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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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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 they go with .ee they won't be able to come post. So, yeah...
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.
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.