Fediverse

Honestly I think the hexbear situation may need to be revisited based on recent observations where among other things an instance admin lied to another instance admin. Even lemmygrad.ml had this to say about it:

The last few days have honestly shaken my faith in Hexbear and their team and I hope the mods and admins at Lemmygrad are monitoring the situation closely.

Personally I want every single diversity of opinion to be able to be shared... so long as it is offered in good faith. Which HB is demonstrably not doing, even to admins of other instances. (That said, I don't always want to see it all of the time either - like porn, it would be good to be able to turn it off if I don't want it flooding my feed 100% of the time? Which after defederation, that is what I have bc you don't need an account just to lurk on content from an instance.) Ofc that's up to you all on lemm.ee to decide for yourselves, not us as outsiders, I was just offering my personal opinion since we were discussing it and it's good to be upfront with my biases:-).

I don't know as much about lemmygrad.ml tbh - that whole defederation issue predates me, although on StarTrek.website I did make the mistake of replying to a comment in a post that I found while browsing All that made me wish that I had never heard of the place. It might have been something along the lines of saying that at least Biden had lowered gasoline prices which helped poorer people and thereby that aided getting Democrats into the USA Senate during the midterms, and how while nowhere near enough it at least was a strategic move that wasn't "nothing"... but whatever I said, the response I got was EXACTLY like when I accidentally did the same to a comment in ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net - I got an enormous FLOOD of responses filling up by Notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards. I did not feel like I fully consented to that level of vitriol and hate in return for what I intended as at least an attempt to better understand a complex situation.

Anyway if full defederation is the only way to prevent such content from showing up in every new person's feed, then so be it. Although I actually would rather have an opt-in system based on proper labeling than a "hard defederate", it's just that such is not made available to us by the developers of the codebase (although PieFed has it, yet the flagship instance PieFed.social has defederated from those two instances already). So since the only options allowed are full defederation vs. help spread all of their content without offering any warning to new users, and not only content but their echo chamber fueled hatred and vitriol towards any opinion that is less extreme than theirs... then defederation it is that seems the best course of action moving forwards, imho.

And perhaps that is what keeps people from putting communities onto lemmy.ee? Knowing full well that the hexbears and lemmygrads will be able to brigade it? If so, it's fine for lemm.ee to remain as a general instance - again it's up to you all who are on it to decide what you want for yourselves - I was just curious to think about the potential reasons why. Also I think it's great to have at least one instance in the Fediverse that is that way, and it would be a loss if it were to change. Then again, hexbear admins lying to admins of another instance... at that point the argument put forth that at least the admins were better behaved than the average user seems no longer true, and that the instance might not be trustworthy any longer in the future? Reaching out in full friendliness is awesome! But not in the face of such bad faith behaviors in return.

I agree on the rest - about people wanting to be more consumers and less contributers, in large part (from what I hear) due to the current state of the moderation tools that apparently are quite poor, and all the more so across different instances, which in lemm.ee's case would be exaggerated since to keep up the standards of a community the mod would have to remove content from hexbears.