6mo ago

Hexbear - Refederation?

Recently I was asked if we'd be willing to reconsider federation with Hexbear, followed by CARCOSA reaching out to me to see if it was something we'd be open to.

They made a post asking if their community was interested in refederating with us, similarly I'd like the opinion of our local users.

Why refederate?

Hexbear has a decent number of sizable active communities:

These all seem fairly well moderated, giving us access to more diverse posts and viewpoints. A lot of our feed right now is dominated by US centric communities, and it'd be nice to get some more variety.

Why not?

They love trolling and I don't expect them to follow our rules when commenting (primarily "be civil").

Just looking at their thread about us, there's a significant number of immature replies slandering us / Canada. I'm not confident their users will engage in actual discussion in our threads, rather than just showing up to throw out insults and memes.

We can try to handle this by banning users / blocking specific communities, but that's going to increase moderation workload for both admins and mods. Hexbear is self admittedly quick to ban users on their side, but they also don't mind ban evasion - not ideal for us.

So what's next?

This is where we solicit your opinions, how does our community feel?

Edit: Well, it looks like the community is overwhelmingly against refederation. Decision made, thanks everyone for your feedback!

54 comments

I think it's reasonable to say the community is overwhelmingly againts refederation, so we'll keep the status quo for now.
Rough counts of comments and votes from local users:
no - 23
maybe if/and/or/but - 3
yes - 2
- Thanks for asking us and then following through by actually listening.
  This thread is the complete opposite of the "Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot" thread lol.
- Thank you for taking this to the community and listening.

its literally a troll instance. most instances defederated from them for a reason

Pass. I don't really think they match the vibe of the rest of lemmy.ca and many other instances.

I was glad to see an end to HB trolls.

I say no. Literally every interaction with HB has been negative. Its like they're all AIs made to be as annoying as possible

Thanks for bringing this to the community instead of immediately making a decision yourselves. It is nice to have the opportunity to be a part of the choice, since it's open as a possibility.
That said, no thank you. Lemmy instance blocking still cannot block both posts and users, which means that even though we can avoid their posts as we wish, we will still be inundated by Hexbear replies on every post. Considering that the comments are quite possibly the worst part of Hexbear, this will result in the same shit-show we had last time. The comments on their refederation post just reassure me that we don't want to be associated with them. I won't shed a tear to be missing out on the 5 extra meme posts on my all page.
- Thanks for bringing this to the community instead of immediately making a decision yourselves. It is nice to have the opportunity to be a part of the choice, since it’s open as a possibility.
  The community is what makes this happen. IMHO any major decision that impacts all of you, should involve all of you.
  
  Best admin on lemmy. Thanks for all you do, this instance is by far the best!

No. The downsides of refederating far outweigh the benefits: They have a history of acting in bad faith, and the listed active communities have equivalent counterparts on other instances.

Please don't federate with Hexbear.

Seems more trouble than it's worth.

One vote for not refederating. Please leave hexbear where they are.

They love trolling
Until we get a decent automod, I'm not interested in fighting off even more trolls.
- Need an automod that will insta-ban with no recourse anyone posting pig balls.

No.
They provide nothing of value.

Gross

No thank you. I left reddit to get away from trolls and echo chamber political drivel.

yeah that's a no from me, dawg

Absolutely not. I will be switching instances if this happens. I have had nothing but bad experiences with Hexbear users and I do not wish to ever have to interact with such toxicity again. In case anyone has forgotten, their only reason to federate with other instances is to "dunk on liberals" and brigade to push a specific agenda. They specifically said as much back when they planned to federate with .world. There is zero intent for participating in good faith from most of their userbase.
- Yeah I left my last instance and signed up here specifically because of Hexbear. Fuck that.

Upvoted for visibility.
I've heard of them.
None of it good.
I haven't noticed an absence of the instance in the communities i interact with. ie. I'm happy with the current federated communities.
There is a peace here that is unlike other sites/forums.
So, please, NO.

No from me.
Having diverse opinions is great. Having more communities is also great.
Having legions of badly behaved assholes everywhere is NOT worth the trade off to get a popular gaming and vegan community in my feed.

To put it bluntly, if this goes through I'll probably just delete my account and move on from lemmy.
I wouldn't want to onboard more friends to this instance for them to be brigaded by HB trolls. Getting people to wean off Reddit for Lemmy, only for them to be bombarded with HB chaos more akin to /b/, would be a terrible experience.
In short: no thanks.

Gonna just add my 'no thanks' here as well :)

This is where we solicit your opinions, how does our community feel?
In the immortal words of Bishop Bullwinkle: Hell naw, to the naw, naw, naw

Absolutely not. I will straight up abandon my account and move to a different instance if .ca federates with hexbear. There's absolutely nothing good about federating with that shithole.
Edit: That being said, thanks for giving the .ca community the opportunity to share their opinions instead of making the decision yourself, even if you probably knew it wouldn't be a popular option.

They are planning their crap right in their vote thread. “You can’t plant seeds without access to the fields.”
Please keep the smooth brains and their “seeds” out of our fields, thanks.

I'm somewhat open to it, IF moderation can keep up with the increased workload. We have to make it clear that while we might welcome new opinions, call us all libs or whatever, we need to show no tolerance for users engaging on Lemmy.ca solely to be a nuisance, which we saw quite a bit of last time. If there's a sizable contingent over there still intending to sow (-🐽-) chaos it's probably not worth the effort to re-federate.
Hexbear users can run their communities like a zoo all they want, but they have to leave the zoo there when they visit other servers.

While I don't like that instance and block most communities from there as I see them, as an end user, I think it's fair to refederate and instead let users individually block Hexbear users, communities and perhaps even the whole instance if they see fit. My worry, however, is if moderation here on this side of the two instances wouldn't get too clogged.
- Two main issues with this approach, in my opinion:
  Instance blocking does not block comments. If multiple Hexbear users decides to harass you, you will keep seeing their replies until you manage to block every user to blame. I don't want to go through this.
  Every new user to lemmy.ca will have to put up with the sea of bad-faith Hexbear users until they also go through this multi-phase blocking process, which is a terrible onboarding experience.
  While these aren't huge issues if Hexbear plays nice, I don't trust that to be the case. From my experience of the last time I just have to assume it will be more harassment and more ASCII/emote spam and do not wish for our instance to be polluted by that.
  
  It's not a matter of if multiple Hexbear users will decide to harass you, it's a matter of when. They start threads to summon other Hexbear users to "dunk on" people they disagree with.

If the admins think they can handle the moderation load I say we try it. But I'm reluctant. It's very troll heavy and their thread on the subject has me worried.
In the spirit of federation, a cautious sure why not from me.

I vote in favour of refederating

Yes, I’m up for interacting with more leftists. As they have been polite visitors on Vegan Theory Club.
- The problem is they have rules about not abusing vegans, so VTC is safe by default. We won't have that safety net.
  
  I will be informing Vancity of this hostile comment towards a marginalized group trying to protect animals.
- Hexbear users aren't leftists, they're radical centrists. Preach the virtues of communism while attacking people for being communists. Speak up about the genocide in Palestine while denying the genocide in China. Support capitalist Russia and Imperialist Putin in the name of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. Preach the values of queer acceptance while harassing people for being trans. Every good opinion they have is tainted by acting the exact opposite way the next day. They claim to be leftists, but 50% of the time their actions are the actions of fascists.
- I'd be happy with more interaction, left or right. But hexbear seems to be interested in trolling mostly. I don't see much of their content, but just reading the linked discussion about federating with lemmy.ca was gross.

54 comments