Hello users of hexbear the mod team wanted to make this post as the past couple weeks of federation have been quite eventful.

First off, I want to apologize to any hardship, stress, discomfort, alienation, or any negativity users have experienced as a result of federation. I want to especially extend apologies to marginalized comrades and those that have voiced their disapproval, disagreement, or concern about federation.

Second, in every vote based discussion we have had on federation, the votes for federation and votes for federation with large instances have trended to be near-overwhelming majorities. In the spirit of operating the site in accordance with the desires of most users, we have gone with these decisions.

Third, I want to remind everyone that you are able to set your default feed in your user settings. This is an important tool, as setting your feed to Local prevents posts from federated instances from showing on your feed. You may further curate your feed by setting it to Subscribed, and ensuring that you are only subscribed to communities you wish to see posts from. The Subscribed feed allows you to for example unsubscribe from the_dunk_tank while subscribing to all the other hexbear communities, preventing you from seeing federated instance posts as well as the_dunk_tank posts mentioning other federated instances.

We are now federated with two instances with more than 200 daily active users:

lemmy.ml

lemm.ee

Forth, I wish to remind everyone that there is a pinned post in the hexbear community that allows users to nominate a federated instance for defederation, it can be found here: https://hexbear.net/post/277518

In closing, we would like to state that this post is also a space for Hexbear users to comment on how federation has been for them.

As we are in one of those weeks when decades happen on this site, your feedback is crucial to us in deciding the direction of this forum. As such, we ask of you two questions:

  1. What are your thoughts on the Fediverse, and how has your experience changed through federation?

  2. What would you like to be done going forward, in an ideal situation?

Once this feedback is collected, we will sift through the answers to find the most popular measures advocated for, as well as the overtones of the experiences submitted, and plan what is to be done accordingly.

07

Other instance users, if you comment on this thread, you will be banned from hexbear and your comment will be removed.

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    We kind of need some kind of federation, the last few months before federation and getting onto the upstream Lemmy codebase were dire. So many pointless internal arguments, people nipping at each other for no reason, and activity wasn't great. Every time a long term user hit the logout-lemmy button, it was like a fifth of the website died. Federation has bred some much needed life into hexbear.

    Federating with shit just works in hindsight was a mistake, I honestly thought it was just one racist nutjob on the "meanwhile on the grad" community, I didn't expect half their instance to defend the racism of photoshopping a Chinese man's skin yellow. Had I known that would happen, I'd never vote for federating with them

    As for future federation, we should probably communicate with the other instances admin team first before federating.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      We kind of need some kind of federation, the last few months before federation and getting onto the upstream Lemmy codebase were dire. So many pointless internal arguments, people nipping at each other for no reason, and activity wasn't great. Every time a long term user hit the button, it was like a fifth of the website died. Federation has bred some much needed life into hexbear.

      This is my opinion as well. Prefederation era Hexbear sucked for various reasons that you've outlined. People were all low-key resentful with one another. It had the same energy as an ex-couple forced to work on a school project or forced to be coworkers. I remember so much cringey vagueposting because mods would delete any comment that mentioned people's usernames as "meta," so you had people vagueposting and letting that resentment stew. It was just awkward in general. Federation injected fresh blood and provided a pressure valve for that pent-up resentment to be blown on some hapless Ledditor.

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah in the lead up to federation we had the bidet struggle session, rock stacking discourse, people saying hunger is not real, bringing back years old arguments just for the purpose of stirring the pot (outdoor cats, sex work and veganism are the three I can remember right now), and every second thread just turned into people moaning about how alienated and lonely they are, while yapping and vague posting nasty stuff towards other users.