I figured since their admin has asked them to stop participating over here it may be worthwhile to get a new discussion going that is primarily blahaj. I’m almost certain they’ll still be upvoting so keep that in mind as that may skew things. Worthwhile to check in from instances that have already defederated them. The previous thread definitely left a bad taste in my mouth but what do y’all think?
Old thread can be found here
EDIT: With regards to the post on new federation guidelines here: https://hexbear.net/post/352119
The current top comment is:
Every instance that has talked shit and got dogpiled should be thanking us for breathing some life into their dead and boring ass websites.
After speaking to one of their admins and seeing the change in the rules on hexbear, I’m happy enough with the outcome.
Trans solidarity is incredibly important. It’s the reason this instance exists. I prioritise that.
Hexbear (and Beehaw) is one of the only Lemmy instances that genuinely prioritise the protection of their gender diverse users, and honestly, if for nothing else, I believe it’s worth a bit of discomfort to find a way of staying connected.
And what’s your opinion on this admins take from their post on their recent rule change?
It’s one of the highest upvoted comments on the thread.
Or the highest upvoted comment in that thread that’s pretty blatant on how they feel about coming over to the rest of Lemmy?
Im very saddened to hear this. Sounds like staying in an abusive relationship because “They have good times too”. I hope you rethink this decision, or myself and atleast a few others will stop using this instance
All I can say though is the reason I am making the choice not to defederate now is because I believe that this is the best chance of developing a large positive trans userbase on the lemmyverse. At the moment, unlike the broader fediverse, lemmy and kbin are quite hostile or indifferent to trans folk. Despite hexbears bullshit, one thing they are, is strongly supportive of trans rights. And if the bullshit is kept to their own instance, then we can benefit from the voices of their trans users.
If they can’t keep their bullshit under control, then we’ll cut them off.
Why not give it a chance and see how it goes?
The users of hexbear just are very bitter that we didn’t adore their aggressive comments on the last post. I really just have a hard time seeing anything good coming of remaining federated.
They just call everyone who doesn’t like their behavior a whiny liberal.
First comment for me, but I’ve been a blahaj member since the migration. When I learned about hexbear, I was really excited because I lurked r/cth back in the day and always liked their content a lot. I’m a GenX queer anarcho-syndicalist who is terminally irony poisoned and moderately online, so it’s basically my people.
So I spent a bit of time looking at what they’ve built over the last 3 years and it was impressive. The reasons behind the mandatory pronouns are fantastic. As a cis person (sorry), whenever I specify my pronouns, it’s an attempt to normalize specifying them so that it isn’t just for trans people. That’s why they added them in hexbear, and when they did that, it outed a whole bunch of transphobes and shitty people, who were then removed from the instance. Sounds like good praxis to me. Seeing cynical interpretations of that sucks.
They also don’t allow downvoting, same as us, for many of the same reasons.
What we’re seeing right now is a culture shock because they’ve only been loose in the fediverse for a week, and the folx over at hexbear are having a struggle session about it. They’ve been in a bubble for a while and they seem to know it They didn’t know their emojis were so big, they’re working out guidelines for engagement, they’re trying to rein in the users who are getting too aggressive (including admins and mods DMing people).
It would be really cool if we at least gave them a couple more weeks to get the hang of things. Their communities are easy to block and the instance as a whole is very value aligned with blahaj. Queer and leftist unity is important.
Being harassed and called a lib for criticizing their dogpiling doesn’t feel like unity to me.
Not minimizing that at all, a lot of that wasn’t cool, but it was a handful of users from a very large instance, so it wasn’t necessarily the fault of the whole instance. They’re having internal arguments about that last thread, and many of them feel gross about it (notice they aren’t here this time). They’re also gonna have some new users who are too eager to dunk on libs to think about it for 5 seconds - a human problem, not an instance one.
Editing to add this link https://hexbear.net/post/353633 Wherein hexbear tells us all their universal safe word, and links to their code of conduct.
Safewords are agreed by participants ahead of time, happening to know their magic word isn’t the same thing.
There’s a big difference between not bowing to respectability politics and respecting the culture of other instances.
I’d be willing to see if they improve but they’ve got a fair bit to make up for after that last thread.
I’m with you and feel the same way. I think that many of them came in really hot and somewhat misdirected. I think with the chance the good will outweigh the bad.
I’m also a former /r/cth poster though too, and while I’m not a ML, I’m also not repulsed by the general flavor presented by the average poster there. That’s said my impression is that the average hexbear user was more of the moretankiechapo type than the Bernie supporter type. Not a problem for me but I can see why there would be culture shock.
Either way I’m glad this is the direction Blahaj is taking if only so I can doomscroll more leftist shitposts without changing instances.
The last thread was incredibly toxic thanks to hexbear users. If that is what they do on discussions about them then they are in effect nothing more than trolls. We should Defederate.
I agree with defederation based solely on the fact that nothing can be argued without it developing into an utter shit-fest with them. They only have memes and a spectrum of weird to abhorrent takes politically to give.
What, overall would we be losing vs gaining the ability to use the rest of Lemmy in peace?
Exactly. I’ve been on boards, communities, channels and networks on dozens of different variations of internet based communication for more than two decades now. I’ve dealt with these types longer and more often than I’m proud to admit. It doesn’t matter how well spoken or well intentioned a few of them are, the people making the most noise on their behalf are shitheel trolls who aren’t worth engagement.
Mark my words, they’re trying to make a leftist version of The_Donald.
It’s up to us to call them on their bullshit before it really takes hold.
They’re not “trying to make” anything, Hexbear is one of the oldest and most established Lemmy servers out there. They’ve been around longer than either of our instances.
I commented before on that thread (before hexbear members got to weigh in) and today I still don’t think permanent defederation is warranted.
Hexbear absolutely needs to do better and some of the issue could also be with Lemmy’s technical limitations. For example, Hexbear emotes are bugged on other instances and also the fact that hexbear and other instances were able to comment on that thread which muddled the objective of the post. Only blahaj members should have participated and we know that for the better.
Defederation to me means complete erasure of an instance that threatens the integrity of the host. I joined Blahaj to be express my queerness on lemmy and Hexbear isn’t taking that away from me. Nor do I believe (imo) there was evidence of that in the 1st thread.
If it’s too inconclusive then I’d say not to defederate and instead focus on making sure Lemmy as a whole can be improved for its users.
