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.
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I definitely appreciate the hesitation in defederation, but I’m in favor of defeding with both hexbear and lemmygrad.
I’ve seen more than enough “Stalin did nothing wrong posts” to know that discussions are pointless and would lead me only to frustration and a desire to drink.
Honestly the hardcore tankies initially soured me from joining the fediverse at first, until I understood how the fediverse functioned and realized it was just a loud minority that held extreme views. It’s still disturbing to read genocide denialism while openly supporting things such as authoritarianism and Russian imperialism.
Yeah, I checked out Lemmy some time ago and noped out pretty quick after seeing it was mostly just Lemmygrad at the time. Happy to be here now that there’s a lot more going on and not super keen on that face of Lemmy gaining a bigger presence again.
Tankies are souring a lot of people from joining in my subjective experience. One of my friends questioned the presence of them and the views of the developers (and also why the “main” (not accurate but they haven’t even joined, so) instance lemmy.ml had the .ml domain to begin with) and I couldn’t give a satisfactory answer at the time, as I didn’t know enough about the place yet.
Upstanding instances should do their part to defederate from any tankie or fascist instances, so we can all distance ourselves from extremist rhetoric and make it seem like an actually OK place to hang out.
I moderate 8 subreddits with a combined userbase of 4.2million subscribers. And a bunch of small ones.
Originally I intended to bring those userbases over here. But the way this instance has been run and the interactions I and other mods have had with the team over PM trying to resolve various issues resulted in each and every one of the modteams I’m in saying “yeah fuck that” over time and getting to know the place. This would have resulted in stickyposts and bringing over thousands, perhaps 10s of thousands, in extremely enthusiastic waves. And this didn’t just affect the teams I’m part of, because everyone on those teams also shares links to many many other teams through all the backrooms.
Communists aren’t the problem. This instance’s policies - which started out looking incredibly promising and had everyone highly optimistic - has singlehandedly killed the interest of dozens and dozens of modteams and by extension the opportunity to bring across massively more people.
(previous comment bugged, reposting it)
Given the way Hexbears own rules are written, the tone and very obvious motivations behind it, I’m not sure we’re missing much.
But would you care to share some examples of what the issues are?
Sorry what? I can’t read context so I don’t quite get what you’re trying to say. Could you maybe quote what you were responding to?
I’m not sure what the problem is with hexbear’s rules. It’s a socialist instance of course it aims to remain socialist. Do you look at the lgbt instances and say “how dare they have motivations to keep their community lgbt!” No of course you don’t. It’s a fundamentally absurd notion.
Hexbear’s goal is to be leftist and have a fucking laugh while doing it. Nothing more. This shit has created a mountain of entertainment, nothing changes for Hexbear but this instance has pissed and shit all over itself.
Are you the PoppinKREAM from reddit?
Yes I am, hello o/
I had enough of people like you, but you don’t see me asking that we defederate you.
I was demonstrating a point.
just admit you were wrong. It’s ok.
“Stalin did nothing wrong” posts. Where are those, exactly?
We criticize Stalin plenty. We just don’t buy that he ate babies and murdered innocent farmers with his bare hands.
Freedom of speech does not constitute an obligation to listen.
Good for you!
What a great sentence, well said. I’m going to use that in the future.
I usually support that sentiment, but it only applies when it is in your hands whether we listen or not. In this case, the admins singlehandedly decided that none of us can. This is pretty much a form of censorship IMO
The admins don’t control you. You can have an account anywhere else you want to. So unless you’re paying for the servers here, you can deal with the Terms of Service or not use it.
As I said in another reply:
The people who own a lemmy instance have the right to associate (federate) with whatever other instances meet their guidelines.
If you don’t agree, then you are free to join a different lemmy instance that is federated with objectionable material.
You don’t have the right to demand that lemmy.one meets your standards. You don’t own it.
If you find that no other instance federates with what you want, you’re free to make your own, with blackjack, and hookers.
For example I don’t want to listen to you. Go away. Defederate yourself.
You totally have that ability… it’s under “Block User”.
What gives you the right to constrain what other people see? Just go ahead and ban them yourself if they offend you so.
I just created this new account because people like you see in themselves the right to constrain what I see.
The people who own a lemmy instance have the right to associate (federate) with whatever other instances meet their guidelines.
If you don’t agree, then you are free to join a different lemmy instance that is federated with objectionable material.
You don’t have the right to demand that lemmy.one meets your standards. You don’t own it.
If you find that no other instance federates with what you want, you’re free to make your own, with blackjack, and hookers.
I’m not in favour of pre-emptive defederating. It feels like censorship doing so and that bothers me.
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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.
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Defederating can happen at any point, and I think would be better kept as a reactive response and last resort rather than proactive.
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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.
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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.
I’m not in favour of pre-emptive defederating.
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.
The more our large instances start fracturing and closing off from one another the less useful Lemmy will become.
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.
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What the fuck?
I was assured by this server that it has no problem with socialists. This is worse than I expected it to be, I expected a half-hearted attempt to justify this action through means other than “they’re socialists and hold socialist views”.
To the three points here:
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“Western propaganda” - Is capitalist propaganda. Of course socialists oppose it, we oppose capitalism.
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“Nato” - An anti-nato position is held by literally every single socialist organisation in Europe. You will not find a socialist org with a pro-nato position. Ffs just look at DiEM25’s position on this, it’s probably the most well known cross-nation alliance of socialist groups and parties in europe including people like Yanis Varoufakis, Jeremy Corbyn and Zizek to name a few but that really doesn’t do the size of the DiEM organising alliance justice. Even Noam Chomsky is anti-nato ffs. What the fuck are you doing acting like this is a fringe position not held by a huge number of people over here in Europe and at the forefront of leftist politics on the continent? Taking the position “you’re not allowed to be anti-nato” is blatant american imperialism.
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“It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished.” - Duh? What the fuck do the liberals running this instance think socialists believe exactly? When Marx calls for revolution do you think that we mean to continue the organisations that existed prior? No, we seek to abolish them and create new socialist organisations that serve the new socialist state we seek to create.
Absolutely mindblowing that this instance ever pretended it was going to play nicely with socialists. I’m disgusted.
Every single take above is also the take you will get from every single socialist community over on reddit. The anarchist communities will also even have an anti-nato position. Like jesus christ. I expected this post to be bad but I didn’t expect it to be “Yeah fuck socialists, oh and fuck what anarchists believe too”.
I’m flabbergasted that @ruud@lemmy.world just completely lied about not intending to block based on ideology, and it’s extremely telling that Hexbear gets a pre-emptive defederation for this shit while literal actual nazis were a chore to get defederated.
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