Hello, users of Hexbear:

We wanted to come back and mention that the mod team has been reflecting and performing self-crit on some recent events.

First regarding federation:

Upon review, there are some aspects of federation we could have improved on and some that we feel worked well.

For now, we are satisfied with the current allow-list with one change, we will be adding programming.dev back to the allow-list in approx. 48 hours. You may check out the post discussing and voting on that instance here: https://hexbear.net/post/528899

Furthermore, there are a lot of great comments in the first Admin SPIL JICE post, which can be found here: https://hexbear.net/post/514276

With regard to that, we would like to say that:

There aren't any more lemmy instances out there to even federate with, all the instances over 150 we are either currently federated with, removed from our allow-list, or they block hexbear.net.

As far as I know, this same set of qualifiers also applies to smaller instances. After the addition of programming.dev I don't really know any other instances that would be anywhere remotely as impactful as our federation and subsequent defederation from lemmy.blahaj.zone or sh.itjust.works.

We recognize that we could have done a much better job communicating what instances are about and having a clearer process for discussion → voting → federation. We have taken on some of the comment's suggestions for this process, which I hope can be seen in the programming.dev post.

Specifically what the inter-instance admin communication process looks like, why the instance may be a good fit, and some notable communities there with the programming.dev post. In addition to spacing out not only requests for additions, but the duration of which users are allowed to discuss and vote.

We would like to state that we thought that front-loading the stress of federation rather than drip-feeding it was the best course of action when we initially started federation. The intent was to have a few stressful weeks but remove untenable instances, resulting in a stable allow-list as quick as possible.

This choice caused undue stress to our marginalized comrades, and for that I am very sorry.

With that being said, there are no plans to do any kind of second instance or "air-lock" instance

If another person wants to go through the effort of making an air-lock instance, we can federate, but the mod team does not have the desire or honestly have the bandwidth to admin/organize a 2nd hexbear so to speak

Looking to the future, here are some personal observations of what could occur, after the addition of user-side instance blocking

• I don't foresee lemmy.ca , SIJW , lemmy.blahaj , lemmy.world , feddit.de or beehaw.org removing hexbear from their blocklist anytime soon
• Maybe the situation with lemm.ee could change
• I don't see the situation with lemmygrad or lemmy.ml changing as those admins are all chill with us
• The rest of them are small hobby instances which really don't impact or create drama on our side

I also want to reiterate some points from our code of conduct in attempts at cultivating more good-faith discussion and to help our ND comrades.

"Please "remember the human" and be kind to your fellow leftists."

"Respect that people have differences of opinion and that every leftist has a place in our community."

"We are a platform that welcomes anyone who wants to be here in good faith"

How this looks in practice:

• Don't make excessively dry/hard to parse/reactionary bit accounts
• Don't label users as wreckers, instead use questions to better understand or block them
• Don't argue or assume bad-faith from other users, even if they are a young account (remember, people remake accounts often)
• Consider using tone indications when appropriate
• Don't use ableist language
• Please report posts/comments you find are against the code of conduct.

Finally, I want to remind users that they are able to curate their feed in their user settings, allowing a user to set their feed to All / Local / Subscribed.

All is content from all federated instances, Local is content from Hexbear.net only, and Subscribed is content from subscribed communities (on all instances federated) only.

In addition, you are able to block users, and report any unsolicited or harassing DMs.

Users are encouraged to provide additional feedback, thoughts, concerns, etc. on Hexbear as a site, federation, or moderation in this post.

Thank you for all helping to make this site unique and amazing!