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

  • silent_water [she/her]
    ·
    8 months ago

    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.