The last few posts made here, they’ve shown up, made the most inane, idiotic, and pointless comments, upvoted each other in a frenzy of circle jerking, and generally made a pest of themselves.
They’re a nuisance, and add nothing of value to the Lemmy experience.
Here’s my view. Lemmy.nz is intended for an NZ audience. Hexbear has been defederated from 5 of the top 8 largest instances. This is problematic for us, as their All is much more likely to show lemmy.nz posts than All on other instances. It starts to feel like we’re being brigaded, even though we aren’t, because their instance is the 10th largest Lemmy instance and yet they don’t see most Lemmy posts (but they do see ours).
I don’t have a problem with international audiences occasionally posting in our posts, even people with no connection to NZ. I think it provides some great perspective on our issues. But when you post a thread, and it gets overrun with international users, I think this becomes a problem.
This may not seem fair on them, but what I want is a friendly-feeling community, and recently we have had a different vibe.
Personally, I have become less inclined to participate. I’ve written up a post about the Papakangahorohoro street, then decided not to post it because by the time I’d written my 150 word article the thread had such hexbear comments as “Get over it crakkkas” and “sounds like the crackers should go back to europe if they dont like it”.
I want to participate in a friendly community, and the last couple of days I have felt like I didn’t want to participate because of the hexbear participation - and the participation of others stemming from that. For that reason, and no other, I think we should defederate. However, I want to hear what others think. Some counter-arguments would be great.
Yeah, I have been attempting to avoid defederating with instances from mine but with HexBear I just kind of had to because they were taking over every popular post.
Edit: I did read OP’s initial exchange and I think OP massively overreacted and the HexBear commenters were largely fine. However, the wider issue still stands which is why I did in my case.
Here’s my view. Lemmy.nz is intended for an NZ audience. Hexbear has been defederated from 5 of the top 8 largest instances. This is problematic for us, as their All is much more likely to show lemmy.nz posts than All on other instances. It starts to feel like we’re being brigaded, even though we aren’t, because their instance is the 10th largest Lemmy instance and yet they don’t see most Lemmy posts (but they do see ours).
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that when instance like hexbear is defederated, they can still see your posts, they can even comment and vote on them. You just don’t see it anymore. They would have to defederate on their side too, to completely block it.
You’re on kbin.social, so I’m gonna make some assumptions about how it works, because I really only have a decent understanding of lemmy - though I’m assuming this is how other activitypub federated services work too.
While it may seem like you (on kbin.social) are replying to this post (on lemmy.nz), that is not the case. You server has a copy of the reply and all the other posts and comments. When you comment, it gets posted to the kbin.social community (magazine?) called !newzealand@lemmy.nz.
Behind the scenes, your server will syncronise your copy with the official lemmy.nz copy.
A user on (say) lemmy.world will also have a copy on their server. Your server will not send your comment directly there, rather it sends it to the only source of truth (the community host server), then the host server will send it out to all servers where there is a subscriber.
By defederating, they will no longer get any updates for any lemmy.nz communities, but will still see their own comments (and other users on their server will see them).
Honestly, I’m not sure what happens when e.g. a lemmy.nz user posts to lemmy.ml who are one of the few large servers still federated with hexbear - do the comments go to hexbear? Not sure. Do hexbear comments made to lemmy.ml federate back to lemmy.nz? Again, not sure (I suspect not).
they can still see your posts, they can even comment and vote on them. You just don’t see it anymore.
This would actually be ideal, as long as their downvotes don’t get federated back to us.
Does lemmy not have a block user function where you won’t see their comments? I guess that doesn’t help when you want to wholesale block users from an instance.
I personally haven’t seen anything worth defederating over so far. In any case I usually just scroll past or don’t interact with comments that are inflammatory. However as you’re the admin it’s your call. My only reservation is that we don’t have many contributors as it is.
Also you should have posted your 150 word article anyway.
Personally I would much prefer the smaller, tight knit group of NZ and NZ-adjacent posters over a swarm of non-NZ users that are posting here because they can’t see the vast majority of posts on lemmy (out of the top 8 servers, there are about 36,000 monthly active users. Of those, about 2/3rds of those users are on servers that have defederated with hexbear.)
My 150 word article would have led to more… discussion - and I just didn’t have it in me to start a conversation like that where there were already aggressive and flippant comments.
While I do enjoy the smaller community of the NZ instance currently, if it ever grows larger I think you’ll be facing similar challenges with users as can be seen with the NZ subreddit on reddit. Such is the nature of social media. So it’s worth thinking about how to manage it in the future is what I’m saying, I guess.
That happened to me too. I came in yesterday with something to say, and when I saw that some of the first people in there were making overly simplistic statements using (problematically class-based) American insults with hexbear-specific spelling, I just didn’t want to post in there.
They have a full on culture of dogpiling/bullying using in-group memes and it gets overwhelming.
I say this as someone who a) likes the name Papakangahorohoro and b) thinks the locals should thank their lucky stars that it’s not named after a local councillor’s friend’s uncle like so many new development streets are.
https://hexbear.net/post/423647
https://hexbear.net/comment/3824503
Just to inform this conversation about why OP is having a fit
Well I think that comment did deserve what it got in the second one. Cant we all (in NZ) pronounce Ngāruawāhia fairly well?
I wouldn’t support defederation based on those two threads, but you hexbears can be a bit ‘hot’ in some topics
Papakangahorohoro
I saw the word once I just typed it from memory. You tell me if I got it wrong. No brainer
As I keep saying, they’re all like that.
They just flood a thread with the most abrasive takes possible, every single time. I believe 196 has already defederated for similar reasons.
I have temporary blocked hexbear so we can have the conversation in peace.
Edit: Apparently I needed to hit save, so now we are temporarily defederated from hexbear.
I’ve read the various comments about it and have no idea why you would have to defederate with them. As long as they play by the rules it should be fine. Just downvote if you don’t agree. The voting system will take care of it.
I think defederation should be a last resort.
Currently less than 1/4 of the votes on this post (the post itself) are from users subscribed to this community. Hexbear users far outnumber us, it’s not even remotely close. With 5 out of the 8 instances with over 1000 monthly active users having defederated them, we are showing up much higher in their All feed. Lemmy.world defederated them, and they have more users than all the other 7/8 put together. Over 2/3rds of lemmy content is no longer available to them, so they see our posts about random NZ stuff, and decide to comment on them. Because there are so many of them, it floods the posts.
Basically, it takes us from being a community of NZ and NZ-adjacent people, to being a community of international hexbear users talking about NZ. It completely changes the tone of the instance.
It’s not something they have done (other than whatever made the others want to defederate), but the point of the fediverse is to curate who you federate with in order to build the community you want, then people join the instances that curate the way they want. I’m not so keen on a community of hexbear users talking about NZ. The occasional one was fine, but to have our threads swamped is just not what I’m here for.
Also, hexbear users are filling all the posts from different instances trying to decide if people want to defederate or not. It’s bad taste.
I try not to be a “my way or the highway” kind of guy, but I haven’t yet seen a good counter-argument to my other post.
I can’t see from the two threads I read through anything particular bad or offensive. Are you able to give some examples of where you feel their dialogue is impeding lemmy.nz in some way?
I stopped using my lemmy.world account nearly as much after they started blocking a bunch that I was interested in, and I’d hate to see that going on here, but if there are valid examples I’d like to see them.
Hi Dave. You make some very good points and you seem like a reasonable guy. I’d like to weigh in with some additional context from another server that is currently wrestling with this question.
Of the top 8 servers, lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, and sh.itjust.works are the three that have not defederated hexbear. Ironically, hexbear chose not to federate with sh.itjust.works when they connected to the rest of Lemmy, so although we never defederated them, they don’t see our content. I see all of their comments on other instances, but they never see me/us, and thus never harass our users directly. I take a strange pride in the fact that the current boogeyman of Lemmy was actually scared to federate with SJW 😅
Unfortunately for you, it also means that hexbears are only seeing content from 2 of the 8 largest instances. They have 1.6k MAUs. You guys only have 140. Lemm.ee has 3.7k, lemmy.ml has 2.9k, and SJW has 2.3k.
In my view, the hexbear community is actually a positive force on this platform. They are frequently abrasive, but they ultimately have the potential to contribute to what we are building here. They are extremely active and some of them are quite intelligent. But they’ve also become accustomed to a privileged position on their own walled-in platform, and they need to be reminded that their views are considered very extreme by the average person.
It seems to me that the actual content posted by hexbears is not necessarily the problem, but rather it’s the volume of comments and upvotes that disrupts the natural flow of the community, causing people such as yourselves to feel as if you’re being brigaded. I think with the support of hexbear admins and some time to adjust, hexbear users could learn to be less overbearing in terms of their engagement with content on other instances.
My general position is that this would best be resolved by speaking directly to the hexbear admins and requesting for them to control the behavior of their users. That being said, the specific transgressions referenced in this post are quite mild, imho.
You obviously need to do what is right for your own users, but I tend to view events from a strategic perspective, and my assessment is that hexbear users can be a benefit for Lemmy, and it’s not too much of a burden to work through these minor conflicts and try to bring them under the same roof with the rest of Lemmy. It’s contingent on them being cooperative and reasonable, but surely they deserve a chance to prove that they can be?
There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution that works, eh dave?
I feel the fact you decided this was necessary kinda proves my point though.
Not really, I messaged @dave so he could be on top of it if it got ‘interesting’.
Now you have got very anti hexbear and ‘they’ have not been antagonistic in this thread.
No, but they have absolutely flooded the thread. They certainly got antagonistic in the previous thread though, basically calling everyone who disagrees with them racist.
Actually after reading the context, I don’t agree with OP at all. I want more places to have Te Reo names, and I want people who dislike it to complain so they can be shut down. I love Te Reo and I want to defend it.
Setting aside the Te Reo argument, in my opinion the OP is guilty of much of what they accuse others of and appears to taunt others into further participation (again, my opinion). If lemmy.nz is going to become a closed community, it will simply become an echo chamber of that closed community - this is the biggest failure of social media - is that what users want lemmy.nz to become?
Keep it open. If it becomes a closed community, I’ll probably wander off.
I suspect Lemmy will grow (or die) to allow those that create continual problems to be banned or similar - perhaps we just need to wait a little longer for those features? Defederation seems far too coarse/broad brush to me for what I perceive to be, at this point in time, just a nuisance that can be ignored.
If you’re getting that worked up about mild non-offensive inane comments I hate to imagine how worked up you get using a self-checkout machine. Chill out.
Holy shit dude, have you used one?
Please place item in bagging area. Are you using your own bags? [Yes]. Please wait for staff member to come over and give you permission to use your own bags. Would you like a receipt? [No]. Please take this 30 centimetre long piece of receipt paper that isn’t a receipt, it’s just printed with stuff you don’t want.
I don’t think it’s justified getting all upset about a few comments, but if I saw an article about someone getting arrested for smashing a self-checkout machine then I’d assume the machine probably deserved it.
Once again, the issue is that none of them actually participated meaningfully in the discussion, just turned the thread into one big circle jerk.
None of the individual comments were particularly bad, it’s the overall effect that is the issue.
the overall effect he’s objecting to is a general anti-racist sentiment, just to clarify that for everyone
Not wanting to learn a tounge twister of a word to call an ambulance is racist? Or spell it out to every single time you give your address?
It would be an ongoing hassle for the residents.
