The downside of that is that we're running the risk of splitting our userbase, and that this would particularly drain hexbear main instance of queer, racialized and neurodiverse comrades not feeling safe among all the liberal chauvinists. So hexbear would have an even stronger tendency to become a lot more straight, white and neurotypical, and i think that would be a massive loss.

And when you're on the den instance and set sorting to all, you do not get the den and "regular" hexbear, you get all of the lemmyverse. That's not how i would want my filter toggles to work. I hope it's ok when i just copy-paste some of my general musings i just sent to one of our beautiful mods here. It's from a private conversation, but it leaves out all the parts that are private, it's just my ideas that i would like to share here:

I don't know if making a seperate instance is the way forward, that would probably split the community and make a lot of vulnerable comrades leave entirely for the den, which would change site culture even more. That's absolutely a point worth considering. I know that full defederation is not an option the site as a whole would accept, either. And i get the usefulness of being federated for agitational and educational purposes, we can actually make an impact on the fediverse and spread our beliefs effectively, and while that should not lead to the dismissal of the concerns of users like me, i cannot dismiss the importance of that entirely, either. We can do more on lemmy than to just dunk on libs, i've seen on the old sub what our way to propagate leftism can do to radicalize people. That place turned me from a ContraPoints radlib into a Lenin reader. I want others to have the same experience. Many others. Doing stuff like that is the only way to save this world and we both know that .

So how do i synthesize these disparate feelings of my community's strong need for a safe space and our larger movement's need for agitation combined with the very real need to not do the average dumb baby leftist thing and split the party?

My take on this is that offering fully localized comms is the way forward. These should particularly include comms for LGBTQIA+ users, for PoC and other racialized groups, for our neurodiverse comrades and those living with disability, as these three groups are very obviously hit the hardest by the downsides of federation. But i also want a powerful trans meme sub that makes it to the front of All. Gotta keep those eggs cracking, y know? We need to watch out for our vulnerable members, but we need to spread the word and confront the libs with their unquestioned queerphobia, ableism and racist national chauvinism. Most importantly: We need to keep all of our users on one instance, but give them the option how far they want to stick their neck out of the safe space, and to adjust that easily whenever they want to. That means effective and low-effort ways to (omg please bear with me for the marketing talk) customize your user experience, which should not only include backend changes, but also fall into the realm of communicating the use of the site's features, such as making regular announcements how to permanently set your sorting to "local", which does a lot to de-reddify what the site feels like. Comrade Owl told me about this yesterday and setting my sorting to local has already changed so much, more people should be aware of that. I also think that strictly containing dunk threads is a necessity, and that moderation should watch out that these are CW'ed accordingly, i see a ton of screencaps with awfully transphobic or racist shit not NSFW'ed and labeled correctly.

There are some technical solutions that need to be taken, but this is also an issue of moderation policy and comucating with the users.