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
Curious what you think the short-term advantage is of defedding these 3? I never saw programming.dev or aussie.zone users in our threads really (browsing by hot or new so maybe I miss the Active shitfights), and only a few .ee users, mostly converts not shit-stirrers.
And I could be wrong, maybe there is a silent faction that feel the same, but I count a grand total of 2 users making this safety argument. I don't think its a viable way forward, and I wish I could find this great piece of writing I read on the subject because I think it would really advance the discourse here
Short term advantage is that we have a few less reactionary posts every day. That's a good thing, we should always be trying to decrease the number of harmful and/or reactionary posts. If you do look at the modlog there's usually 1-5 posts a day removed from ee, dev, or aussie users. So I understand the desire to keep them out.
Long term disadvantage is a slow and steady decline in the user base. If there's no clear path to growing the site, every time someone decides to leave, they're not getting replaced. That leads to a decrease in overall engagement, which leads to more people deciding to leave, and the circle of life ends with that. No room for reactionary posting if nobody posts at all
I see a total of two users banned, one temporary, in the past like 4-5 days, both ee users, none in the past 2d, but I guess the general point still stands. But I feel defedding is a very blunt instrument. If they're getting moderated, I think we've mitigated a large portion of the potential harm already, and the scale of the problem is pretty small. Not worth isolating us from a large userbase instance over
100% agreed on the long term outlook. federation is our best chance at keeping the user churn to at least net zero if not positive
@a_blanqui_slate
Wait how do I ping users
@a_blanqui_slate@a_blanqui_slate@hexbear.net