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:
- https://hexbear.net/c/games
- https://hexbear.net/c/technology
- https://hexbear.net/c/movies
- https://hexbear.net/c/food
- https://hexbear.net/c/vegan
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!
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
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.
I’m sorry but I think you misunderstood me.
Hexbear has very stringent rules against bugging vegans, so they won’t brigade VTC for that reason. Lemmy.ca doesn’t have that protection from hexbear, as we’re a multi purpose instance rather than vegan specific.
That’s all I was saying. I have no issues with veganism at all.
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.
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.
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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.
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’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.
