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:
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What are your thoughts on the Fediverse, and how has your experience changed through federation?
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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.
Other instance users, if you comment on this thread, you will be banned from hexbear and your comment will be removed.
Yeah exactly, those are the vibes I think of when I think of hexbear pre-federation. The romanov thread isn't even that bad, and there's not really anyone being wrong in it. Just a lot of people misrepresenting/misinterpreting each others standpoints.
A lot of users on this site are very well read and have a solid foundation of their ideology, and they are used to reconsidering their stance and looking inwards. A lot of other users aren't.
There's a large subset of the userbase that, but for the grace of god, would have been libs. They are so convinced that they are on the right side, that any disagreement with them must mean the other user is a wrecker, a chud, a lib or something the like. When they experience disagreement they assume the worst and then dig their heels in, so they can get that sweet dunk dopamine. I think that's a result of our community having been insular for quite a while. We all know [ideology/current event/science], so theres no real reason to know it personally, because we can trust our comrades to do the work for us. With that base attitude self-crit doesn't occur, it's just something other people have to do.
vagueposting
I've been dogpiled a few times and every time was incredibly infuriating, because it was done by long-time users that chose the worst possible interpretation of what was communicated and refused to consider wether they themselves might just have been a tiny bit wrong or misunderstood something. It was dogpiling not for being wrong, but because they misunderstood something. :::
That culture leads to a lot of people carrying grudges, and then you stumble into it like an outsider and it's just weird and pointless.
The desire to dunk is definitely a defining characteristic of this community. I avoid struggle sessions but I still get into weird arguments, usually when I see someone saying they don't understand x conservative idea, so I try to explain it with the intention that we should understand our opponents. Then the person I'm trying to explain it to puffs up thinking they've got a chud and just keep trying to make me justify the belief I keep telling them I don't agree with.
imaginary blood in the water, us hexbear shorks can't resist