DEFED EVERYONE folks are missing. Hexbear will die without new users. We need to get new users somehow. Federation is that somehow. Voting against any and all federation is voting against the future of Hexbear.
I wouldn't say fine. Hexbear managed to tread water and it was a tonne of manual work to do drives offsite that put Hexbear in spaces where it might grab a few users at a time. What Hex needs is systemic growth caused by the organisational structure of the site, this then provides growth without labourers actively working on generating the growth. The site has in fact grown a little bit since federation, compared to pre-federation where it was just breaking even with frequent drives, often performed by individuals taking it into their own hands to do too.
We need to get new users somehow. Federation is that somehow.
I disagree, we were getting plenty of new users before federation from outreach on reddit and other places, and just plain old word of mouth. And frankly I don't think bringing in new users should be our primary goal, at least not above fostering a safe and welcoming space.
This was a tonne of manual labour though, often performed by people taking it into their own hands out of personal concern/anxieties for hexbear. If the organisational structure of the site provides growth we're much better off. We have actually grown a bit compared to pre-federation too, which shows it works.
And frankly I don't think bringing in new users should be our primary goal, at least not above fostering a safe and welcoming space.
I don't think new users means discarding the latter. There's no suggestion on my part that we weaken hexbear's rules. New users that fit in will provide the growth, new users that do not will get themselves banned.
We should not re-federate with blahaj (or any server) unless they have corrected the things that caused our defed. Doing so will significantly agitate users here that wanted it and cause lasting bad blood that harms Hexbear. It's not an option at all until something drastic is taken from their side to address the original issues that caused it.
100% agree. Ultimately, we defed from Blahaj because one of their power mods is a bigoted shithead and the admin is a two-faced backstabbing dipshit. "uwu im just a smoll bean admin i can't help it when the mod of 196 keeps on shitting CARCOSA including airing out CARCOSA's dms to 196 uwu" Fuck off with that duplicitous bullshit.
I don't know what this site was like having never heard of it until a couple months ago. I found you all through Lemm.ee federation. Today I'm reading communist theory, have become vegan and am working on my delibification. That wouldn't have happened or have taken longer if not for you guys and federation. I would have stayed a smarmy ignorant lib although maybe a bit happier and less stressed.
Edit: I feel compelled to make it explicit that this is not a vote either way. I'm offering this perspective since the goal of federating was stated as radicalizing libs like me to show that it can work. The judgment of whether there are enough people like me to make federation worth it, in particular since this seems to affect trans comrades disproportionately, is for others to vote on.
This right here is the culture that drew me in https://hexbear.net/comment/3763871
how do we pull in
-pilled people like you without destroying the good vibes here from the sludge of reactionary posters that infest reddit-alikes? serious question and it's not just aimed at you.
I do not think its possible to recruit from general society without exposing oneself to it. I think that's what the vote here is about, do we want to recruit via federation, which means exposing people here to the chuds, in hopes of catching some open to radicalization or do we want to make it a truly safe place.
Moderation of the chuds will only ever be effective after they posted so I don't think you can have a truly safe space which is also exposed to the outside.
Are you telling me you came up with that username while you were still a lib? You'll out left us all!
My sarcasm detector isn't very good, does that mean you think I'm full of myself and should be banned? Pretty sure I'm misunderstanding something that since that seems overly harsh lol
Ah that makes more sense. My sarcasm detector really is terrible but since I know this I also know that there most likely is a misunderstanding when someone seems rude for no reason so no harm done
Stop trying to refed with Blahaj. Apart from the chasers, the trans users there are brain wormed libs. They aren’t comrades and for most they’ll never be. They’re brained wormed libs and that’s their home. Otherwise those users would be here.
tbf a lot of them are here, though that doesn't change the fact that we should stay defederated
Why the fuck would we federated with blahaj again? For what possible reason?
It will be a day and people will whine about how fucking terrible the posts are. Like last time.
We have a lot more emoji than last time, but unlike last time, our emoji scale correctly on federated instances, so we won't get any complaints about oversized emoji
We have a lot more emoji than last time
we won't get any complaints about oversized emoji
I understand the impulse to try and pull two rather queer instances together. But I don't understand anyone saying it's gotten better over there or they're trying to clean up.
I check there from time to time, and I'd say it's worse than r/196 at this point. It's more distilled. Like the people who stuck it out are even more redscare-brained than the regular crowd.
When I do see some reasonable stuff there, it's the same two hexbear alts and one is Carcosa. Then of course they're weird with those two in replies.
It's well intentioned to want to bring the two communities together, but it's unrealistic and will probably just deepen divides.
I check there from time to time, and I'd say it's worse than r/196 at this point. It's more distilled. Like the people who stuck it out are even more redscare-brained than the regular crowd.
I got the idea that Ada wouldn't remove 196 mods specifically, who attacked our admins and defended chasers. If she is not hesitant to remove reactionary mods of other communities, federating could maybe be worth it
Tbh they're not any worse than instances we're already federated with, and if anything they at least seem to take transphobia more seriously than the others.
I got banned from one of their comms for briefly mentioning transmisogyny, so they don't really care about trans women
Maybe its that particular mod? But yeah ig then the admins shouldn't let them be a mod in the first place.
Ig doing a bit better than badly moderated instances necessarily mean doing it well.
The main reason we defedded from them is that they allowed chasers to post openly transphobic stuff along the lines of
Spoiler
"trans men shouldn't get top surgery because i like boobs"
their userbase defended transphobia because it was directed at us and we (our trans posters) aren't really trans. that happened before the defed and again recently. it speaks to the kind of userbase they've attracted - not to mention the chaser DMs.
From OP:
(we would selectively not federate with their /c/196 community)
With 196 out of the way, there's several good communities there that we lost in the defed
!blahaj@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!colombia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!egg_irl@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!ftm@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!gamedev@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!lgbtq_plus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!mtf@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!nonbinary@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!pointlesslygendered@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!socialanxiety@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!transprogrammer@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!ttrpgs@lemmy.blahaj.zone
!unixsocks@lemmy.blahaj.zoneIt is still the same admin
True
and the same userbase
Not so much, /c/196 has 24 times as many users as the second most popular community, /c/mtf. See their top 10 communities:
ShowPointing out that 90% of the user base of the instance are members of the problem comm is the opposite of an argument in favor of federation
I made a post the other day asking Hexbears to tone down their AES rhetoric so we have more room to interact with the other instances and like 99% of the responses were unequivocally no.
I think the answer is very clear here.
like 99% of the responses were unequivocally no.
based hexbear united against shit ideas
asking Hexbears to tone down their AES rhetoric
What's the benefit to doing this though? Tailism is bad and only invites more shitlibs and state department devotees into our space
I will never tone down my communism posting. Uncritical support to the DPRK
To hear incorrect views without rebutting them and even to hear counter-revolutionary remarks without reporting them, but instead to take them calmly as if nothing had happened. This is a sixth type [of liberalism].
Defed programming.dev, due to unaddressed transphobia toward our users from their admin.
Continue to defed blahaj.zone. Terrible admin, terrible instance.
kbin.social and fedia.io do not federate. I'd be open to trying it if not for deanonymized modlog and upvotes. That sounds fucking terrible
kbin.social and fedia.io do not federate. I'd be open to trying it if not for deanonymized modlog and upvotes. That sounds fucking terrible
I agree about kbin.social, though the recent 0.19.2 Lemmy release now accepts federated reports from Kbin, so that's a little progress.
Here is the issue to watch for progress on Kbin instances receiving moderation actions from federated instances, whether they be Kbin, Lemmy, or something else: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/570
fedia.io only has 225 monthly users, compared to kbin.social's 4,686, so they should be easier to moderate. One potentially decent community on fedia.io is https://fedia.io/m/firefox, the official fediverse Firefox community that was originally supposed to be a lifeboat from r/firefox on
.
Federating with blahaj concerns me somewhat. I have no desire to have chasers in my or other transfolks' DMs. Unless that’s properly taken care of by their admins, I have no interest.
Defed: aussie.zone - Every (western) nation-specific lemmy I've interacted with is full of brainworms and colonial apologia.
Stay fed: lemm.ee - Decent mix of reasonable people, a couple comrades, and the few reactionaries that stumble in aren't enough to taint the entire instance for me.
Defed: programming.dev - The admin transphobia was pretty bad.
Stay defed: lemmy.blahaj.zone - c/196 basically is blahaj.zone. See how they bullied the admin to stay federated with programming.dev despite their desire to protect trans users.
Stay defed: kbin.social & fedia.io - As far as I'm aware, the popularity of the kbin model was specifically because they thought that lemmy was contaminated by tankies due to its marxist developers. I'm pretty sure they'll defed us immediately anyways.
We already know Blahja will not keep their moderators in check, programming.dev same. I've been browsing Local more often cause i just dont care what the rest of the fediverse has to say
Blahaj won't keep 196 moderators in check. But
(we would selectively not federate with their /c/196 community)
Are there non-196 moderators that Blahaj did not keep in check?
blahaj.zone can stay fucked off forever. The 196 comm isn't the problem; its users are. Selectively defederating from just that comm won't keep the chasers out.
I'm fine with the others being federated. Then again, I don't have a ton of skin in the game. I'll happily defer to folks that do.
Keep doing what we're doing. I don't think trying to reintegrate with groups that have shown their reactionary streaks in the past is a good idea, because I seriously doubt they've changed at all. And every time we've federated with a problematic instance for the lulz or whatever we've just ended up de-federating again like a month later after a ton of drama.
I also don't think it's good to federate with a site but ban their one problematic comm. Those issues will spill over, those users will still see our posts, and we'll see theirs in other comms.
We should do a yearly drama where evryone can just get it out if their systems. Fully federate for like a week, let chaos reign, then close our borders
Federate with the libs on blahblahzone. Do a little
Start some drama get some of them to say stupid shit. Use it as casus belli to discuss defederating again. Scrape a few of their users. Defederate.
Perform similar raids on other instances that we have not been federated with.
Lemm.ee is pretty alright. Aussie zone is too small to be offensive. Programing.dev I don't care about either way.
isn't blahaj zone the same one we defederated from previously for very good reasons??? I don't know enough about the other instances to have a strong opinion about their userbases. I would assume we're going to get mod harrasment no matter what if the modlog is deanonymized, so maybe we shouldn't put ourselves through the trouble.
Edit: changing my vote to
, no more half measures walter
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.
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.