What instances would you want to federate with?

People liked the idea of starting with some hobby instances and asked for some more possibilities. Briefly checked a bunch out to take some notes, and if any are of interest please check them out and reply with further observations so this can be edited and improved.
pathfinder.social - mostly Pathfinder/Starfinder but also general tabletop, GMing, worldbuilding, looking for group and stuff
mander.xyz - dedicated to nature and science [houseplants, mycology, reptiles, plant identification, astronomy, archaeology, biology, geoscience, geography, anthropology, physics, isopods, chemistry, underwater photography, & more] (has a really nice custom UI theme so federating would allow viewing hexbear with it)
thegarden.land (alt) - gardening
programming.dev - programming and development
lemmy.studio - for musicians and music lovers
waveform.social - digital music, reaper, flstudio, ableton, synths
lemmy.film - for filmmakers, movie buffs, artists, creators
lemmy.radio - for amateur radio enthusiasts to use
fanaticus.social - community of sports fans to talk about sports
sub.wetshaving.social - for discussions, reviews, and general sharing of thoughts about wet shaving
pawb.social - sfw furry instance
lemmy.sdf.org - SDF Public Access UNIX System, retro computing
compuverse.uk - technology [computing, retro, self-hosting, game deals, tech support, programming, speedrunning, blu-ray, etc]
social.fossware.space - for FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Enthusiasts
infosec.pub - information security
terefere.eu - visual art, design, photography, architecture, artefacts, history
lemmy.srv.eco - self-sufficiency, mutual aid, collapse, environment
r-sauna.fi - all things sauna, in English but there's Finnish culture
preserve.games - sponsored by hitsave.org [Hit Save! is a registered 501©(3) non-profit dedicated to the preservation of video games, their history, and related physical and digital materials]
dataterm.digital - all things cyberpunk, novels, games, ttrpgs, techno, VR, inline skating
slrpnk.net - solarpunk, green energy, no lawns, composting, farming, climate, DIY, anarchism, vegan, birdwatching
lemmyfly.org - aviation related communities
lemmyrs.org - everything Rust language
poptalk.scrubbles.tech - popheads, Swifties, Britney
aiparadise.moe - ai art, ai writing
mtgzone.com - Magic: the Gathering (MtG)
pathofexile-discuss.com - Path of Exile (PoE)
dormi.zone - Warframe
startrek.website - everything star trek
possumpat.io - instance hosting communities for some niche interests and hobbies [possums, ff14, gundam]
- pathfinder.social - mostly Pathfinder/Starfinder but also general tabletop, GMing, worldbuilding, looking for group and stuff
  def agree with this one. its the only unionized ttrpg and is generally a pretty friendly environment. idk if that instance is insane or anything but the pf2e subreddit itself isnt very sus
- Damn there are way more of these than I had assumed lol
- Yeah I think these should be good
- Tagging for later
- Yeah, baby. I'm on slrpnk.net. it's a pretty chill federation.
  
  Yeah, seemed chill. Has a really nice theme. They've blocked this instance before federation has even been enabled, though. If you're interested in connecting and in the slrpnk community maybe you can advocate.

Pathfinder.social has some general ttrpg comms as well and could enhance ttrpg@hexbear.net, worldbuilding@hexbear.net.
- I like this! I hadn't thought about federation with hobby coms to build put our less used comms but honestly I like it better than federation on a political basis. It still helps us hook in as a point in the matrix but without attracting wreckers.
  
  Oh lord I would love to federate with some hobby comms. I love this site for the politics and shitposts, but I think we're a bit lacking in activity for things like boardgames, 3D printing, etc. and federation would probably improve that.
  
  Yes, and the non-discrimination and PG-13 rules overlap well, so avoids bigotry and hornyposting.
  
  They'd probably want us to stop discussing piracy so openly
- Third-ing hobby comms. Those are the last thing keeping me on reddit.
- Are there a lot of hobby Lemmies out there?
  If not, should we make one?
  
  Didn't know the answer to this, so looked around to see what was available and made a list of hobby lemmys in a separate comment.

Apparently we can federate with Mastadon too and I'd be curious to see how toots.matapacos.dog would show up in a reddit style UI. Not necessarily realistic but worth the experiment imo
- We can, I've had Mastodon replies on lemmy.ml, and it seem reply parenting just doesn't work well. Mastodon just kind of has one long thread, not replies to each reply, so Lemmy can't assume which comment a reply is too and just puts it at the top-most level and gives you the @ping. Usable, but not ideal.
  
  Wait, but wouldn't it work to make reply tweets show up as comment replies?
- I think it puts the burden more on the Mastodon users to figure out than us.
- At the moment, it is not possible to subscribe to user accounts on Lemmy, only communities. This means it is basically not possible monitor anything taking place on Mastodon from Lemmy because communities don't exist on Mastodon. Mastodon users are able to follow Lemmy users (though not communities), and can reply to posts / comments they make. These replies are visible on Lemmy. From the Mastodon user's perspective, there is no difference between a Lemmy post or a comment though. This may change as things develop.
- And the meta thing is another curveball around mastadon

Lemmy.blahaj.zone has a lot of posts with a similar vibe but have struggle sessions about tankies. I think they could benefit from seeing our left unity culture, but we'd have to have janitors rigorously cleaning their shit before it hits our end. If we could moderate out the sectarian posts I think it would be a great addition.
- this seems like a terrible fucking idea. it has 196 on it, which is known for its hyperfetishization of trans people. the fact that a trans space allowed them on is a serious mistake and it makes hexbear far more accepting to trans people as a result.
  
  I think it is important to emphasize the word mistake here. The people running !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone are anticommunist shitlibs of the highest order, but the operators of the instance itself seem a lot more reserved. I have seen pushback against the red scare shit in some other threads there when the subject of blocking lemmygrad (which they haven't done) comes up.
  I think these 196 dweebs just ran up in there, declared it their new home, and now they're stuck with them unless the admins decide to piss a lot of people off. I could be wrong, but this is the vibe I'm getting.
  Anyway, I'm only being a pedantic nerd about this because it is very easy to get the moderation actions of the admins and mods of specific communities mixed up. Ultimately the admins deserve blame for leaving these people in power, but the landscape has changed drastically over the past week and I'm willing to keep my judgement a little bit lenient in the short term.
- From what I've seen, they ban people for being ”tankies”, so I don't know about similar vibes.
- Isn't 196 full of
  ites? I know I don't have to subscribe but it seems like our users would a) bully them until we get defederated, damaging our reputation more than if we hadn't federated with them, and b) complain about them incessantly on here, and also complain about there being too many complaint posts and also complain about there being too many complaint posts about complaint posts.
  
  Ah but you are forgetting the parody posts about the complaint posts
- If their mod team was burning alive, I would not even piss on them. We need to try other instances first because BZ has cool people but also extremely dedicated anticommunists, some of whom are mods.

_{Federation Fridays} We open the floodgates but only on Friday so we can work out our workweek frustrations by dunking on some libs.

Almost all of them, but I think we'd have to do it in stages with more similar instances first so users can grasp the concept of federation themselves and avoid torpedoing the federation concept or destroying hexbears reputation on the fediverse.
So probably lemmygrad first, and we'll see from there. Federating with instances that have sports, hobby and fitness communities would be really nice in my opinion.
- I would prefer an open approach as well (but idgaf what we do as long as most people here are happy). Presumably the first week or so will be chaos, but we will eventually ban the troublemakers, get blocked by a couple dozen instances, block a handful ourselves, and find an equilibrium. The fact that we could just pull the plug at any time is reassuring. If it turns out to be a mistake, we return to the status quo. We are in an extremely unusual situation of being willing to federate and simply not having done so.
  If we are going to do it one by one, we should probably be diplomatic about it and actually talk with these peer instance operators. Do a proper introduction, establish some mutual expectations, etc. Like you said, taking a few small steps at first is probably a good way to get acclimated.
  
  If we are going to do it one by one, we should probably be diplomatic about it and actually talk with these peer instance operators. Do a proper introduction, establish some mutual expectations, etc.
  Yeah we're going to have to do that.
- Oh yeah and with the old posts back, your comment reminded me of this hilarious time a horse paste chud stumbled upon hexbear and got dunked on lol
  https://hexbear.net/post/137175
  
  Yeah if libs start posting liberalism on the hexbear instance it's fair game I guess lol. Though we should still be kind to well meaning folks.

honestly we should federate with every non-nazi fed and spread the good word of communism
- This. The chapos yearn to post anew

Lemmygrad.ml is a good one too but again a case of moderators having to clean out the sectarianism
- Lemmygrad is the only decent one, and the lowest amount of work for our moderation team. Everyone else will be screaming about tankies until they turn blue in the face.
- I would say no, because I personally don't like lemmygrad.ml.
  
  If you're federated with an instance you don't have to subscribe to their stuff, it just gives the option and makes them appear if you sort by all

Everyone that isn't fash, but we should take our time to make sure we don't completely implode. Let's join just lemmygrad for, idk, a few days with an announcement reminding people to play nice with our comrades, then branch out to smaller commie instances and then push rightward (in terms of the leaning of cites we federated with) until we have all the non-fash (non-criminal/loli/snuff/etc) instances.
It's my impression that even federating with a porn instance creates legal liability, but I think that's a different topic.
People are viewing our sites culture as fragile. That is false. It can be killed if we tremendously fuck up, but our history on cth proves that it is a vector of infection at least as much as it is a victim. The libs have more to worry about from our culture than we do theirs.
- site culture isn't a hearts of iron game where you slowly color the lemmy map red. even just federating with lemmygrad would lead to an influx of anti-anarchist sectarian swerfs to the community, which is going to be a headache both for users and for the moderators and is a permanent irreconcilable point for large sections of both sites
  unlike reddit, everybody is specifically going out of their way to go to lemmy. there is no spectre, there is no constant influx of chuds that don't know about hogposting
  if your goal was to agitate over the internet and send people towards hexbear you would be making accounts on reddit and other social media, not imagining converting sites the size of less popular CS:GO servers
  
  I flatly reject your characterization of lemmygrad (the swerf claim is bullshit) but anyway you are more significantly incorrect in imagining people as so static in their beliefs and alignment. People who are interested in radical politics are people who are alienated from the status quo and overwhelmingly clinging to the psychological bouies of whatever interpretive lens they have been able to determine -- from the vantage point of mostly-narrow experience with other lenses and what their current one is -- suits them the best. If they encounter something on a regular basis that can plausibly serve them better even despite the biases of their current view, they will generally accept it over time.
  I think there is an actual ability to do more than just preserve our virginal purity of comfort and illusory social harmony from being "diluted" by these people who you only rhwtorically conceptualize like a toxin or chaff.

I wish we had more anarchists.
- Hey, what's up, it's me your local anarchist
  
  why is it so hard to find anarchists who don’t hate Tankies and Tankies who don’t hate anarchists. Why can’t we all just get along and overthrow capitalism.
  
  Me, I used to call myself an anarchist but then I realized I couldn't explain it well enough to justify anything about it. I guess I'm just a socialist.
- Ideally we could disabuse places like blahaj zone of their anti-tankie hysteria and then you'd have a nice spot to hang out

As for the inverse to this question, what instances would we not want to federate with, I've got the matapacos.dog block-list. It isn't super comprehensive, but it includes many of the most notable reactionary / loli / bot instances, as well as whatever has stumbled across my radar so far. A little over 100 in total, including some new Lemmy instances which have been overrun by spam bots or are run by outright reactionaries.
It looks like the porn instances are beginning to find their footing, so that's another thing to contend with.
- There's no reason not to federate with those instances. If people here want to subscribe to them and participate in them let them, people do not have to see anything they do not want to see as they can block NSFW content entirely or they can block comms. Ditch the ones with illegal or extremely questionable content (loli etc).
- matapacos.dog block-list
  I misread for a moment and worried those AnBidenist bastards claimed another comrade on top of Blahaj

I would prefer not to federate at all tbh.

Lemmygrad, but that's about it

All of them. Hexbear should not operate on white list, it should operate on blacklist.
Communists should not hide from engaging with everyone.
- "I'm not locked in here with you! You're locked in here with me!" _

pathofexile-discuss.com since this instance has an official guild in PoE and quite a few people here play it.
- For those interested, more info here and here. I haven't been playing since Forbidden Sanctum myself, but I might play next league.

none of them

Clearly there's a lot of back-and-forth between essentially two different philosophies towards the purpose of this site.
The first one says: we are loud-and-proud communists who disdain to conceal our views and aims, therefore we should federate with as many instances as possible to educate and agitate. That means engaging with libs/chuds/reactionaries of all stripes and allowing them to flood in to be dunked on (and allow us to flood out). There's greater potential for us than just being a uniquely left-unity enclave in the broader internet. You can call this the "Blacklist philosophy".
The second one says: it's taken 3 years and a lot of struggles and purges to cultivate this space into such a positive, welcoming one, and the main reason people keep coming back here is because of that. Opening the floodgates to the majority of Lemmy instances would do potentially huge damage to the vibes of HB and alienate many of our comrades. Sure, people are free to block any comms or users they want, but that's already demanding effort from our users who simply don't want to be exposed to reactionary garbage in the first place. We worked hard to purge the bigotry, why allow any of it back in? This is the "Whitelist philosophy".
I'm inclined more towards the WL philosophy myself, especially after seeing so many people say that this is essentially the only social media they use because everywhere else sucks.
e: mixed up BL and WL
- Yep I mixed those up, thanks
- I'm curious how closely this maps on to people's opinions about internationalism vs socialism in one country
  
  "we should federate! permanent revolution!"
  
  "hexbear in one instance, nothin personnel"
  
  I think we should federate and that Trotsky should have been killed a decade sooner than he was.
  We can criticize Stalin for many things, but "socialism in one state" as isolationism was always, always a bullshit accusation.

- Not possible, they already have us blocked, lmao.
  
  Libs are a superstitious bunch, they're always terrified of engaging with socialists in any capacity that isn't punching left or down
  
  A spectre is haunting Lemmy, the spectre of Chapo
  
  I'm sure we can convince em
- We can only harass them by proxy by holding influence in mutually federated instances.

- If you want to argue with folks, go create accounts on those instances. Don't clutter up my experience on this site because you want to argue with a bunch of people on the internet.
  worth noting that you can just filter out all posts that originate from comms/external instances that aren't Hexbear's. Users from other federated instances can post in Hexbear's comms and you'll see that - but those posts would be subject to Hexbear moderation and whatnot.
  It just doesn't make sense to me. Nobody on hexbear is hopefully using their real name, so what are you gaining by having federation? Bringing your clout with you to other sites?
  more users, posts, etc. not to mention solidarity with other leftist places like lemmygrad. I mean - just look at some of the instances Bruja posted below. Is there not a single one of those that you'd maybe be interested in seeing a post from, assuming you're not filtering by Hexbear comms only? Our Gardening/Earth comms aren't that active and I wouldn't mind seeing posts from Mander or The Garden, for example. And those are just some instances one person recommended that we could possibly federate with.
  I'm sure we'll get shitheads but it is worth considering what we'll actually gain!
  
  i go to hexbear hobby comms for leftist-centric discussion about hobbies. if I wanted to just get general hobby chat about a subject there's a million other sites with more active userbases than the entirety of lemmy. federating would remove the unique features of hexbear hobby comms and leave them flooded with general use, general space reddit-esque discussion. sure, they're empty and mostly unused, but when they are used they're providing something that every other site would not provide
  for instance: federating c/ttrpg with the pathfinder lemmy would A: remove piracy discussion unless some rules ceasefire could be planned and B: riddle that comm with nothing but "does perk X make my ass look big on round 3 of combat when using a full-round action?" D&D brain posts
- It's about bringing people into the fold. This is a great site and I want to share it. If it weren't for pearl clutching about /r/chapotraphouse I never would have found this space. I want to see pearl clutching about hexbear.net

lemmy.world because that's where I mainly am
- we would be inundated with libs and it would stop feeling cozy imo
  
  I really really don't think it'll be inundated. Some will come in and get educated, some dunked, and some banned, depending on what they are up to. If it actually ends up being too much, it's not difficult to reverse the decision.
  
  Pretty sure that's going to happen no matter what

One anti-vote (subtract from the count) for beehaw
- Beehaw already blocked us (they also defederated from lemmy.world) so that's not an option regardless
  
  Wait what did we do already to get blocked?

"possumpat.io - instance hosting communities for some niche interests and hobbies [possums, ff14, gundam]" This is literally just my interests, wtf.
- I cannot wait to be called a red fash gundie
  
  I'm only up to Zeta but I think every faction sucks so far. Someone needs to bring some space communism to Universal Century.

R/cremposting is thinking of going to Lemmy. We should federate with them so I don't need to make a new account.
Anyone who disagrees with this is an fed. Thank you for reading

None.

Allow all, selective deny by community vote (and common sense deny straight-up transphobic, fash, ancap, etc. instances from get-go). Libs are annoying but some can be eventually reached as they go through their own personal stages of denial about the economic system that's going to eventually kill us all, lol.
Been here since Hexbear started, I don't think expanding Hexbear community reach would be a bad thing. It's more going to set the tone for the fediverse, versus than the other way around. We've got the best posters, don't we folks?

- It is not currently possible. Hexbear is not exchanging information with any other Lemmy instance. This is a discussion about potentially doing this in the future.
  
  That sounds spooky. Like we're going to give a bunch of info the some FBI tracking center and it's going to be more organized than the hand written notes an intern had on us earlier

I would personally want to federate with everyone and maintain a blacklist as necessary. The post by bruja is at least what we should do as a minimum. I joined here when the chapo subreddit was banned but stopped using it due to the limited amount of non-political content. It would be nice to be able to federate with other instances to see other content in the same feed.

Hello, I'm an (unofficial) envoy from the jlai.lu instance.
It doesn't seem like the jlai.lu instance is able to subscribe to communities over here. I suspect that hexbear is running in whitelist mode.
Would it be possible to add us to the whitelist ?
We are a small instance there with pretty standard moderation rules and we (mostly I) would appreciate very much to be able to access your content over here :)
Thank you !