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:
- âPlease 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.â
- âThe Westâs 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.â
- âThese organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term ârules-based international order.â It is in the Leftâs 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.â
The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to âdismantle western propagandaâ and "demolish organizations such as NATOâ shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.â Itâs 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:
âI 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.â
âAll 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.â
- 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.
Achieved by the ideology of the very people youâre currently suppressing. All youâre doing is moving this community hard-right, alienating the left by saying âthis is not for youâ.
How do you think this discussion is gonna go down every single time this community ever gets linked anywhere now? Itâs gonna be âthe community that banned socialistsâ and itâs gonna attract the neoliberals and the far right as a result while ensuring everyone that leans remotely left says âoh, fuck that thenâ. Itâs a completely shortsighted move for the future of the instance. Itâs going to have nazi bar syndrome.
As soon as we had that PM where you said âsurvival of the fittestâ to me I knew something was up. You literally quoted Thatcherite/Ayn Randian philosophy to justify selectively not intervening in name squatting and community theft, a move that completely fucked over this instanceâs potential to work with any subreddit modteams in further hastening the reddit migration. Livid that I was led on by this place to begin with.
Oh you mean that time where you asked me to remove the current mod from !gamingcirclejerk@lemmy.world? Where you asked me to either add you as a topmod or rename the existing one because you were the moderators of that community on Reddit?
I told you to pick it up with the current one or to create it on another instance. I said that with your entire reddit community behind you you would quickly become to bigger âgamingcirclejerkâ without me having to intervene. It was in that context that I called it âsurvival of the fittestâ of communities on instances. Nothing too philosophical about that.
Feel free to post our entire conversation here.
Yes I do mean the time the official gamingcirclejerk team asked you to stop the misrepresentation of this GCJ, which is literally stealing the branding, and the graphics created by the official team on the subreddit, and presenting itself as a continuation of it. I asked you to resolve it. Whether that meant putting the official team in charge, or whether that meant some other resolution, because attempts to reach out were being ignored. I am not misrepresenting that conversation, neither are you really I donât see a reason to contest that other than me as topmod, nobody suggested anything other than the existing team being added to it, most likely in the existing hierarchy but we didnât get that far in conversation did we? So given thereâs no much disagreement on the content letâs just skip to the end eh?
Antik: âAnd whatâs wrong with there being two GCJâs? Surivival of the fittest basically. If you have a better team you can outgrow the current GCJ on lemmy.world easily - especially since you will be linking from the original subreddit.â
GCJ: âBecause itâs our labour? After 12 years of putting in the work to build and manage the existing community it sticks in your throat to have someone come along, use the same name, take the branding that we made with our own hands so they can benefit in taking over from the 12 years of labour that we performed to get it to where it is. If you worked on lemmyworld for 12 years, brought it up to hundreds of thousands of people with a history of thousands of media articles about its antics and influence on the industry you might also have a problem with someone else then using the same name, graphics and branding to take over simply because they typed in the name first.â
And there was no response from then on.
After discussing it with some of the team gossip got around various reddit mod backrooms and bish bash bosh nobody wanted to have anything to do with this space anymore because it doesnât respect the work and effort people put into creating those communities and bringing them up to what they are today.
Like, what exactly did you expect this response to do? Inspire faith in the way this team respects other teams, wants to maintain positive relations and genuinely does care about the work people put into their communities? It was flippant. And the expectation was that same flippancy about everything would be the experience modteams would all get if communities were made here - so they werenât, with completely valid concerns.
And now whatâs happening? More incredibly shortsighted decision making. This topic is going to come up every single time lemmyworld is ever mentioned now. It is going to haunt the site. And on top of that the site already struggles with clear wreckers trying to harm it, coming from fascists or from some other instance that wants to see it fail or maybe reddit, who the fuck knows. And now itâs taken the risk of adding thousands of extremely pissed off and sleighted leftists to that, completely unnecessarily, because you know damn well they absolutely wanted to play nicely. Are these the actions of an instance carefully thinking about its health(avoiding drama that inspires unstoppable wrecker behaviour that constantly cripples the site) and maximising its growth(networking with and promoting the transition of users from elsewhere) while promoting a positive environment(making people nice to each other instead of hostile)? Fuck no theyâre not.