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
I'm currently unsure if I agree on the block list stance but I absolutely agree that lemmy.world should be on the initial allow-list outlined in the post.
We should absolutely be challenging the largest liberal instance and not letting it devolve into reddit 2.0.
Without, bluntly, relentless bullying on reddit I never would have discovered r/cth which absolutely provided the space at the time that, along with experiencing deteriorating material conditions and my general interest in politics would never have pushed me further and further left.
I think it's possibly the most important instance (outside of something like beehaw which will never federate with us unfortunately) to have our users post in.
I also don't see federation lasting long with Lemmy.world, but I've been generally happy to see the general aversion towards capitalism on a lot of posts there so hopefully I'm wrong on that front.
I think it will work. Look at my response here to someone doing the "tankie" routine and look at the votes.
This is not reddit. We have a much larger advantage here without the far right and the astroturfing.
I've honestly had a good time on it so far. People engage reasonably well, I even got upvoted heavily on this post where I said I don't give a shit about the historic events between MLs and whatever I care about actually achieving shit, when someone was doing the "you're a tankie" routine. This gives me quite a lot of hope that we can in fact move these people if our rhetoric is good. Most of them are apolitical left leaning libs, and A LOT are tech mega-nerds, the early adopter crowd. The fact that they're tech meganerds actually makes them an easier target in my opinion, they are mature and willing to read large amounts of text, they enjoy high quality conversations, they have attention spans, these are all factors that make what we say effective with them. If our arguments are rational, intelligent and well put they like them. This contrasts heavily with reddit where it is massively astroturfed. We have a clean playground for once. It won't stay that way forever but we have the advantage here.