The last few posts made here, they've shown up, made the most inane, idiotic, and pointless comments, upvoted each other in a frenzy of circle jerking, and generally made a pest of themselves.
They're a nuisance, and add nothing of value to the Lemmy experience.
Here's my view. Lemmy.nz is intended for an NZ audience. Hexbear has been defederated from 5 of the top 8 largest instances. This is problematic for us, as their All is much more likely to show lemmy.nz posts than All on other instances. It starts to feel like we're being brigaded, even though we aren't, because their instance is the 10th largest Lemmy instance and yet they don't see most Lemmy posts (but they do see ours).
I don't have a problem with international audiences occasionally posting in our posts, even people with no connection to NZ. I think it provides some great perspective on our issues. But when you post a thread, and it gets overrun with international users, I think this becomes a problem.
This may not seem fair on them, but what I want is a friendly-feeling community, and recently we have had a different vibe.
Personally, I have become less inclined to participate. I've written up a post about the Papakangahorohoro street, then decided not to post it because by the time I'd written my 150 word article the thread had such hexbear comments as "Get over it crakkkas" and "sounds like the crackers should go back to europe if they dont like it".
I want to participate in a friendly community, and the last couple of days I have felt like I didn't want to participate because of the hexbear participation - and the participation of others stemming from that. For that reason, and no other, I think we should defederate. However, I want to hear what others think. Some counter-arguments would be great.
Does lemmy not have a block user function where you won’t see their comments? I guess that doesn’t help when you want to wholesale block users from an instance.
I personally haven’t seen anything worth defederating over so far. In any case I usually just scroll past or don’t interact with comments that are inflammatory. However as you’re the admin it’s your call. My only reservation is that we don’t have many contributors as it is.
Also you should have posted your 150 word article anyway.
Not built into the platform, but some apps have it.
I'm glad you see the problem.