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!:-)
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:
And Lemmy.World’s statement says:
and among them is:
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.