Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.
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Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.
Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.
The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:
- “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.”
- “The West's role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.”
- “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term "rules-based international order." It is in the Left's interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”
The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to "dismantle western propaganda" and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.
In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.
Here are some examples:
“I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”
“All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”
- https://lemmy.world/comment/121850
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1487168
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1476084
- https://lemmy.world/comment/171595
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3648500
Overall community comments:
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526128
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526086
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3652828
To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.
- https://lemmygrad.ml/post/158656
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/882559
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/540170
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/446529
Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.
We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.
I'm not in favour of pre-emptive defederating. It feels like censorship doing so and that bothers me.
Their note to their users specifically says to keep their anti establishment opinions and trolling to their own communities and don't spread it further for fear of defederation. It hardly sounds threatening to us.
Defederating can happen at any point, and I think would be better kept as a reactive response and last resort rather than proactive.
The more our large instances start fracturing and closing off from one another the less useful Lemmy will become. You're hardly blocking out an idealogy, if hexbear users wanted in they could just sign up and that would make it harder to find them. At least having them federated makes it easy to filter out @hexbear if we wanted.
Practicing tolerance goes both ways. Calling communities 'them' vs 'us' and judging a group based on the noise of the few doesn't seem like the right approach. If hexbear became a problem and moderators complained of hate speech and conflict then absolutely we use the tools we have to keep things functioning, but filtering out groups because we don't like 'their' belief systems will make us judgemental and biased as a result. This is a platform to promote discussion not an echo chamber to gather like minded opinions and bounce them off each other in perpetuity.
These are very good points, imo. Preemtively banning a sizable community without even a dialogue beforehand will only stir more extreme opinions and division between instances.
(Previous comment looks like it was bugged or something. Reposting it)
That's not the real danger. Anyone that thinks that isn't going to happen anyway is fooling themselves. All social networks trend toward individual clubhouses, and Lemmy's design is perfect for that. This is not a fault of technology, it's a people problem, it will be recreated everywhere one way or another.
The danger with preemptive moderation of any kind is that it turns moderation into gate keeping, and we simply can't trust that to be even handed, no matter if they're left, right, or center. There perverse incentives to abuse that are too numerous.
Whether it be users or instances, action should be taken after something has been done, not before. This is one of the slippiest slopes there is and it's troubling there's no standard, shared code of ethics admins are using that will prevent that
All of that being said...when I read Hexbear's rules, the tone and obvious motivations of the admins there, I can't help but feel like this isn't unwarranted. For one very basic reason:
Hexbear's motivation is openly about how it can affect other instances, and it's rules are basically just telling their users to "go forth and do the thing but don't get banned". That, more than anything else, should get a defederation. Instances should not exist for the purpose of influencing other instances. Full stop.
Just....read that shit. Really take in the open contempt they have for other instances filled with people that don't toe the line. It's like a ship flying neutral colors coming up on the starboard side but the cannons are clearly loaded, and the deck is filled with peg legs and eye patches. It's painfully obvious what they want, no parley needed.
I agree, though I hesitate to call it "pre-emptive defederating". But I can see the viewpoint.
To me, pre-emptive defederating is what was done by most Mastodon instances with Threads. Or how mastodon.art defederated from BBC. There was nothing to judge there. There was no content. Nobody could have said what kind of content would be seen on threads or the BBC instance. You could guess, sure. But you had absolutely no way of knowing.
With hexbear, there is plenty content there to judge, and historically federated influence has always been the same as local, that is, the behavior of a fediverse community is not meaningfully different outside of their own instance. As a result, the admins of instance Y can judge what federation with instance X would look like, there is data there to look at.
Pre-emptive to me would mean having no community content to judge at all, like the Threads and BBC examples.
I will add that this is in the nature of the fediverse. It is inherently not useful as a replacement to social media centers such as Reddit, because it's decentralized nature implies the fracturization has to happen, and social media works best when everyone is in one giant garden party for chance meetings and spontaneous interactions.
That's not necessarily a doom&gloom thing, it just means that by its very nature, software such as Lemmy cannot be useful to users who are seeking to replace Reddit. It can be Lemmy. Which is something else, albeit superficially similar in some regards.
(edit)
However, in general I do agree that they should probably have been allowed to federate and then re-evaluate based on how it works out. If their posts average X% downvotes, if Y% of local users end up filtering them or if a large portions of moderator actions are just from having to manage those users, they can still defederate.
I looked over the instance, and I cannot see anything I'm missing out on, but I can understand why others would want to at least give them one chance.
I completely agree with this well thought-out comment. In fact, point 3 is evidenced in this very comment section.
Yeah, I'm really surprised with regards to point 1. "We have opinions that we recognize are unsavory to others so keep the especially unsavory stuff here so we don't piss people off" seems like a good thing. I feel like defederating this early may have been the wrong call, but I don't think regenerating now is the right call either. I suppose the argument is that they don't believe it will actually be contained.