Hey hexbears just want to update everyone.
We took the weekend to properly consider and are removing: programming.dev , aussie.zone , and lemm.ee from our allow-list.
We will look at refederation with lemm.ee after local-only communities are developed. When that feature is available we would really like to consider changing every hexbear community to local-only except for chapotraphouse, askchapo, news, and the_dunk_tank. The final say on if a community is local only or not is 100% up to the mod team on that community.
The reason for this is that lemm.ee despite having twice our monthly active users has a 700k annual comment rate to hexbear's 1 million, in addition lemm.ee has very little active communities that do not exist on hexbear.
Resulting in lemm.ee benefit of federation being votes and views, with a secondary benefit of comments.
However, as expressed by users belonging to marginalized groups, comments from .ee users are often lib-shit and in some cases outright hostile. While many on hexbear love dunking on these lost libs the duty to protect marginalized users is much more important.
The end vote for programming.dev and aussie.zone was a tie, so we decided to break the tie in favor of defederation. The decision on lemm.ee was much harder as the average user did express desire to remain federated however the admin team decided that a temporary removal from our allow-list was the best option.
As an admin team we have never wanted to prioritize growth, and we wanted to give federation with liberal instances a try, however we consider providing a safer browsing experience for marginalized users more important than the opportunity to dunk.
While user side instance blocking and local sort are options, neither address the issue of federated instance users coming into posts in hexbear communities to make reactionary comments.
Thank you everyone who gave input and please provide any feedback, comments, concerns, etc in comments.
final vote count:
federation
all 32
aussie.zone 27
lemm.ee 41
programming.dev 27
lemmy.blahaj.zone 5
defederation
all 40
aussie.zone 19
lemm.ee 4
programming.dev 19
lemmy.blahaj.zone 43
Lemmy.ml or lemm.ee, maybe? The latter due to reliability of lemmy.ml being low and my private chats with the owner way back being pretty okay compared to most libs. Or just creating the one I've had in my head for years. I don't dislike the grad folks either but just prefer a space that isn't sectarian. It will probably take me a week to make my mind up tbh.
Lemm.ee is better imo if you want as little people to immediately write you off as possible. Lemmy.ml, despite being the flagship Lemmy instance, is too associated with the "tankie" devs.
And it sucks to see you (mostly) go, but it is what it is. Just stop by the news megathread every once in a while.
Oh and if you find a newer instance that's cool, give me a head's up. I don't think it's wise at all to be invested in a Lemmy instance that's against federation. Like, what's the point then? You might as well just turn Hexbear into an old-school forum. God knows we're still missing shit that has been available in forums for decades.
If they go with .ee they won't be able to come post. So, yeah...
If you wanna get a stark picture, make your outside account with a different name and pfp and post here.
There’s a significantly different standard applied to outside accounts.
Not making a judgement about it right or wrong, but it exists.
This is absolutely true and it's been an issue since the beginning of hexbear before federation, after moving off of Reddit. New accounts get treated with extreme suspicion. The only reason I didn't get banned on the spot back when hexbear was Chapo chat and first went online, was because one of the admins decided to give me a second chance after getting banned on some other lifeboat server.