Hello Users of Hexbear I wanted to have a featured post discussing the next steps for federation. We have discussed this at length among the mod team, and it is pretty much evenly split between federating based on a "block-list" or federating based on an "allow-list". While the mod team slightly skewed in favor of federating using a block-list, meaning that any instance not specifically blocked will be able to link with hexbear.net, we will be starting with an allow-list.
What this means is that only instances specifically on our allow-list will be able to link with us, there are a few reasons for this. We wanted to slowly integrate into the fediverse to see what it would mean for hexbear.net's culture as well as how we fit into the wider fediverse. We also wanted to minimize the instances have not blocked threads, or does not block the reactionary/fash/pedo instances.
I was honestly suprised to discover that most lemmy instances block lemmygrad.ml but do not block the reactionary/pedo instances, sad.
Here is a tenative list of what our allow-list would look like: lemmy.world/instances , https://possumpat.io/instances , https://lemmy.ml/instances , https://sopuli.xyz/instances , https://discuss.tchncs.de/instances , https://lemmygrad.ml/instances , https://mander.xyz/instances , https://lemm.ee/instances , toots.matapocos.dog
a block-list would be massive and exhaustive to ensure that we do not federate with any pornographic, reactionary, fascist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, or csam-adjacent instances.
We will be creating a pinned post in c/hexbear where additional instances can be nominated for addition to the allow-list. https://hexbear.net/post/277506
Please see these previous posts by Nagarjuna regarding federation: https://hexbear.net/post/273407 and https://hexbear.net/post/273404
If you would like to officially put down your opinion on federation, please make a comment with 🧱 if you'd like to federate based on a block-list, a ✅ if you'd like to federate based on an allow-list, or a 🚫 if you do not with to federate at all, this is a temprature check and not a binding vote. Thank you and as usual off-topic comments will be removed.
Thank you for the feedback and apologies for the original emojis chosen, the final count is 58 🧱 111 ✅ 45 🚫, please correct me if that is wrong
If we don't federate, then Hexbear is nothing more than some shitty Reddit clone. We ought to do everything we can to de-Redditfy Hexbear, and federation represents a step towards de-Redditfication. If we don't federate Hexbear, we might as well just jettison Lemmy altogether and use an old-school php forum instead. Some random php forum has more functionality than Lemmy by virtue of being mature software, cutting down on the amount of time admins spend to maintain this website. We still can't even have sigs, instead having some half-assed bio instead. Plus, forum ettiquette and management are also decades old at this point where weird edge cases on how to manage a forum have long since been explored. For example, let's say there's a 300+ post thread about sailing where 200+ of them are devoted to arguing the ethics of hunting. Forum mods are able to create a new "Ethics of hunting" thread and move the 200+ posts from the sailboat thread to the newly created thread so you would have two threads, a sub-100 post thread about sailboats and a 200+ thread about ethics of hunting. Depending on how anger people get, the 200+ thread could be moved into a subforum where only old accounts can comment in order to cut down on day-old wrecker alts. Reddit was such a major step backwards in terms of features and functionality, and if we're not using the one major feature that forums don't have, then what's the point of using Lemmy?
And this is not getting into the part of using our time spend online agitating bystanders and shitting on libs and the fash, which I 100% agree with you.