Hey hexbears just want to update everyone.
We took the weekend to properly consider and are removing: programming.dev , aussie.zone , and lemm.ee from our allow-list.
We will look at refederation with lemm.ee after local-only communities are developed. When that feature is available we would really like to consider changing every hexbear community to local-only except for chapotraphouse, askchapo, news, and the_dunk_tank. The final say on if a community is local only or not is 100% up to the mod team on that community.
The reason for this is that lemm.ee despite having twice our monthly active users has a 700k annual comment rate to hexbear's 1 million, in addition lemm.ee has very little active communities that do not exist on hexbear.
Resulting in lemm.ee benefit of federation being votes and views, with a secondary benefit of comments.
However, as expressed by users belonging to marginalized groups, comments from .ee users are often lib-shit and in some cases outright hostile. While many on hexbear love dunking on these lost libs the duty to protect marginalized users is much more important.
The end vote for programming.dev and aussie.zone was a tie, so we decided to break the tie in favor of defederation. The decision on lemm.ee was much harder as the average user did express desire to remain federated however the admin team decided that a temporary removal from our allow-list was the best option.
As an admin team we have never wanted to prioritize growth, and we wanted to give federation with liberal instances a try, however we consider providing a safer browsing experience for marginalized users more important than the opportunity to dunk.
While user side instance blocking and local sort are options, neither address the issue of federated instance users coming into posts in hexbear communities to make reactionary comments.
Thank you everyone who gave input and please provide any feedback, comments, concerns, etc in comments.
final vote count:
federation
all 32
aussie.zone 27
lemm.ee 41
programming.dev 27
lemmy.blahaj.zone 5
defederation
all 40
aussie.zone 19
lemm.ee 4
programming.dev 19
lemmy.blahaj.zone 43
Silly hexbears, you won the popular vote, but forgot to factor in the Hextoral college! A classic blunder
Disappointing. I'd hoped the community here would not pointlessly isolate itself but that appears to be what it wants to do.
Gonna have to
and use something that's not defederated from everywhere.I also find the reasoning a bit flawed. We need user turnover and influx, not for growth, but in order to keep a stable environment. Without it, hexbear just becomes the same 20 bitter people arguing with each other ready to eviscerate each other over minor disagreements in the next pointless "struggle session". As what happened for years before federation. Federation has improved the signal to noise ratio in some ways.
Also with per instance and per community blocking in the latest versions of lemmy, I wonder how necessary this all this. Will users still see federated comments in hexbear posts, if they have blocked the instance?
Yeah, pre-federation Hexbear was noticeably worse compared to now. I really don't understand what people see in pre-federation Hexbear. I guess it was less openly bigoted, but seeing all those bullshit struggle sessions and people who you regard as your acquaintances arguing over the stupidest shit isn't exactly great for your mental health either.
Federation Hexbear was truly something else, and as we're heading towards post-federation Hexbear, I can't say I'm looking forward to it.
Multiple users legit left this site for months at a time multiple times due to those dumb struggle sessions. Hexbear even lost devs over some of them
Let me know what you find, a community with consistent negative growth and no path to positive growth isn't going to last forever, so it would be good to know where others end up as the slow and steady drip of users out of Hexbear continues.
There's always Lemmygrad of course, though it's not a leftist-unity platform and the general vibe is very different (more serious ig?)
But man we should at least stay federated with lemm.ee, that instance's admin has been very reasonable and it hasn't caused much trouble at all; nothing that banning any troublemakers can't fix.
I agree. The community agreed too if you look at the votes, but that's the way it goes. It's not a democracy and nobody is pretending it is.
Unfortunately I believe that Hexbear is a left unity platform in name only if there isn't anyone that Hexbear is trying to be unified with.
pointlessly isolate
however we consider providing a safer browsing experience for marginalized users more important than the opportunity to dunk.
As far as I'm concerned that's what moderation is adequate for, not the defed button. Without isolating itself Hexbear was already one of the best spaces online for marginalised people, particularly lgbt, period, I can't think of something comparatively better. Compromising the ability to spread leftist ideas to others in order to go above and beyond already being the best just isn't necessary, it's actively detrimental even.
Compromising the ability to spread leftist ideas to others in order to go above and beyond already being the best just isn't necessary, it's actively detrimental even.
By what metric? We're federated with other instances still. They aren't all far left. They're reading what we're saying and the message is still getting spread. Our ideals are spread through interacting with people offline too. Not being able to reach ee users doesn't make for the fall of hexbear.
Hexbear was already one of the best spaces online for marginalised people, particularly lgbt, period, I can't think of something comparatively better
When marginalized users are actively saying please make this compromise (not even fully defed), I don't think it should be such a difficult decision or be misconstrued as isolating. We're not isolated and that was never an option in the poll
doesn't make for the fall of hexbear.
I never said it was. I'm sure it will trundle along for years and years like most niche sites do. Something Awful still exists and hasn't "fallen", but existing is a different thing to having relevance or influence.
I think you really just value "influence" over marginalized comrades when you say stuff like this tbh
I don't really want to start a fight over this but I will say I firmly believe the western leftist martyrdom mindset is the preference to fail by striving to be "perfect" instead of succeeding with imperfections.
I don't really like the tone of the responses either, I've ignored it but they have consistently felt like you're implying I'm not part of the marginalised. "Marginalised comrades" applies as much to me as anyone.
No where have I said that you're not marginalized, but I am saying that in this case you dismiss anyone who requires more safeguards in the community than you do
Requires? I think that's the wrong language. They would prefer more safeguards, they don't require them as they use plenty of other sites without them.
The issue here is a site policy issue, by having no firm position on federation/defederation "Hexbear will not defederate except for X reasons", the door is open for it to be pushed upon by everyone, for any and every reason. If that door were closed we simply wouldn't be having this conversation, and those people would still be here, using the site as-is, because they already use it.
They would prefer more safeguards, they don't require them as they use plenty of other sites without them.
I absolutely don't. It really speaks for this place that i come here in spite of the userbase being mostly cis men, but the reason why it stays that way is decisions like this one.
The thing is, no matter how well moderated the site is (and I believe it already has exceptional mods), you can't stop some users from seeing the ridiculous fascist takes before they're taken down. There's a reason some users need to be banned instead of just selectively taking down their bad posts, the same principle applies to whole instances.
I don't think Hexbear has ever been the place to radicalize libs in, either. It's been a place for people who already had the right ideas to find likeminded people and get access to more resources, sure, but we've never really tried to be the first step in the pipeline. I don't see the problem with compromising our ability to reach libs if it means we're losing good comrades who don't wish to see the occasional fascist stroll in here.
Concerns that this is gonna lead to a gradual declination of the userbase are more well-placed, and hopefully we can figure out a way of attracting the right kinds of users to Hexbear. But I really don't see why it's of any use to attract people that have no interest in picking up a book or even watch a video longer than 4 minutes. I realize that we have some comrades here that we brought over from .ee, sure, but the juice ain't worth the squeeze IMHO.
It hurts the communities for marginalised people too whether they realise it or not. Where do they think new users come from? They don't spontaneously appear from thin air they appear because other people are exposed to them in other spaces.
Before reddit existed on the internet there was an entire wealth of private forums for lgbt people (and every other niche hobby or topic you can think of). All of these forums were significantly better than reddit in terms of safety for lgbt people. Being safer and better spaces didn't stop reddit slowly devouring their userbases until they all closed down though, which reddit did by being an everything-in-one-place site of convenience because people didn't really wanna logout and login to 100 different private forums and wanted the convenience of an algorithmic homepage that could highlight when some of their rarely visited communities had something worth seeing, because manually visiting all of them would be a pain.
Also like, being federated gives LGBT people on other platforms exposure to and access to this platform, which spreads awareness of this community existing for them in the first place.
Man, I don't even fucking want to but I've done jack shit online for months maybe even over a year except post here and unlike in the past when it felt like my online activity actually did something I feel like it's not now.
These spaces are theatres of operations (lemmy, reddit, tiktok, twitter, etc) and even though I despise most of them they're spaces communists need to be creating more of us in. With Lemmy, it was about building something that was going to eventually create its own theatre-of-operations that disrupted existing ones, and hexbear was going to be connected to that so I could always justify it.
I mean. It stems from what cth was originally for people, which was really a base of operations in the theatre of reddit. And then people that came over sorta expected that here and sorta morphed into a clubhouse. Which is fine for people that just want an entertainment space for escapism among socialists but I feel increasingly unproductive with no sign of being productive in future. I will still poke Hakim pretty soon and see if he wants to do an ama though, I wanted to around christmas but then awkward questions might have happened surrounding Israel. We've settled on most of the issues though.
Were you leaning towards just plain lemmy.ml for your account instance or somewhere else? Only reason I don't say lemmygrad is for wider leftist appeal (nothing against Lemmygrad y'all are great)
Lemmy.ml or lemm.ee, maybe? The latter due to reliability of lemmy.ml being low and my private chats with the owner way back being pretty okay compared to most libs. Or just creating the one I've had in my head for years. I don't dislike the grad folks either but just prefer a space that isn't sectarian. It will probably take me a week to make my mind up tbh.
Lemm.ee is better imo if you want as little people to immediately write you off as possible. Lemmy.ml, despite being the flagship Lemmy instance, is too associated with the "tankie" devs.
And it sucks to see you (mostly) go, but it is what it is. Just stop by the news megathread every once in a while.
Oh and if you find a newer instance that's cool, give me a head's up. I don't think it's wise at all to be invested in a Lemmy instance that's against federation. Like, what's the point then? You might as well just turn Hexbear into an old-school forum. God knows we're still missing shit that has been available in forums for decades.
If you wanna get a stark picture, make your outside account with a different name and pfp and post here.
There’s a significantly different standard applied to outside accounts.
Not making a judgement about it right or wrong, but it exists.
There’s a significantly different standard applied to outside accounts.
This is absolutely true and it's been an issue since the beginning of hexbear before federation, after moving off of Reddit. New accounts get treated with extreme suspicion. The only reason I didn't get banned on the spot back when hexbear was Chapo chat and first went online, was because one of the admins decided to give me a second chance after getting banned on some other lifeboat server.
Admins made a call and you should stand by it. There's not a solution that will make everyone happy because there is no agreement about what the site is or should be. Those who want it to be a safe space are not going to agree with the people who want a platform for radicalization and dunking.
Personally, I was fine with lem.ee federation, but I don't want it at the expense of my marginalized comrades if that's the choice at hand. But again, if that's the consideration at hand, I wish we had better mechanisms for measuring popular sentiment. @AcidSmiley@hexbear.net brought up a lot of valid concerns, but is she speaking on behalf of a much larger group or just for herself? I find it hard to say.
I guess all this is to say, I'm fine with the decision, but I don't think we should be making decisions that affect everyone's experience here in such an ad hoc way. Whether it's one Hexbear one vote, full dictatorship of the mods, or some third thing the criteria for decision making should be clearer and better structured.
Well, i definitely wasn't speaking for the majority. Maybe i wasn't even speaking for a majority of the trans people on here, i frankly don't care about that tbh. My views on transness are driven by what i need to not only survive, but to thrive and be happy and that is very different from how we are commonly supposed to be and allowed to feel, because the ways we are supposed to be and allowed to feel are part of controlling us and exterminating as many of us as possible without the liberals noticing. I refuse to walk into that trap. And if that means that i live my life as a tripple gay nonbinary transfem bog witch kinkster headed deeply into her queer villain arc, so be it. It's honestly kinda fun when i'm not bothered by all the straight people out there and the little pissbabies who want to be like them.
Anyway, speaking on behalf of a large group would be the very opposite of what i'm on this world for. Basic facts of my day to day life put me permanently at odds with democracy-as-majority-rule. Slightly less so with democracy-as-finding-consensus, or democracy-as-doing-right-by-as-many-people-as-possible, but let me be perfectly clear here: When you're one of the weirder subsets of a minority that is roundabout 1% of the population and that 1% isn't the 1% hoarding all the wealth, democracy means you're fucked.
I've learned that the hard way over and over again during the last 3 years when i was rapidly yanked out of experiecing the world as a white imperial core
leftistfucking nerd who at least mostly passed for a straight-ishmanvery old boy and was thrown into experiencing the world from the perspective of a political football seeing increasingly heavy use. Having hope for liberals taking political action to improve my living conditions is always a disappointment and a deeply sobering experience. It leads to the painful realization that even the part of our institutions that is not openly arguing for my opression is a spectrum that looks exactly like this:
So yeah, i'll be honest here, i'm glad that the survery results were not taken as a binding vote. What @CARCOSA@hexbear.net has posted itt has shown me once more that the mods of hexbear are people i can actually count on, and some of the reactions here, including yours, my cherished French guy talking about prison a lot, have shown me that there are still many people on this site who deeply deserve my affection and respect. The overall discussion has also shown me that a sizeable number of hexbear users are contrarian, irony-poisoned, uncaring LARPers who are liberal in the most violent ways and who will continue trying to push the site in a direction that aligns with their relative privilege, whether it's as white cis dudes or as marginalized people who have in some way managed to at least grown numb and callous enough to not feel like an open wound after walking into conversations happening within dominant society. I get that this is a survival skill, i'm not judging people for learning to not give a fuck, but i'm not like that, i am a complicated, emotional mess as people tend to be when they go through puberty again in their 40s, but given that i've been hormonally incapable of feeling the way i need to feel for most of my life, i am not willing to give that up even if it hurts me. I'm sorry when it hurts people around me, and that has happened way too much in my recent post history, partially because this entire shitshow of a struggle session coincided with a bit of a rough patch happening in my life, but that's how it is now. It doesn't excuse me being an ass, but i hope it explains it, especially to those who got caught in the crossfire without deserving any of it, like my dear comrade @Nakoichi@hexbear.net.
This still sounds angrier and as more of a doomer post than it's supposed to be, but i already had to rewrite the entire thing because i misclicked once after finishing it for the first time. Honestly, i'm fine rn, there's beautiful and precious things happening in my life and if i wasn't still glowing from them, i wouldn't have risked logging into this account after going on a verabl abuse spree a few days earlier and wouldn't even have seen that you pinged me. I don't really know where i'm headed on this site except that i'll not be publicly active under this account for opsec reasons, i've just shared a lot since i've come here and even when you're careful that's risky when reactionaries want to gut you. But i may be checking my inbox once in a while just in case.
tl;dr: Democracy is a fuck and if you want to run a site full of all kinds of marginalized people by majority vote, you are still full of liberal brain poison and need to do some fucking self crit.
I think it's time to
now. Please stay safe out there, comrades. But make sure to actually go out there. Make sure to tell the ones you care about how you feel for them. Make sure to remember that a better world is possible.
I hope you'll be around comrade, even if it's under another alias. All the people who have annoyed me here over the years are all gone now, and you may yet have the same pleasure.
Puberty sucks I kinda just zoned out till I got my pair of big tits
Being a teenager again when you aren't a teenager is also a weird feeling. Being trans is tough y'all even without dealing with bigotry, take naps regularly
(unironically, helps with puberty issues and also resets your mood when having a bad day)Your perspective on the federation issue was very enlightening and I appreciate how much passion you have for this place and what it means for marginalized people. I hope you stick around whether its on this account or another one, you're a wonderful valued comrade and I appreciate you
Separate from the issue of federation (where your perspective is fair enough), I'm genuinely appalled at people so roundly supporting the anti-democratic horseshit. Aren't the people on this website supposed to be fucking socialists? Do they have no concept of class consciousness? They are just completely ideologically incoherent if they think this shit flies.
We love our authoritarian tankie mods. Make the decisions you want to make, I trust your judgement.
To indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one's suggestions to the organization. To say nothing to people to their faces but to gossip behind their backs, or to say nothing at a meeting but to gossip afterwards. To show no regard at all for the principles of collective life but to follow one's own inclination. This is a second type.
~
It's been made pretty open and safe to contribute to the federation discussion, I don't understand why folks would feel the need to not participate in the thread and instead through backchannels. If that many folks didn't feel comfortable with lemmy.ee federation they should've
dI value both your perspective, commitment to ensuring a safe space for marginalized comrades, and work put into this project. I understand and empathize with your position as I can't imagine it's easy and you and the rest of the team have demonstrated a desire to protect our marginalized comrades; but I don't think it's impossible for Hexbear to be able to act as both outreach and a safe space. I value my own safety from fascists and absurd bigots, but I don't think mass defederation from cooperative lib instances is the way to do it.
Has the team considered conducting a study on marginalized populations on Hexbear to try and evaluate if defederation is really wanted from the marginalized groups on Hexbear? It seems like a lot of folks aren't arguing on the importance of keeping folks safe, but instead on how many want that specific tactic to be used. Perhaps if we take a survey of the real lived experiences of those who we're focusing on we'd have concrete evidence to point to for admin decisions atleast.
If anybody on the team is willing to get a cryptpad account or is trusted to host cryptpad then a cryptpad form may be a solid option. I'm already in the /c/traa matrix, if y'all'd need help setting this up or want another resource to work on this I'd be happy to help.
it was probably not a mistake. I liked stumbling across dogshit .ee takes but it probably was unhealthy for me I usually ended up wishing violence upon them, and that's for a slophog like me, can't imagine its good for normal people either
Basically, it turns out a DM vote is worth more than a comment vote. That's what it boils down to. There's no point in tabulating the votes if the admins aren't going to honor them anyways. They might as well just have a discussion thread and make their decision based on the vibes of the thread. It would've saved them the trouble of keeping track of votes and be more honest.
I don't think it is coincidence that the pro federation users didn't go to the effort of dming the mods. Like you might prefer federation but not being federated is unlikely to make the site inaccessible to you because of a lack of shitlibs posting reactionary comments.
I slightly lean toward federation but overall don't care that much. My vote should be weighted less accordingly.
I don't think there's anything dishonest in running a poll then deciding based on new information not to do as the poll suggests, when you clearly explain your reasons and have a dialogue about them like we're doing now.
Glad to see people acknowledging the power of the trans posting vanguard
It was never a vote. It was a gauge of opinions. The
opinions just didn't have as solid a argument behind them. If we really do want to go a dunking we can make accounts on other instances. The people harmed by federation dont have that option.do you see how "I want to dunk on libs" and "federation makes me feel unsafe on this website" aren't equal positions that require the same consideration? even anarchists don't go this far.
No, it has nothing to do with dunking on libs for its own sake, but on sustaining this website. In simplified terms, people come for/from the dunking and stay for the safe space. By defederating from the last major "normie" instance (lemmygrad is also cut off, lemmy.ml already has a reputation for being "tankie," and every other instance is too small), it cuts off a source of newcomers.
This does not bode well for the future of this site. Unlike most people, I saw pre-federation Hexbear as slowly circling down the drain with members cannibalizing each other over pointless struggle sessions. As someone who only occasionally lurked in the original subreddit, I still do not and perhaps never will understand what people saw in pre-federation Hexbear. Hot take, but the vibes back then completely sucked, full of awkward passive aggressive energy that erupted when people started getting personal over treats. Frankly, pre-federation Hexbear didn't have a future.
Federation introduced some needed life to the site even if the vast majority of Ledditors are complete shitheads. As we embark on post-federation Hexbear, I think Hexbear is going to resume circling down the drain with members once again cannibalizing each other over pointless struggle sessions. Non-federation outreach didn't do jack shit during pre-federation Hexbear, so I do not have confidence that non-federation outreach will be somehow different in post-federation Hexbear.
Awoo's comment is going to be prophetic if the admins actually defed for real.
people come for/from the dunking and stay for the safe space
Respectfully, this is may or may not be true but ultimately it is a supposition. For myself and many others, the dunking is alright but not in the least why I am here.
Yeah I feel like this is mostly an issue of tooling. There is some desire of mine that wants this platform to be more open so we can get the word out to more trans people, and the other desire is to form an anti transphobia task force that hunts down every transphobe and forces them to drink their own pee. This is mutually exclusive due to bad tooling
Disappointed with decision to defederate from lemme.ee. Obviously the userbase broadly didn't want to and I felt we had been in a very good balance with them for a long time. It's really not about dunking, it's just about a broader pool of users and communities to interact with.
1/10 times a comment from an ee user would be a lukewarm decent comment, the other 9 times it was
in my personal experience
This is almost definitely good for the short term health of Hexbear but almost definitely bad for the long term health of Hexbear. The only way to remove all possibility of someone stumbling onto a reactionary post is to disallow posting. This feels a step too far honestly.
Curious what you think the short-term advantage is of defedding these 3? I never saw programming.dev or aussie.zone users in our threads really (browsing by hot or new so maybe I miss the Active shitfights), and only a few .ee users, mostly converts not shit-stirrers.
And I could be wrong, maybe there is a silent faction that feel the same, but I count a grand total of 2 users making this safety argument. I don't think its a viable way forward, and I wish I could find this great piece of writing I read on the subject because I think it would really advance the discourse here
Short term advantage is that we have a few less reactionary posts every day. That's a good thing, we should always be trying to decrease the number of harmful and/or reactionary posts. If you do look at the modlog there's usually 1-5 posts a day removed from ee, dev, or aussie users. So I understand the desire to keep them out.
Long term disadvantage is a slow and steady decline in the user base. If there's no clear path to growing the site, every time someone decides to leave, they're not getting replaced. That leads to a decrease in overall engagement, which leads to more people deciding to leave, and the circle of life ends with that. No room for reactionary posting if nobody posts at all
I see a total of two users banned, one temporary, in the past like 4-5 days, both ee users, none in the past 2d, but I guess the general point still stands. But I feel defedding is a very blunt instrument. If they're getting moderated, I think we've mitigated a large portion of the potential harm already, and the scale of the problem is pretty small. Not worth isolating us from a large userbase instance over
100% agreed on the long term outlook. federation is our best chance at keeping the user churn to at least net zero if not positive
Based on the change being made here to defederate from some of the worst offenders the decision to switch to local only may not be necessary, and may instead just reduce interoperability between Hexbear and lemmygrad. I've really come to enjoy having our comrades from the 'Grad on Hexbear and I think it would be a disappointment to lose them throughout our communities.
Absolutely, Lemmy as a platform needs some more robust moderation tools.
Putting posts into "purgatory" so you can request a user fix them would be nice. We really need the ability for community mods to flag users and posts to be sent to site admins for things like sitewide bans(could also put their posts into purgatory so they can be reviewed by the admins as part of their decision without them being freely visible on the site)
I think that federation increases the scope and workload of moderation a lot in ways that weren't expected prior to it existing, and Lemmy's nature as a federated system is clashing with its nature as a not-yet-mature platform, and both the lack of moderation tools and lack of granularity of those tools aren't helping.
Honestly I think it'd be cool to have an option between "all federated instances" and "local only". Call them friend instances or neighborhood instances or something.
Damn, this sucks ngl. Astonishing to me that there's still so much "defed all" bitterness. This place is much better when it's not a completely isolated island
Some people don't enjoy transphobic harassment, but you do yo
I've said as much in other places but as with other complaints, like the site culture being "ruined" post-federation, etc: I just don't see it. I don't see it happening in our threads, I don't feel the site is majorly negatively impacted at all.
I've scoured the modlogs, I see a grand total of 1 account from .ee banned for transphobia in the past 2 months. 1 temp ban from traa due to a cryptic comment over the same period. Are there accounts doing this and going un-banned by our mods, or is this not a real problem of any reasonable scale? Or is 1 straggler every couple months simply untenable and too many? Because we see more wrecker accounts simply made directly here on-site than that...
On top of that, when no one noticed us the signal to noise ratio was considerably higher. You were more likely to be taken in good faith when people weren't sure. Not saying that was an overall good but hey, one website doesn't necessarily have to do everything either.
That’s heavily debatable lol. Most of the nastiest moments on the site were pre-federation.
Completely disagree, federation ruined the vibes of the site
in what way? I browse Local by New/sometimes Hot and literally nothing has changed from my perspective
Maybe Active threads have more off-site posters in them?
There was an anti-ableist anti-bodyshaming push that seems to have been abandoned or stalled since federation. "lesser" ableist terms I mean. I love and respect them, but blame lemmygrad's slightly more abrasive culture mixing with our own. No, I can't point to any particular data beyond my own anecdote.
*note, i said "Push" indicating *movement *not saying that hexbear ever had a particular issue with either from the start aside from the occasional reactionary breakdown by a user. 1 month pre-fed if you called someone an ableist term you would have had your comment removed, even if it was directed at a chud.
This resulted in a higher signal/noise and a more chill atmosphere generally.
None of this is a totalizing statement and makes no assertions beyond the scope of site culture pre and post fed. See bio for more info.
Hmm, also nothing to back it up but vibes-wise you might be right, though I hadn't noticed until you pointed it out. I'd be 100% fine with a return to that level of moderation, I don't think we really benefit from people getting made fun of for their looks or anything. I don't have super strong feelings about it but it might be a good push to start back up. I think if anything the difference is probably coming from changes in reporting behavior, I don't think the mod team's changed a lot since federation
Things are pretty much the same right now vibes-wise as they were pre-federation honestly. There were issues in the middle of course, as needed defederations were found, but like, right now, it’s about how it was again.
I'd suggest that you factor in that site vibes (going back to the old sub too) correlate with the news cycle as well. If there aren't major global events unfolding to drive discussion, it gets pretty dry and stale till some place enters "the cool zone".
Federation certainly has had an effect, but I don't think that you can pin all the site issues on that alone is all.
I mildly agree with the decision to hold off until we have LOCs, but yeah the bitterness is lame. I wish we could actually put in the effort to do propaganda but people would rather dunk without any pushback instead.
it's not "holding off" though, we already did the federation and that status quo didn't seem particularly untenable to me...
They are going to refederate after LOCs are implemented, is what I meant.
just make a lemmmmeeeeee account and "do propaganda" on that if you care so much lmao
This is the kind of uncomradely, snarky energy that I'm referring to tbh.
I would say it's more "uncomradely" to willingly put your comrades in the way of harassment. But I know dunking is more important than that.
My whole point is that I don't like the "dunking", so it's obvious you're not really here for a conversation.
I also said in my comment that I "mildly agree" with the decision to defederate in the short term. The source of my agreement on that topic is primarily driven by other users' experience with harassment.
I didn’t want to stay federated because of dunking. You’re being a bit reductive.
not my intention, just earnestly surprised it is so common because it doesn't align with my experience using the site at all
I'd say that removing lemm.ee is bad for the site because it makes us so much more insular when we lose the possibility of gaining users from a large generalist instance, and we have a tendency to not effortpost or actually read sources as much when there doesn't a exist a population of clueless wandering libs to explain stuff too, but honestly it doesn't matter.
There's been a few times over the past month or two where I hadn't seen lemm.ee posters in so long that I thought we already defedded them. So many of them have been banned that remaining federated with them no longer really makes sense, there's a fundamental incompatibility. My thinking was that it might be worth it to give them a little leeway if their admin would promise to enforce some of our rules against obvious reactionaries on their own site, but I doubt they would even if asked, and in that case we can't really revisit this until everyone on Hexbear has the ability to choose whether or not to see these people.
I was at the point where i assumed that anyone from lemme.ee was about to start
and was pleasantly surprised any time a .ee poster wasn't.There was an issue with lemm.ee about a month ago where no federated activity was propagating for a few days. Comments posted to hexbear comms from .ee accounts seemed to just go into the Phantom Zone. I figure a lot of users during that time either made hexbear accounts (hi) or just fell off
I think users can already block instances, it was recently added to lemmy
Does that also block the users from that instance DMing you? It's my understanding that this was the biggest problem.
wow that's a crappy implementation ngl. I assumed it blocked all interaction. Imagine if blocking a user only hid their posts not comments or DMs
Probably shouldn't hold votes if you're not gonna honor them. It gives people an illusion of choice.
Maybe just do a sentiment-gathering post instead, since that's how you actually used the info.
It's all good I didn't even vote because I don't care that much aside from the dominant sentiment to not refederate with blahaj. Just wanted to point this out in case it helps this go smoother in the future. Doing running tallies of votes kind of gives the wrong impression that the exact numbers matter, for example.
This is kind of cliche but it's a good rule of thumb for explaining things: tell people what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell you what you told them. If there's an inconsistency there or a piece missing folks will get confused or unhappy. For example, someone could lead with, "we have concerns about lemme.ee from a safety perspective and are leaning towards defed if there is not an outcry of support for staying federated." Then there's no surprise! Same process, same outcome, and potential conflicts have been avoided.
Anyways, thanks for all the work you do!
I unironically love that the mods are putting the concerns of marginalized users over the votes of liberals wanting their dunk treats.
there's always a bajillion places on the internet you can go to for that kind of thing having hexbear be hexbear and being able to come here for a break after seeing a bunch of garbage on twitter and the rest is nice tbhNot only that, but if you want to shine the bright light of dialectical materialism on Lemmy libs, you can just make an account on a different instance and fire away. What purpose does it serve to expose everyone on Hexbear to the libs?
agreed. Especially when part of the unspoken dynamic preferred by the dunker contingent is implicitly asking for those of us who don’t need a dunking mainline to form the faceless mass that allows their dunks to weigh so heavily here on our turf
I am fine with the decision as it is. Dunkers can make new accounts on other instances where marginalized people cant make new safe spaces. But to mischaracterize anyone who voted for federation as "liberals wanting their dunk treats" is a fucking shitty take.
Most of the pro-fed comments I read in the poll thread were talking about wanting to do outreach to pull in proto leftists. But apparently agitation and outreach is for liberals. "True leftists" just talk with the same group until they have a split over whether cats should be allowed outside.
I spend almost all of my time in the Mega Mega, the News Mega, reading Tervell's Gunposts, owlposting, or making horrific memes, and I routinely forget that we're even federated with anyone, and go days or weeks at a time without seeing anyone except hexbears and lemmgrads and .mls
For most of our federation experiment federation has had no meaningful effect on my hexbearing experience, and it certainly hasn't had a positive experience. Even the dunking got boring only a week in to federation and I was one of the people gnashing my teeth at the promise of blood.
I didn't notice .ee was here and won't notice that it is gone.
the average user did express desire to remain federated however the admin team decided that a temporary removal from our allow-list was the best option
Being an average user is a skill issue
Three people hold a vote on which restaurant they will all eat at. Person one and two ever so slightly prefer thai, person three is deathly allergic to peanuts and shellfish and can't safely eat thai. The median vote is upheld and democracy prevails! Person three awkwardly goes home wondering what the fuck is wrong with their "friends"
Not saying for certain that this is the landscape but you cannot deny that it looks that it might be considering the evidence presented. Please consider the limitations of simple democracy, and the very open humble dialogue Carcosa is having with you before you start complaining without substance.
There is a question on the substance though, I'll paste what I put further down the thread:
I've scoured the modlogs, I see a grand total of 1 account from .ee banned for transphobia in the past 2 months. And 1 temp ban from traa due to a cryptic emoji-laden comment, over the same period. Are there accounts doing transphobic harassment and going un-banned by our mods, or is this just not a real problem of any reasonable scale? Or is 1 straggler every couple months simply untenable and too many? Because we see more wrecker accounts simply made directly here on-site than that by a long shot but we aren't shutting off registrations...
If this were a common issue I'd say yeah, the harm outweighs any possible benefit, but looking at the modlog that's not the picture I get
I'm cis so I'm going to leave that discussion to other comrades. This has substance and isn't the sort of comment I was referring to. This was directed at the sort of comment which implies that the decision was arbitrary when the reasoning was clearly stated.
Just a day before the vote, an .ee user got banned from one of our trans boards for a lenghty post where he boiled down a thoughtful, complex article about a trans masc person's difficult relation to masculinity to literally saying "not all men" and argued that feminists should stfu about pointing out male privilege. I can't say he was being outright transphobic, i reported him for his sexism apologia and that's what he got banned for, but it still hurts to see discussions in trans spaces being taken over by antifeminist dweebs who completely ignore anything trans related about the discussion and use it as a jumping off point for spreading mysogyny.
A day before that, we had another ban of an .ee user for a completely unhinged slava ukraini diatribe about hexbear doing Russian "ampliganda". Apparently this ampliganda thing is "propaganda" were you say things that are actually 100% true and correct, but you say them so often and so loudly that they disturb the state department narrative. This kind of western chauvinist redditor shit has always been extremely common with .ee, it's a large part of why the list of banned users from that instance is so long and we barely see engagement with them nowadays. Now you might say "see, we barely see engagement!", but that would be missing the point that engagement is so low because the site has such a widespread problem with violating our code of conduct.
I understand the decision to refed once we have local only comms, i get that my hardline "defed everybody" stance is not a position i can enforce here, and i think it's a viable compromise to redesign the community so we can maintain both outreach, dunking and safer spaces at the same time, but for now, i prioritize the safety of women and queers and the safety of my comrades affected by western imperialism and national chauvinism over dubious promises of short-term growth, and i'm glad moderators agree with that approach.
That's 100% shitty, and I did miss counting that one because it was a site ban and didn't list transphobia in the reason, but one user showing up an being shitty like once a month, maybe twice, isn't very many... Like I said before we get more wreckers signing up for local hexbear accounts than that most months by far.
The slava ukraini types again also suck, and its not like I value their input, but I don't think they're particularly harmful in small amounts... The value is about how we respond to them, and what other users from their instance see when we do (their boneheaded thought-terminating cliches getting both mocked and dismantled.) I don't see them as very harmful primarily because they're coming into our space where we have all the power to bully or insta-ban them, but as I'll expand on below, I do also believe we should have comms that are safe spaces away from them too
I'm definitely in favor of local-only comms (though it really depends how it's implemented). I don't particularly want like, the majority of the site to be local-only. A middle-ground where outside instances can view the comm but not post without a hexbear acct would be great for certain comms, and obviously some should be local-only safe spaces.
But something like !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net presents a dilemma where, ostensibly it's just memes and comradery and stuff, and that (IMO) should be open to other instances because those instances have trans people (maybe once every week or two we see one from .ee alone, and the fediverse as a whole has many more) and they'll probably not be very interested in our community if all the trans content is hidden away behind a registration questionaire and login screen, but we can't let them in on that comm without, once in a while, having some shitlord like the one you mention... Maybe that would be a good case for a view-only local comm, but idk.
Given that this defed is temporary, and there is a bigger contingent that wants it than I ever expected, I'm fine with it, but I worry that safety concerns along similar lines (especially the slava ukraini types, I really don't think they are a safety issue in the same way, they're just doodoohead liberals) could end up killing the community here outright in the long run via user attrition and infighting and such, and I think that new people making accounts here and/or posting from other instances are more positive than they are negative. Yes, most of the ones we'd want to keep around will make an account here eventually, but 95% of them would just never be exposed to us if we were defedded.
Yeah, i see that !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net is reaching a lot of people and i fully agree that this presents a dilemma because i think it's a good and valuable thing both that trans people from other instances, especially eggs that need a cracking, get to see us and that we confront cis people with actual trans points of view. Making cis people listen in on us authentically talking about our own experience among ourselves instead of being talked about is an important part of normalizing queerness, i absolutely see the value in that. I think that under agitation and community building perspectives, it may be a good thing when that comm remains public-facing, but that's something trans comrades should decide on their own. Going local-only or not should be a decision the comms make for themselves. If that doesn't leave a public-facing trans comm, that means we should consider other options, whether it's a new comm for that purpose or crossposting to relevant fully open comms.
Once the feature actually exists and gets used it will be a lot easier to draw that distinction and have it be understood by the whole userbase too
But something like !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net presents a dilemma where, ostensibly it's just memes and comradery and stuff, and that (IMO) should be open to other instances because those instances have trans people
fwiw, the traa mod team is talking about ways to square this circle - mainly by building automod-like tools to help us by automatically remove comments from instances not on an internal whitelist while flagging the comment for restoration after manual review. that way we can keep the comm open to the wider fediverse, allow the instance to federate more openly without threatening our userbase, while still allowing us to approve users once we're reasonably certain they're trans. it remains to be seen if this is possible but we're going to give it a shot and hopefully it's a happy compromise for everyone, if it works out. this approach also means we don't have to wait on the lemmy dev cycle / put more work on our own very thinly stretched dev team. this may also be valuable to the other comms for marginalized comrades.
generally, I think we can do a lot better than we currently are, if we develop better mod tooling.
Three people hold a vote on which restaurant they will all eat at. Person one and two ever so slightly prefer thai, person three is deathly allergic to peanuts and shellfish and can't safely eat thai. The median vote is upheld and democracy prevails! Person three awkwardly goes home wondering what the fuck is wrong with their "friends"
Except we have cases of multiple people thinking about either quitting or cutting down time spend on this site because of this decision, so your analogy doesn't hold. This is more like person one having a strong preference for Thai, person two having a weak preference for Thai, and person three being deadly allergic to peanuts. Person two doesn't matter, so it's a question of whether you want to keep person one or person three with one person lukewarmly supporting person one. It makes the most sense to go to the Thai restaurant while giving person three a head's up that person one and person two are going to the Thai restaurant.
Like I said in a previous comment, if the admins had another thread asking whether Hexbear should defed from lemm.ee, I bet a supermajority would want continued federation. If the pro-federation crowd truly didn't have a preference, this 200+ comment thread wouldn't have blown up, now would it?
Lol, two ties would have been broken.
The first and last time “Just Vote” would have actually mattered on an individual level.
Honest to god, I was going to vote and lazily decided not to because in every previous vote pro-federation had won by a wide margin. I hadn't seen any federation drama in months so I thought things were going well enough that this was just a periodic check in.
Don't think it would have mattered much, the votes for Lemme eee were 73-44 for staying federated, and we're still defederating temporarily. The admins would have just applied the same reasoning they used there for all other instances.
Yeah, I have a lot of concerns about local only when it comes since lemmygrad comrades add a lot to the site. .ee was mostly just dunk tank fuel.
but nah we're just "bitter"
