Don't care. If I gave a shit about the biggest instance because it has the most users, then I would have stayed on Reddit which has orders of magnitudes more users. The whole damn point of federation is your instance is not locked into what the biggest instance wants to do.
I think the concept of a mascot or poster child for Lemmy is somewhat antithetical to the concept of federated social media. Kind of a no gods no masters situation.
I really feel like everyone is letting their emotions and ideologies run the narrative here. Lemmy.world was already defederated with Hexbear, everyone was. What they are doing is choosing to remain defederated once Hexbear federates. And that is perfectly within their rights. Until we get better moderation tools and the ability block instances at the user level I can completely understand why the admin and mods don't want to deal with potential issues. Maybe once we all have better tools then we can try playing nice together. This is the same reasoning Beehaw took and I think it makes sense in this case as well.
Why though? They've done nothing worthy of defederation, they're simply trying to maintain their standard of quality. And they are a HUGE INSTANCE.
Extremists are always going to get pigeonholed by the rest of the network that doesn't want to see that shit filling up their All page and infiltrating their comments.
Leave blocking communities and instances to users. If you don’t want to see “extremists” in your All page, block the community. Block the users in the comments.
Defederation should happen based on the instance community’s collective decision (no vote was done for defederation) and when an instance is actively working against the rules of a federated instance. Hexbear has not shown itself to be breaking the rules or to be planning to, and the arguments used by the world admins were all opinions and not based in reality. The admins of hexbear specifically made a post telling their users to respect federated instances rules.
Yes, the users are opinionated - but that in and of itself isn’t worth defederating with.
Mind you I’m not about to start asking to defederate from world, but I’m still kinda worried that this type of preemptive defederation is going to be the norm for world.
I would love to be able to block entire instances but I don't believe that is possible yet. If it is please tell me how cause I have a bunch that would be on the chopping block!
It's not just about blocking it for yourself, though. Content from all federated instances ends up in YOUR instance's All tab. So when extremist instances sneak in and start federating with everyone, their shit gets broadcast to a huge audience that everyone can see, including users not logged in. So by not defederating, the admins are effectively supporting the platform of extremists and not enforcing their own instance content rules through inaction. This is what I mean by admins needing to maintain their own standard of content on their own instances.
We just did this at lemmy.one with exploding-heads for the same reasons.
I disagree with lemmy.world's decision, for three reasons:
Address problems as they appear - negligence is bad, but so is jumping at the gun.
Locking users out because they're misbehaving is different than locking them out under the assumption that they'll misbehave.
Given that lemmy.world is a generic purpose instance, odds are that it would work better by letting users sort themselves out, and only intervene on problems when it is not reasonable to expect users to do so.
I also think that lemmy.world's current size in comparison with other instances is a bit problematic. It's great to see instances growing but it would be better if said growth was spread out.
Just my two cents, mind you. I'm from neither instance.
Please read and respect the rules of the community instance in which you are posting/commenting. Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated. Realize that you are a representative of the hexbear instance when you post on other instances.
Is this "a naked man outside a store, whippin’ his dong around & throwing poo at passersby" to you?
If he dressed himself before trying to enter my store, I'd probably let him in. However I'd keep watching him; and on his first attempt to take off his clothes, whip his dong or throw poo, I'd throw him out.
Note however that there's an important difference between both situations: defederation affects a whole group of people. We could claim that some of them were whipping their dongs, were throwing poo, but we can't automatically point at all of them and say "you're all at fault"; that would be incorrect and immoral.
Note also that I'd likely see this in a different way, if the defederating instance was beehaw instead of lemmy.world. Due to the purpose of each instance (generic and free-for-all vs. safe space), and overall impact on the lemmy side of the Fediverse.
I think the analogy would be more accurate if he was whipping his dong out and throwing shit within his own home. And he can do what he wants there, because it's not affecting anyone else. Sure, the people in his house can have whatever opinions they want of him, but if he's cleaned up and dressed before he leaves his house, who cares?
No one stans Russia in hexbear, we literally say "the collapse of the Soviet Union was the largest humanitarian disaster of the latter half of the 20th century"
Instances can defederate whenever they want, but skimming the sidebar and announcements, it's weirder to me that lemmy.world is still federated with lemmygrad, which seems to be very similar to hexbear.
Anyone have any insight into the difference between lemmygrad and hexbear?
Hexbear is leftist unity, larger, and more shitpostery. Also hexbear has more trans users because of even better moderation and pronoun tags being the default.
Not in favour of this.
I chose Lemmy.world because I wanted an instance that would federate even with people I might disagree with. If it's illegal and abusive, sure. But to defederate on ideological grounds? I was planning a recurring donation but this makes me consider setting up my own instance.
They're welcome to whatever discussions they want to have on their instance. As long as they respect the rules of other instances when they're here, then everybody wins.
As for their point about dismantling western propaganda - if they have documented sources then let's have a conversation. It's not like there isn't western propaganda
I don't remember which episode, but the podcast blocked and reported described exactly that that is what's going to happen to the fediverse. Sad.
(found it. The conversation is about mastodon and starts at 43:30)
Adding to what others have said, opposing viewpoints are GOOD. Well reasoned opinions should be encouraged. I don't want to end up in another curated echo chamber built by someone else. Add the tools for users to block an instance and for blocks to work better in general. Give us the tools to decide our content. Leave the curation up to the users.
Otherwise you'll just end up with everyone spinning up their own instance and building a million individual echo chambers(tho it wouldn't be bad if there were more instances lol)
Idk, I thought I heard of a few doing so. Like defederating mastodon, that corpo Facebook one, ++. Though no specifics, just stuff I thought I heard; may be misremembering
I feel like the admins of hexbear are fairly conscious of their user base and have made sure to take all the necessary steps to properly federate with world. What’s concerning to me is that world preemptively defederated without hexbear showing any signs of hostility or malicious intent. Remember how long it took world to defed from exploding-heads? A literal nazi hub?
It all seems like de federation based on political ideology which, I mean, is in worlds own rights to do, but the fact that they’re the largest instance making preemptive decisions based on nothing isn’t boding very well.
That's what's worrying to me. If they federated and started brigading communities, that's one thing, but I don't think they even have the numbers to meaningfully do that to start with. It feels like ideological censorship.
I mean, they're opinionated but we've nothing concrete to suggest they'll be invasive or detrimental to other instances. Even lemmygrad generally keeps their stuff to their instance.