I am not sure where to post this - most of us on this instance probably use it as a “general-purpose” one to launch ourselves into the wider Fediverse, with only a few communities being here locally. @jgrim@discuss.online @lazyguru@discuss.online
I would like for Discuss.Online to defederate from the troll instance hexbear.net, to protect new users (who don’t understand how communities work, local and remote) from being exposed to their toxicity and therefore drive people away from the Fediverse. I personally made the mistake of responding to a comment in a post in !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net and continued to receive messages from them - each one triggering my Notifications - for WEEKS afterwards (and then did the same for lemmygrad.ml as well, though iirc at least one and probably both of these occurrences likely was from my prior instance StarTrek.Website, which I moved from to here b/c of Discuss.Online’s much better admin practices e.g. significantly higher uptime). I almost quit the Fediverse entirely after those incidents, though thankfully I recalled how Kbin used to be better, less toxic I mean, than Lemmy, and pushed through to figure out how to block things, especially instances (which sadly does absolutely nothing to stop this effect, when in communities not actually located on those instances, since the “instance block” is more of a “community mute”). Though I am by no means the only one that this has happened to - it seems to continually occur for each new user that joins here, almost like a rite of passage to learn which instances need to be avoided, and yet we don’t even know how many users this is turning away from us.
Such instances and hexbear.net in particular either cannot or will not control their users, and in fact there is evidence that the admins themselves have lied to other instance admins, at which point any further communication to them is already known to be in bad faith (admittedly, the other possibility is that the admins lied to their own userbase - although is that really much better?). You can read all about this particular incident in e.g. https://discuss.online/post/13387124 (and others e.g. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6205969), although it is only the latest in a long string of such occurrences. Another good read is https://discuss.online/post/434998, which cites several examples that caused the admins of Lemmy.World to defederate from hexbear.net (much of the content has since been deleted, either by mods or by the OP, but it should be visible somewhere e.g. the modlog?). Many of the largest instances across the Fediverse have eventually already defederated from this instance - e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/post/4279462 and https://lemmy.ca/post/3326347 and https://feddit.org/post/41472 (I don’t understand German so that’s the best example I could find there).
Personally I want very badly to defederate from users on lemmy.ml for similar reasons, and also the admins there likewise are not transparent with their policies of saying one thing while doing another, in particular site-wide banning people for comments that they did not know were taboo, b/c it says so nowhere that people know how to read what topics are prohibited (e.g. in the sidebar it just says “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”, and there is a link to “What is Lemmy.ml”, which is just a broken link). That one I understand may be more problematic to defederate from although I think there is a strong case to be made for it. Fwiw, it was recently discussed in https://discuss.online/post/13727946 including that incident where a mod told a user that they (the mod) wanted to kill them (the OP) (sadly, I am not anywhere close to joking or exaggerating - read it for yourself e.g. at https://hexbear.net/post/3706906/5518427 where even the unremoved comments from the mod doubles down with “nono I don’t want to shoot for pointing that it’s a game, I want to shoot you because…”, and then later tripled down still further, e.g. stating “I hope you die soon.”). To be clear, the incident occurred on hexbear.net, but the mod is from lemmy.ml - those instances are often intertwined, along with lemmygrad.ml.
But regardless of what happens with lemmy.ml, the case for defederation from hexbear.net seems much more clear and straightforward - and really, why not?
Tangentially, @Blaze@feddit.org does great work in enticing mainstream Redditors to come to Lemmy, and is looking for an instance to recommend that new users to come to, though the current federation with hexbear.net is a dealbreaker. I don’t know if you would even want to see a large influx of new more mainstream users from there, and to be clear I think that Discuss.Online should defederate from hexbear.net (and possibly lemmy.ml) either way, but I wanted to point out how defederation is not necessarily a bad thing i.e. in terms of decreasing available content, as doing so would open up new possibilities to be more welcoming to an audience that gets turned away by such toxicity and political extremism as is constantly flooding over here from those sources, i.e. increasing content overall.
Discuss.Online is such a welcoming instance, I feel, and you are doing a fantastic job of being admins, e.g. as evidenced by the uptime stats, and upgrade timeliness, etc. The only downside is being willing to host such toxic content on this instance that derives from other sources that are not nearly so welcoming and friendly - and yet are presented side-by-side here along with all other content as being equally worthy of attention (especially when browsing by All, which I note is the default behavior, rather than Subscribed). We can do nothing to control others, only ourselves, but deciding to remain federated with them is a choice that reflects poorly on us imho (even if most of us have already blocked or otherwise avoid those communities personally, being more tech-savvy than your average mainstream Redditor), so I hope you will give strong consideration to these points, regardless of whatever the outcome may end up being. And thank you in advance for that!:-)
You must log in or # to comment.
Signed.
Let’s do lemmy.ml too
One reason not to is that it would block access to such high-profile communities as !Firefox@lemmy.ml. It looks like at least one person on this instance is subscribed to that community. Then again, new users are constantly getting themselves banned for no reason that they can fathom - perhaps mentioning China or Russia or North Korea in a not-favorable-enough light? - and it’s very confusing and off-putting to them, which like hexbear.net can drive them away from interacting on the Fediverse. Ofc that instance can do as it pleases, but so too can we and why choose to host such content here when the admin practices are so confusing, lacking transparency? Also many hexbears have alts there that they use to troll with (though tbf if a bunch of places started defederating from lemmy.ml, they would simply move elsewhere - but still, it would help somewhat even if not perfectly!).
The real trick is that there, far more so than on hexbear, many innocent users exist that would get caught up in the sweep. Ideally we could turn off access to it by default, but then allow people to opt-in to it if they wanted? And/or at least provide a warning label so that new users are not taken unawares when trying to comment in communities located on that instance - bc once you know the rules, to avoid discussing anything even remotely political, then it’s fine? Except neither of those is functionality that exists on Lemmy.
So yeah, I am strongly in favor of defederating it too. Not as a punitive measure but a supportive one to maximize welcoming new users to the Fediverse. I wholly support the decision of e.g. lemm.ee to not defederate from lemmy.ml - bc that’s what best implements their own vision of maximizing not welcomingness but total access to as much of the Fediverse from one account as possible - but at the same time, that’s not what we are about here. The mission of Discuss.Online is very different, and for us (again, for new users of this instance) it seems to me to make sense, to defederate from lemmy.ml? But I will support whatever our fearless leaders - who do literally all of the admin work:-P - decide in this regard (but I will indeed hold out hope for this outcome!:-).
Fuck ML
I’m in favor of defederation from hexbear.
Thank you for voicing your support.
I fully agree with this, the first time I opened Lemmy hexbear stood out to me the most and I would have left if I didn’t know about how they were generally disliked
Thank you for sharing your story - it helps to hear such perspectives:-).
Yes please!
While I don’t speak much and just browse lemmy, I fully agree with this post.
Thank you for adding not just your vote but your voice.
I have tried living with them but even blocking it has been ineffective.
I like free speech and discourse but they rarely do so in good faith.
I tried as well, until I realized the same.
The instance block feature is misnamed imho - it only blocks communities on that instance, but as you see the users can still reply to you, triggering notifications, and vote to influence the visibility of your content.
As it should be for any member of the Fediverse, except they do not abide by the rules set forth on most instances, nor are we able to block them, leaving defederation as the only, last resort.
They will still continue to come, via their alts, but it will still help a bit, like having a spam filter for Lemmy - every step helps.
I’m not fully caught up but I’m watching this post and will make it an instance sticky.
Thank you - I am glad that you will give it serious consideration, which ofc will take awhile.
I fully agree. I moved to sh.itjust.works and recommend others new to Lemmy to the instance specifically because they defederated with hexbear, lemmygrad,
and beehaw(among others).Defederation is a huge selling point of Lemmy over other services and I have had no negative experiences with other users thanks to instance admins who take the difficult choice to defederate. Imagine if The_Donald could have been blocked along with all of its users. The toxicity that leaked out everywhere from that community was painful. Defederation is that power, and it’s something incredibly positive for Lemmy instances and the users of that instance.
There’s nothing stopping people creating an account on those instances if there are communities there that they care about.
I hope your instance goes for it because it’ll have a wide reaching and positive impact on engagement and community growth when that small fraction of non-lurkers engage and have a positive experience, void of the toxicity that commonly stems from users of hexbear etc.
Edit: I confused Beehaw - they are a fine instance. Other commenters have noted Beehaw defederated with SJW, not the other way round, for different reasons.
I was disagreeing with you until you mentioned the “new user” argument. I absolutely agree with that, if new users check out Lemmy and the first thing they see is the brainrot from hexbear or lemmy.ml, that would make a disastrous first impression.
- yeah, for those of us who stuck around here it’s already in the past
- so far this has happened 100% of the time I’ve told people about Lemmy irl - they not only don’t join us but they outright chide me for even having mentioned it, always citing the “political extremism” that they see, which I thought was odd b/c while it’s here it’s easy to block and not that prevalent, EXCEPT…
- DYK that in a Google search, the top hit for “Lemmy” that is an actual instance (4th hit for me) is indeed “lemmy.ml”, which notably offers a default sort of Local rather than All - so indeed the anti-capitalistic, anti-Western society propaganda (apparently) IS precisely what people see when they search for “Lemmy”
- A DuckDuckGo search will show first Lemmy.World, but how many mainstream normies will use that approach rather than Google? Lemmy has a huge reputation problem, and it doesn’t help that a new user can simply walk into CTH or the_dunk_tank and experience all of that first-hand - and worse yet, there really is no way (short of defederation) to block all the users from an instance that encourages such behaviors.
Yep, I wandered into TDT as a new user and got into a discussion with a bunch of hexies all telling me how NK was way better than the US. The only reason I couldn’t see how much more propagandized US citizens were than the N Koreans was because I’d been so thoroughly indoctrinated.
It’s been over a year now and I’m still waiting for anyone in that sub to move to NK, which is apparently a really cool and chill place.
Prior to the Rexodus, during the protests, after reading some articles about social media, I decided that I was going to leave Reddit to get away from the toxicity. I did not know yet if I would replace it with anything else online (as opposed to e.g. reading books & otherwise touching grass irl & offline), but I definitely had to get away from that as it was seeping its way into me, and I did not like who I had become (yet as a mod of a couple mid-sized gaming communities there, I couldn’t exactly just not see such stuff as continued to come my way).
I truly do want to hear from a wide diversity of opinions - so long as they are offered in good faith. The lack of the latter though… why should someone else’s right to speak infringe upon, even trounce (the better word might be “trump”?) my right to not have to listen?
Btw, we did have a heavily conservative (group of?) instances here, exploding-heads.com, although the entire Fediverse individually defederated from them, after which they ceased to exist (I have no idea if those are related somehow or if they simply fell upon themselves due to in-fighting; but either way newer ones did not spring back up, which is the important thing). Hexbear.net, and to a significantly lesser degree lemmy.ml (complicated by their admins also being the main developers of the Lemmy codebase), seems basically to be the leftist equivalent. And the admins of hexbear themselves know and admit to their users trolling the entire Fediverse, as reading my link to the hexbear statement and the links to similar statements within hexbear shows. Even so, they cannot - or will not - control their users. At which point it falls upon others to have to make the harder choices.
PieFed allows such - every single post involving Beehaw is given this message:
This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.
With that link going to the very own words that Beehaw chooses to say about their own platform, rather than words being said about them by someone else. However, Lemmy does not offer this capability, more’s the pity. I hold out strong hopes that Sublinks will though, one day:-).
As you say, people will go turtle and refuse to engage, unless they feel that it is safe to do so, thus ironically in order to try to encourage additional content we need to block out content that is hindering that growth? :-)
Btw, your instance did not choose to defederate from beehaw, it was rather the other way around - here is the original notice. TLDR: those are 2 of the largest instances, and mainly they wanted to reduce their EXTREME moderation burden to have everything “just so” as they prefer things to be for them, though they seemed to have made an exception for lemm.ee for whatever reason - see also this recent discussion about it that mentions lemm.ee and discuss.online and in particular this interesting comment.
I would like to see the Fediverse grow, but for that to happen we need to prune some branches first.
why should someone else’s right to speak infringe upon, even trounce (the better word might be “trump”?) my right to not have to listen?
So perfectly put. I am here to have honest and open conversations, be disagreed with, corrected, and informed of the flaws in my own thinking, so long as that is done through respectful dialogue.
You can disagree without being a douche but those that are only there to troll and hurt others don’t have a right to my time.
And as Lemmy grows, striving to federate healthy and well admined and moderated instances is essential if it is to be a desirable place outsiders will want to join.
Also I’m really impressed by the quality of discussion that goes on on your instance. Dropping in here today has been a pleasure. You’ve got a good thing going over there!
Exactly! Whenever I bring up an issue involving downvoting (by used of hexbear, or perhaps lemmy.ml) people usually ask why don’t I just move to an instance where downvotes are disabled? The answer is always that I WANT feedback, if delivered genuinely and authentically, by people whose opinions matter i.e. ones who don’t preemptively start by lying to themselves routinely, before they then tell their alternative facts to others. In this manner I literally am aided into becoming a better person, as I used to be wrong and then afterwards am (hopefully gently) guided into being correct.
So then to be “corrected” by those for whom no means yes, does me no good. Instead, it encourages me to just stop offering content, knowing what feedback will occur when I do. Toxicity kills discussions, and if our entire purpose here is to facilitate discussions, then by allowing toxicity we have failed (though there are “details” here that matter ofc, like whose responsibility it is to moderate content on what instance - usually it is the admins, except what happens then when that practice breaks down and the admins themselves join in? at that point defederation is all that remains open to us, bc we have no capacity let alone capability to moderate not only content on our own instance but also another one too, especially one like that that self-admittedly thrives on conflict).
Quality over quantity you might say. Except that’s not true bc when toxicity abounds, it not only lowers quality, but quantity as well. This is ironically even true on Hexbear itself, as they have managed to run off even some of their own devs (https://hexbear.net/post/1712067/4540345) - and if allowed to spread further, will run off many other users too.
Did SJW recently defederate from HB?
I specifically left because they were fighting very adamantly to stay federated.
Weird that they defeded with Beehaw, though.
Did SJW recently defederate from HB?
It looks like it. Interesting discussion here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/27494947
Weird that they defeded with Beehaw, though.
They did not actually - it was the other way around: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
I saw a post today that seems like evidence that mostly bots are using hexbear. It is a very long biography of Alan Moore and the top comments are all about unrelated topics.
That’s a megathread so it makes a bit of sense to be written in a different style. The comments are… odd yes, but I don’t care about “oddness” - I am weird myself and celebrate that fact!
AI or human, I only care if they are “toxic”, i.e. follow our rules of behavior to encourage rather than shut down conversations.
Whoops I seem to have lost a sentence, wherein I stated that a quick glance at !chapotraphouse@hexbear.net (while not logged in) reveals that literally nobody on this instance has subscribed to that community - and yet, does that matter, since we are talking about the experiences of new members, who can nonetheless (as I did) find these posts while browsing All (which I note is the default behavior rather than Subscribed), especially using New?
And since I’ve already started adding to the post, here’s more: likewise with !technology@hexbear.net and !videos@hexbear.net and !news@hexbear.net, although some people seem subscribed to !memes@hexbear.net.
For those of us who are more tech savvy - even if we don’t use Arch btw:-P - it’s not such a problem, but how many people will persist in learning how to do that, especially to then be surprised when ever after blocking an instance, those users can still reply (thereby generating Notifications) to them? The top criticism of Lemmy on Reddit is ofc the overall lack of content - especially niche communities - but the 2nd top criticism iirc is our toxicity, e.g. our political extremism problem (a Google search of “Lemmy” pulls up lemmy.ml as the top instance - even though a DuckDuckGo search pulls up Lemmy.World and yet which are mainstream normal people more likely to use? - which has its default feed set to Local, therefore that is what a mainstream normie is vastly more likely to see: “kill the landlords” and other posts advocating for violent upheaval of Western society and other such “both sides equal” rhetoric; which helps me understand why 100% of the people that I’ve tried to recommend Lemmy to have not only refused to join but admonished me for even having mentioned it to them; NOW I understand that though! b/c OUR experiences, after blocking many communities, are nowhere close to the default that such a new user would see, unguided by someone who knows that it is possible for Lemmy to be experienced differently!!!??!).
Defederation is nowhere close to ideal, but since there are no other options offered really - e.g. labelling, such as is quite helpfully done for NSFW content across the Fediverse, which could offer a more opt-in than opt-out approach; edit: I had accidentally switched those two terms:-D - then what else can be done, in-between nothing (allowing all remote content to also be hosted from this instance) vs. everything (block it all)? I really do wish that other options were made available - but given these two choices, I am advocating for the latter, for the sake of new users who are least prepared to deal with the situation. Also, as demonstrated by clicking the links in the OP, remote content is always available in read-only mode, so it’s not like I am advocating that such content not exist, just that it not be hosted here and thereby turn people away by its presence.
Doing so would instantly turn Discuss.Online into the #1 top most welcoming Lemmy instance in the USA, and whether we wanted to specifically push for it or not, make it a top target for Reddit refugees.
I wish CTH and dunktank weren’t the most prominent comms coming out of Hexbear (into /all) because they are the most in-crowd parts of the site. They are specifically for dunking and shitposting. Their games comm is great, largest trans comm in the fediverse (I think), and all the people I’ve met over there have been awesome. But they are unapologetic, cynical, honest leftists and they have created an ecosystem there that not everyone understands at first glance. Did you know that Hexbear has been around for 5+ years, isolated from Reddit, and it’s only been about a year that they have been interacting with the general fediverse population? I didn’t get it at first either, but I engaged and learned, and took criticism in stride.
You are right, you will get shit if you wander into a comm and try to have a serious pro-dem take (or say anything lib-brained in CTH), but again, they are leftists and they will tell you how you are wrong. I find, though, if you are trying to make a serious point, though, they usually come with sources to make you re-think your position.
This kind of interaction has broadened my mind, but I was leaning left anyway. If your instance is mainly neo-lib, milquetoast Democrats, or easily offended soc-dems, then maybe you’re right, you should defederate. But if your instance has democrats who can see there’s something wrong or strong soc-dems ready to change things, I say you keep them federated, and maybe de-defederate the more controversial comms to protect new users.
Anyway, best of luck deciding!
Search up the sources they provide and research the event and the events surrounding it. They provide some of the most ahistorical “evidence” I’ve ever seen on lemmy.
The fact they use liberal as a negative should be enough for any reasonable person to write them off.
Totally agree on the “alternative facts” point, though I wanted to add that tbf I think what they are using the word liberal as a negative for is how it does not go far enough. Which… it doesn’t. e.g. in the USA, neither conservatives nor liberals are doing much of anything at all to stop gun violence i.e. school shootings.
However, after that is when they lose people I think, espousing that nothing short of violent upheaval of all society will ever work - although would even that work, when the other side has all the guns and technology and money and power and at this point even legality on their side?
Hexbears most often use a number of childish argumentation forms - such as “bOtH sIdEs EqUaL” - as extremely well-explained (imho) in Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook series. That is aimed at explaining how conservatives such as Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and Alex Jones and The_Donald talk, but I notice those identical patterns in arguments from supposed “leftists” on hexbear.net and to a lesser degree lemmy.ml also.
Although to be clear, that is not why I want to defederate from them. Why I want to be able to block them - which Lemmy software does not allow except for full defederation - is that in addition to their childish forms of argumentation, their behavior is also childish as well, and more precisely they often act as trolls, notably even outside of those well-known communities where such behaviors are encouraged by their admins and mods. If they want to refuse to learn from history - and thereby be doomed to repeat it - that is their choice, but I don’t like how they are taking all of Lemmy down that path along with them, especially when new users who don’t know much about “instances” can’t tell the difference and just thinks of all of Lemmy as “that place where trolls are allowed to exist”.
deleted by creator
Yeah those communities would work great if marked as “local-only”. I thought the admins there even said somewhere that they wanted to explore doing that. However, “local-only” communities have been possible for quite awhile now - next week it will have been fully half a year - and seeing as how hexbear is not willing to make that switch… it comes down to other instances making that trolly-problem decision to either allow all of their content, vs. none of it by defederation.
I also saw some instances (such as StarTrek.Website) attempt to try out intermediate experimental solutions on their own (blocking solely those 2 communities while allowing all others from the instance to be federated), only to have them be terribly confusing to users and later abandon them and just defederate with them entirely.
I think it boils down to: when people engage in good faith, a solution can be found, but when e.g. even instance admins will lie boldly to the face of other instance admins, what possible agreement could be reached that would satisfy anybody?
Preemptively I will say that it sucks that people will get caught up in all of this who even on that instance avoid those troublesome communities. On the other hand, good fences make good neighbors, and if you feel bad for them you can create an account and go talk with them - an “opt-in” procedure like that is fantastic, maximizing the freedom of choices for both you and the other party involved.
The problem comes when features are made to be “opt-out”, and moreover, buried beneath several layers of complexity to accomplish a block (assuming that’s even possible - right now on Lemmy it’s really not, as even after blocking an instance, its users can still troll you, replying to you and generating notifications, plus vote on and thereby influence the visibility of your content). Exactly like how Windows is enshittifying itself, making procedures be “opt-out” like that tends to drive people away - even if good users get caught up in the ongoing struggles. In fact it’s rather like taking hostages - “you don’t dare defederate from us or all of these innocents will get hurt!” - and yet giving in to the absolute worst behaviors simply offers tacit approval of them, and allows them to spread still further.
And to be clear, yes I am absolutely talking about making the Fediverse more welcoming to mainstream normies - which is not merely leftits who aren’t leftist hard enough, but even centrists, and possibly even some less-vitriolic-and-well-behaving (if any such exist) conservatives. If we want to grow the Fediverse, to where it will be welcoming to ALL, then we need to make sure that ALL feel welcome - at least, those willing to behave and play by the set of mutualy-agreed-upon rules. Though for those unwilling to abide by agreed-upon principles, their political stance does not matter to me in the slightest, as even the very people claiming to espouse them won’t hold firm to them anyway.
Yeah those communities would work great if marked as “local-only”. I thought the admins there even said somewhere that they wanted to explore doing that. However, “local-only” communities have been possible for quite awhile now - next week it will have been fully half a year - and seeing as how hexbear is not willing to make that switch…
Which I’m glad about because I sometimes like content from that comm, and so do some .ml, lemm.ee, and other instance users. I wouldn’t want to have to switch to a Hexbear account to view those comms. I don’t know how it works, but it makes more sense that the instance that doesn’t like the comms blocks them, like .world did with the piracy comms.
That’s fine, I just wanted to voice my opinion for the instance few stick up for, but you guys do what you want to do.
You have added to this discussion imho:-).
You are correct I think that the true ideal would be to not prevent people who want access to those communities from being able to do so, i.e. the opt-in nature should not be blocked, nor should people (especially new users) be forced into being presented that content devoid of context as if it were fully normalized as nearly all other communities on Lemmy are, i.e. it should not be opt-out, with that process gated by some technical procedure.
Ideally a third option would be available… however Lemmy has offered none, only an instance block procedure that to me seems horribly misnamed, as it functions really only as a community mute, but the users from the “blocked” instance can still troll you, outside of those communities.
It is a difficult problem to be sure, and one that each instance must struggle with as best it can - e.g. I agree that lemm.ee should not defederate from it, as that would go against their stated mission, although by the same token I think that Discuss.Online should defederate from especially hexbear to better match our own mission statement.
Ideally a third option would be available… however Lemmy has offered none
Lemmy allows instances to block specific communities, as LW does with the piracy communities
The incident where the mod said to the poster that he wanted to kill / shoot him, and that he hoped the OP would die soon was on !stardewvalley@lemmy.ml - a game community that afaik people would not expect to have a “struggle session” on (nor do I see how such language would be helpful even if it were?).
And hexbears constantly brigade people in other communities too, sometimes self-admittedly switching to their alts that allows them to get around Lemmy.World’s defederation of their hexbear accounts.
These problems go far beyond one or two communities - they are institutional in what their admins allow, and sometimes even encourage. e.g. in this post I find this language very revealing:
As an admin team we have never wanted to prioritize growth, and we wanted to give federation with liberal instances a try, however we consider providing a safer browsing experience for marginalized users more important than the opportunity to dunk.
Not the opportunity to talk with, discourse, engage in Socratic dialogue alongside, or communicate via back and forth exchange of messages, but “the opportunity to dunk” (implication: onto them, sharing with them the righteousness of your own cause, but in a manner not to convince and rather to look down upon while doing). Is it a wonder then that every conversation with them feels adversarial, when the very self-stated purpose (sidebar text and messages like these from the admins) of hexbear is to provide its users “the opportunity to dunk”?
It also is confusing to people to not see the instance name in the blocklist and yet not be able to access those communities either, so there’s a transparency issue with that approach. Thank you for sharing it though - I thought that StarTrek.Website had been trying something funky all on their own as I tried to diagnose this issue with Farid there (in DMs), not realizing that was a provision in the Lemmy codebase. Still, while I don’t think it’s a viable solution to this problem, either for hexbear.net or for lemmy.ml, it is good to know that it exists:-).
Share your comment reply in cth
It was something that I considered innocuous - probably along the lines of “at least Biden lowered gas prices, which [implication: while not everything] at least is not nothing”. Ofc they were having none of that.
And it might have been in the_dunk_tank rather than CTH.
Anyway your question presumes that “weeks” is something that would be shown in the Lemmy UI - but it is not, so all of them will just say “xyz months ago”.
Nor, if they somehow did show a period of multiple weeks, would that even be a bad thing? The sidebar of CTH (and TDT) literally says how e.g. “This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.” Their replying in this manner then is a strength - i.e. a match to what they say that they want to do - to “dunk on” people. Then again, the sidebar is hidden by default using the Lemmy web UI in a mobile browser… so how would people, discovering a post by browsing All (lets say by New), even know what they have managed to walk into?
Mind you, like porn, I have absolutely zero desire to stop the content itself, in this case them from “dunking” on one another, my beef was how then that content gets shared across the entire Fediverse, despite it being not a good “fit” with common standards of decency elsewhere. The community statement for discuss.online says:
A general purpose Lemmy instance for discovery, fun, & sharing. It’s a Lemmy place for all.
A community for anything and everything that’s not terrible.
Let’s talk! But not like in a “your partner saw you looking up bunnies with pancakes on their heads” talk. Let’s talk about anything and everything. Like how much we love bunnies with pancakes on their heads!
And Lemmy.World’s statement says:
Be polite and follow the rules ⚖ https://legal.lemmy.world/tos
and among them is:
Everyone has a right to browse and interact with Lemmy.World and other federated instances free of harassment and/or threats of violence. Please try and be kind to your fellow human, or at least civil. Trolling users is only funny if both parties find it funny. Trolling mods and/or site admins is ill-advised. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang)#Concern_troll
TLDR: remember the human.
BTW, let us not forget that my post has nothing to do with myself as a single user, but rather that of hexbear admins having lied to admins of other instances, and of a lemmy.ml moderator with the backing of those admins telling a user that they want to kill them and hope that they die soon. With those as the chief matters of concern, what possible use could my own experiences be, except as merely yet one more occurrence, shared by thousands across the entire Fediverse who had to discover the hard way what happens on hexbear? (along with untold others who did not stick around long enough to tell their stories)
Yeah I’m not really sure what you’re talking about most of the time, I don’t care if your instance defends from hexbear. I enjoy being on an instance that can see hexbear and I see why it might not be good for new users.
I just wanted to see your hexbear interaction that left you feeling so negatively about the instance
Ah I see. I actually enjoyed chatting with Hexbears, personally. Immediately after leaving Kbin.social (as it started to go defunct, and was down for weeks at a time), my most highly-received / highest-upvoted content was there, with me snarking on the likes of boomers, politics, and capitalism. I really struggled with my decision to block the instance, b/c I enjoyed that. Too much, I decided:-). Conversely, now that I know more about their style, I no longer enjoy hearing about them:-(.
This really isn’t about any personal experience that I had with them. I shared my personal experience to suggest that I halfway knew what people meant when they shared their own stories about them. It’s their whole entire style that bothers me, not where it is directed at, and in particular not whether it’s directed at me personally or not. Unlike most others raving about them, I don’t recall ever having been banned or posts removed there personally.
I did find it annoying to keep receiving notifications WEEKS after my comments, but I suppose even that much is on-brand for ChapoTrapHouse and “the dunk tank”, with their “struggle sessions” preferring that more in-depth style. I begrudge them not at all for being true to whatever style they espouse - the trick, I mentioned, lies in that style being extremely off-putting to the uninitiated.
Like if there was a warning message that popped up saying “are you sure that you want to reply to this? users on this instance are known for being quite more than a little… extra in their zealous replies”, then that would totally be fine. Just like I’m fine with porn existing - again, so long as it is properly labelled, so that someone doesn’t lose their job over coming to Lemmy while at work.
Hexbear’s problem is not that it exists, but that it refuses to play nice with others, especially when outside of their instance. e.g. when banned, several of its users have simply switched to their (likely pre-existing) alts on lemmy.ml and continued right where they left off. They admit this - heck, they are proud of this, and I’m fairly certain that in that link I shared to lemmygrad.ml, one user even mentioned having already started to make an app specifically to facilitate getting around instance defederations by using alts to seamlessly navigate using whatever account will allow their content to go through. This is par for the course for
conservativesusers of “that style” where consent of thevictimrecipient means nothing (perhaps b/c the message is just “so pure” that it MUST be sent?!).Anyway I blocked them months ago - that’s not the point, the point is how they drive away new users to Lemmy. I want the Fediverse to grow, not shrink. And I believe that this is the best way to accomplish that. Likewise (perhaps oddly?) I am supportive of lemm.ee not defederating from them, b/c that is what works best for users who appreciate not having barriers placed for them by a stronger admin presence (e.g. even exploding-heads.com is not present in the blocked instances list there). That said, I think most instances may want to strongly consider defederation from hexbear.net, and in particular I think it suits the style of Discuss.Online to do so, given our aim to encourage people to speak more - without being in fear of toxic push-back.
