Hello Users of Hexbear I wanted to have a featured post discussing the next steps for federation. We have discussed this at length among the mod team, and it is pretty much evenly split between federating based on a "block-list" or federating based on an "allow-list". While the mod team slightly skewed in favor of federating using a block-list, meaning that any instance not specifically blocked will be able to link with hexbear.net, we will be starting with an allow-list.
What this means is that only instances specifically on our allow-list will be able to link with us, there are a few reasons for this. We wanted to slowly integrate into the fediverse to see what it would mean for hexbear.net's culture as well as how we fit into the wider fediverse. We also wanted to minimize the instances have not blocked threads, or does not block the reactionary/fash/pedo instances.
I was honestly suprised to discover that most lemmy instances block lemmygrad.ml but do not block the reactionary/pedo instances, sad.
Here is a tenative list of what our allow-list would look like: lemmy.world/instances , https://possumpat.io/instances , https://lemmy.ml/instances , https://sopuli.xyz/instances , https://discuss.tchncs.de/instances , https://lemmygrad.ml/instances , https://mander.xyz/instances , https://lemm.ee/instances , toots.matapocos.dog
a block-list would be massive and exhaustive to ensure that we do not federate with any pornographic, reactionary, fascist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, or csam-adjacent instances.
We will be creating a pinned post in c/hexbear where additional instances can be nominated for addition to the allow-list. https://hexbear.net/post/277506
Please see these previous posts by Nagarjuna regarding federation: https://hexbear.net/post/273407 and https://hexbear.net/post/273404
If you would like to officially put down your opinion on federation, please make a comment with 🧱 if you'd like to federate based on a block-list, a ✅ if you'd like to federate based on an allow-list, or a 🚫 if you do not with to federate at all, this is a temprature check and not a binding vote. Thank you and as usual off-topic comments will be removed.
Thank you for the feedback and apologies for the original emojis chosen, the final count is 58 🧱 111 ✅ 45 🚫, please correct me if that is wrong
Soft ⬛️.
Honestly, I just think there's more potential humor if hexbear is federated with a bunch of neolib servers.
I'm not like some hardcore hexbear nerd tho. I'm just an old r/cth and chapo.chat poster who came back here recently. I understand there are probably people who value drama-free existence here. Their votes should probably count more.
I just thought r/cth was at its funniest when it had to engage in a fishtank with a bunch of "well ackshully" redditors. It was funnest when people would whisper the subreddit's name like it was a curse word.
Keeping the fash and neolibs afraid by relentlessly DM'ing them demanding they post hog was the best contribution to the broader discourse since Al Gore invented the internet. Change my mind.
I have to agree, I’ve been here since day 1 and it’s the biggest thing I miss about the subreddit.
⬛ half measures are liberalism.Only block the porn and csam. Reactionary instances should be handled via adventurism, not blocked.
To hear incorrect views without rebutting them and even to hear counter-revolutionary remarks without reporting them, but instead to take them calmly as if nothing had happened. This is a sixth type.
To be among the masses and fail to conduct propaganda and agitation or speak at meetings or conduct investigations and inquiries among them, and instead to be indifferent to them and show no concern for their well-being, forgetting that one is a Communist and behaving as if one were an ordinary non-Communist. This is a seventh type.
To see someone harming the interests of the masses and yet not feel indignant, or dissuade or stop him or reason with him, but to allow him to continue. This is an eighth type.
Mao would want us to post more, and I say that as an anarchist
pedo instances
why is this shit even allowed
whatever, ✅ makes the most sense imo. anyone can spin up an instance at any time, right? and apparently anything goes. feels like we should tightly control what we allow to show up here
🚫
With the latest round of hacking and account compromise we need to shut it down, shut it all down until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
Lemmy is a mess, okay, a big mess. I know it, you know it, everybody knows it
And you know it wasn't like that until Sleepy Joe took over. When I left office after the stolen election, we had the tightest most secure servers, the best servers, we had millions of hexbear users, good posters all of them, the greatest posters, and they all slept cozy in their beds with their blahajs and wippets until the radical democrats took over, now you can't even round the corner without seeing an MS-13 cartel account posting dead animals
⬜️
And I demand that when non-local content is shown the hexbear logo in the upper left put on a pair of ideology sunglasses
Oh noice.
Federate. Communsits shouldn't be hiding themselves, should be engaging, and honestly Hexbears can do a shitload of good by engaging. There's also some pretty cool people over on lemmyworld I've been having an alright time there.
⬛️ for 1 month then re-evaluate. Gives people enough time to get used to it, for teething problems to settle, etc etc, obviously block all the shit ones as thigns go along, blah blah. If it's still a problem at that point then I would support other action.
I don't want to start out with an allow-list, we will never ever change that if it's how we start. We should at least TRY being open and engaging instead of being awkward shut ins. If it goes badly there's plenty of room to change the experiment, whereas there isn't the other way around.
EDIT: Looking through the responses I think some people are confused about what black vs white are.
EDIT2: Why isn't lemmy.world on the allow list? I'm super against the allow list it doesn't even include the biggest instance. Just yolo it then block all the shit ones it won't be that difficult to manage.
EDIT3: Oh scratch that the allow list isn't an allow list but an example of where these other lemmys are allowing.
EDIT4: Commun-sits is a funny typo.
Same opinion here. Propaganda is most effective on the internet in developed regions because of the reach and scale. Just look at capitalist propaganda for proof. You can write a post and have it reach thousands, if not potentially millions of people. In real life, you can only talk to one person at a time
Posts are also stored forever, and anybody can view them at any time. In real life, you have to repeat the same information over and over
People are also much willing to browse the internet and read something for hours and hours every week. Good luck trying to talk to the same person for hours every week about the exact same subject
You can also link sources on the internet. Have you guys every tried to educate a person IRL on why revolution and ML works? It's basically impossible because you'll just seem like a genocide denier trying to point to USSR and China as successful examples and you can't disprove anything without links
If we don't federate, then Hexbear is nothing more than some shitty Reddit clone. We ought to do everything we can to de-Redditfy Hexbear, and federation represents a step towards de-Redditfication. If we don't federate Hexbear, we might as well just jettison Lemmy altogether and use an old-school php forum instead. Some random php forum has more functionality than Lemmy by virtue of being mature software, cutting down on the amount of time admins spend to maintain this website. We still can't even have sigs, instead having some half-assed bio instead. Plus, forum ettiquette and management are also decades old at this point where weird edge cases on how to manage a forum have long since been explored. For example, let's say there's a 300+ post thread about sailing where 200+ of them are devoted to arguing the ethics of hunting. Forum mods are able to create a new "Ethics of hunting" thread and move the 200+ posts from the sailboat thread to the newly created thread so you would have two threads, a sub-100 post thread about sailboats and a 200+ thread about ethics of hunting. Depending on how anger people get, the 200+ thread could be moved into a subforum where only old accounts can comment in order to cut down on day-old wrecker alts. Reddit was such a major step backwards in terms of features and functionality, and if we're not using the one major feature that forums don't have, then what's the point of using Lemmy?
And this is not getting into the part of using our time spend online agitating bystanders and shitting on libs and the fash, which I 100% agree with you.
I'm currently unsure if I agree on the block list stance but I absolutely agree that lemmy.world should be on the initial allow-list outlined in the post.
We should absolutely be challenging the largest liberal instance and not letting it devolve into reddit 2.0.
Without, bluntly, relentless bullying on reddit I never would have discovered r/cth which absolutely provided the space at the time that, along with experiencing deteriorating material conditions and my general interest in politics would never have pushed me further and further left.
I think it's possibly the most important instance (outside of something like beehaw which will never federate with us unfortunately) to have our users post in.
I also don't see federation lasting long with Lemmy.world, but I've been generally happy to see the general aversion towards capitalism on a lot of posts there so hopefully I'm wrong on that front.
we did not include any instances that are not blocking threads.net, it is a tenative allow-list and there is a post featured in !hexbear@hexbear.net and linked in the original post to a place where instances can be nominated to be added to the allow-list or block-list
🚫 Bullying libs is fun but you can do that literally anywhere else on the internet. Hexbear has a friendly, positive and comfy vibe that you can't find anywhere else. It's by far the best online community I've been a part of. It would be a shame to lose that vibe.
🚫
I share the a lot of the same sentiment as other no voters here in that this place has been through a lot to cultivate the unique welcoming and positive site culture it has, and I would be worried that federation would destabilize that. I remember federation being talking about for a long time, but to be honest I don't see all that much utility from it. That being said, if we were to federate, I would much prefer a very tightly curated allow-list. To be fair, I was only a lurker during the r/cth days so I don't really get the impulse to federate just to agitate on other instances, but my opinion is that there is a lot more to lose now than just a simple subreddit as a lot of work as gone into developing, maintaining, and moderating this site into what it is nearly 3 years later (also wtf, time flies by).
◼️
If only as it unleashes up as a terror upon lemmy.
A ghost haunting if you will.
But ⬜️ seems the most sensible.
🔳 final vote.
🚫
I have zero interest in federation. I don't understand why people who want to post on other instances don't just make an account somewhere else in the fediverse and post away. Everyone can go post on these other places right now if they want to. Why change what we have going on here? I like it here.
✅ don't be scared of federating, we've been federated since the beginnings of Lemmygrad (3 years ago, 1 year after Lemmy [and Lemmygrad] were founded) and it works well. You can browse by Local to stay on Hexbear, or use All to browse on federation. If libs wander in, there's a report function. Personally on Lemmygrad, it's not much of an issue. Plus I know you'll bully them until it's not fun for them anymore to troll hexbear and they'll leave or defederate.
Only thing in the allow-list is sopuli will likely block you instantly, they've blocked Lemmygrad since day 1 lol.
🚫
Every time we've invited a new group to join with us it's been a disaster. If people want to prosthelytize to other users they should go where those other users are instead of bringing them here
🚫, if I wanted to shitpost on other boards, I would just register there. We got a good vibe here that I like. The stuff that other sites complain about us about - the mandatory pronoun tags, the carnism cws, the unapologetically pro-trans culture - is a lot of what I come here form.
If we do federate, ✅ for cool ones like lemmygrad (so long as they can work within our anti-sectarianism rules). We can dunk on libs without welcoming them into our house.
Anything but 🚫 is gonna have a wild resurgence in struggle sessions, I think. Even somewhere like Lemmygrad has a different culture, being explicitly ML while Hexbear is (to my knowledge) just generally leftist. I'm not totally against it, in the sense that nothing online really matters and I can just ignore the sessions, but I imagine the extra workload for mods will be significant.
Fair enough. Honestly, I can't say for certain how this will go, but I think if the mods are on board, it should be fine. As other people have mentioned, the site culture has gotten pretty good in the last few years, and I have a little more trust in the people here than in most forums.
