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
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.
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Yeah I really feel like the issue is a lack of tools
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.