Hello, users of Hexbear:
We wanted to come back and mention that the mod team has been reflecting and performing self-crit on some recent events.
First regarding federation:
Upon review, there are some aspects of federation we could have improved on and some that we feel worked well.
For now, we are satisfied with the current allow-list with one change, we will be adding programming.dev back to the allow-list in approx. 48 hours. You may check out the post discussing and voting on that instance here: https://hexbear.net/post/528899
Furthermore, there are a lot of great comments in the first Admin SPIL JICE post, which can be found here: https://hexbear.net/post/514276
With regard to that, we would like to say that:
There aren't any more lemmy instances out there to even federate with, all the instances over 150 we are either currently federated with, removed from our allow-list, or they block hexbear.net.
As far as I know, this same set of qualifiers also applies to smaller instances. After the addition of programming.dev I don't really know any other instances that would be anywhere remotely as impactful as our federation and subsequent defederation from lemmy.blahaj.zone or sh.itjust.works.
We recognize that we could have done a much better job communicating what instances are about and having a clearer process for discussion → voting → federation. We have taken on some of the comment's suggestions for this process, which I hope can be seen in the programming.dev post.
Specifically what the inter-instance admin communication process looks like, why the instance may be a good fit, and some notable communities there with the programming.dev post. In addition to spacing out not only requests for additions, but the duration of which users are allowed to discuss and vote.
We would like to state that we thought that front-loading the stress of federation rather than drip-feeding it was the best course of action when we initially started federation. The intent was to have a few stressful weeks but remove untenable instances, resulting in a stable allow-list as quick as possible.
This choice caused undue stress to our marginalized comrades, and for that I am very sorry.
With that being said, there are no plans to do any kind of second instance or "air-lock" instance
If another person wants to go through the effort of making an air-lock instance, we can federate, but the mod team does not have the desire or honestly have the bandwidth to admin/organize a 2nd hexbear so to speak
Looking to the future, here are some personal observations of what could occur, after the addition of user-side instance blocking
- I don't foresee lemmy.ca , SIJW , lemmy.blahaj , lemmy.world , feddit.de or beehaw.org removing hexbear from their blocklist anytime soon
- Maybe the situation with lemm.ee could change
- I don't see the situation with lemmygrad or lemmy.ml changing as those admins are all chill with us
- The rest of them are small hobby instances which really don't impact or create drama on our side
I also want to reiterate some points from our code of conduct in attempts at cultivating more good-faith discussion and to help our ND comrades.
"Please "remember the human" and be kind to your fellow leftists."
"Respect that people have differences of opinion and that every leftist has a place in our community."
"We are a platform that welcomes anyone who wants to be here in good faith"
How this looks in practice:
- Don't make excessively dry/hard to parse/reactionary bit accounts
- Don't label users as wreckers, instead use questions to better understand or block them
- Don't argue or assume bad-faith from other users, even if they are a young account (remember, people remake accounts often)
- Consider using tone indications when appropriate
- Don't use ableist language
- Please report posts/comments you find are against the code of conduct.
Finally, I want to remind users that they are able to curate their feed in their user settings, allowing a user to set their feed to All / Local / Subscribed.
All is content from all federated instances, Local is content from Hexbear.net only, and Subscribed is content from subscribed communities (on all instances federated) only.
In addition, you are able to block users, and report any unsolicited or harassing DMs.
Users are encouraged to provide additional feedback, thoughts, concerns, etc. on Hexbear as a site, federation, or moderation in this post.
Thank you for all helping to make this site unique and amazing!
Whatever you do I hope you keep the format if that
/
thread, that shit was hilarious.beehaw.org
dont try those guys, most of their userbase is lemmys who lemmygrad bullied out for being fascist, rabid anti-communists. They're the Gusanos of lemmy.
Didn't we already try federating with them or am I misremembering that?
I appreciate so much the openness and careful consideration that goes into administrative decision-making here. This is a beautiful little piece of the internet; thank you for all the labor and love you've put into it.
I agree, I love the little queer punk dive bar we’ve all built for ourselves here out on the fringes of the internet.
also hard to parse bit accounts. rip BMF, we hardly knew he
Death to America
I said it in the other thread, but i don't see a problem with weird or inscrutable humor. Even NT people don't get every joke. Sometimes half the fun is not getting it and puzzling over what it means. I mean, it starts to be art, and plenty of art is far from transparent. Requiring that all jokes immediately make sense to everyone might stifle humor on the site.
What's more important imo is that people feel comfortable when they don't get it, and feel comfortable asking for clarification. There shouldn't be a "only cool kids get it" vibe.
PS, I'm still listening to people's takes and figuring out what I think, if your feelings differ from mine PLEASE feel free to share with meAs someone that both loves bits and cannot always understand intent where it is obvious to others, I think that's decent nuance. Not just "oh is this an extremely weird racist I need to cyberbully" but "will I be mocked and humiliated for responding sincerely/asking for clarification" as that's when it gets really stressful. If you're doing a bit as a reactionary, at least don't be mean if someone believes you and responds how one should if they encounter a chud.
Luv me mods, luv me trans comrades, 'ate chuds. Simple as
Don't like it? There's the door.
Someone made a bit where they explained the hexbear motto. PPB. polite, precise, brief. This is such a good bit we should run with it.
PPB is also the Portland Police Bureau so that extra pig for the PB
I'm liking where things have settled. All I was hoping for was grad and ml. I got trek lemmy as a bonus, which is nice.
I figured blahaj wouldn't work, but I think it's cool you tried. Sucks about the DM thing. I felt bad that happened.
I don't wanna say it was worth putting stress on people here, but I think it's funny that
was manifested across the fediverse. I hope they keep telling people scary stories about how "hexbear is pro trans, has an unapologetic tone, and has fun emojis that annoyed me (a redditor)" because I think it can be a beacon for some future friends.I hope they keep telling people scary stories about how "hexbear is pro trans, has an unapologetic tone, and has fun emojis that annoyed me (a redditor)" because I think it can be a beacon for some future friends.
I also think that the more incoherently somebody describes our position, the more curiosity we will receive. it's one thing to be just called a wrecker instance, it's another thing entirely for our description to be "far left tankies but love Putin, everybody has pronouns but are alt-right 4channers pretending to be LGBT, stupidly large emojis and they keep posting images of a pig shitting on its own balls when confronted," if I saw that description of of a community out in the wild I'd be like "holy shit, what the fuck is going on over there? I gotta check this out!" honestly I think that a similar weird description is what brought me over to the subreddit
a similar weird description is what brought me over to the subreddit
lmao same
We have the best admins and best mods I love you Carcosa thank you for your service in the trenches
For tone indicators, could we get an emoji set for those? I think having a button/icon would make adding said indicators easier/more fun for users
Here's a list of some tone indicator emojis that I've seen used on discord servers. I bring them up since they're pretty slick looking and have both PNG and SVG formats ready on an open license: https://github.com/benhamill/tone-emoji
the UI for it requires clicking into the user you wish to block profile
You can also block a user from one of their comments. The three-dots "more" menu at the bottom-right of each comment includes a "Block user" option (circle-with-diagonal-line icon).
I'd love to read more about the changes you made internally for better mod dispute resolution.
I want to pushback in the strongest possible terms that a crusade against perceived 'pedantry' and the inability to infer a users meaning at all times (or even know you may be misinterpreting it) at risk of a ban will make this site more 'usable' for ND people. It will make it more usable for certain ND, but pedantic style is literally a diagnostic criteria for autism I don't know how you can make a blanket statement that it will make it better for all ND people.
When two people acting within the rules have such radically different communication styles that not good can come of it, that is an absolute use case for the block and I'm flabbergasted that someone feels comfortable excluding one set of ND over another as opposed to exploring other options. I was able to have a productive conversation with dozens of other users before the user in question came in and things broke down.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply I thought the kids were engaging in that. I was responding to the fact that specific other posters are pushing that view in several different threads and Im glad to see that's not the position of the admin team.
Agree with everything you said. You write comments very well, in this post and in the previous community discussion post.
Excellent post! The reason I tend to be a lurker is due to trauma from dealing with NTs misinterpreting me and attacking my use of language, and the effort I go through every time I post scouring my words to make sure they are "correct" in an effort to prevent that from happening.
Thank you Egon for advocating for folks like me.
(for context, I have been pretty active on a non-hexbear alt under a different name.)I still think it would be good to have an initiative to make mega-threads on the most common subjects of disagreeance
yes! please!
which could then be linked so users could use that rather than having to rewrite the same essay 15 times.
If you mean linking outsiders to a pre-written response by someone else, in most cases I think it's a bad move. I think often you really do have to just copy and paste parts of your old comments sometimes, and add changes to fit the flow and vibe of the current conversation, although you should definitely cannibalize and paraphrase other people's stuff from hexbear. I think the only time you can get away with linking a pre-written response is when the other person is already feeling open-minded and curious.
When you link directly to someone else's pre-written response, 1) it comes across as you not thinking for yourself, and 2) libs won't read it. Often the only way to make libs read is to address the text directly to them as part of a discussion. This way, they have to read it so they can respond to you. Another benefit: other libs in the thread are more likely to read the text this way, because the person you're talking to stands in for all of them, and they get invested in the exchange.
Related to that, often I think it's best not to lay all your cards down in the first comment. Hook people in with one or a few good points, then follow up with more.
And finally, this is sort of a fine line, but, I never insult anyone. I get frustrated, I get passionate, I call people out, but I never malign anyone, even implicitly. I always assume (or pretend) that people are good but misinformed, or just have not thought about things from a certain angle yet. I remember my past self. IMO the only time we should insult people is when we are dead sure of three things: 1) most of the audience is against them, 2) they are a lost cause, and 3) they are a huge jerk who should be insulted.
The China thread someone made a while before federation has been wildly useful to me due to that.
I made that.
I think such an effort would be good, both to decrease stress for the many brave posters in the trenches, but also for everyone else. During federation it became clear to me that a lot of users here act just as a lot of the libs we mock: They rest easy because they "know" themselves to be right, and therefore do not ever investigate their beliefs. The difference is that the users on hexbear are immersed in an environment were others do investigate these beliefs, and such the users have a somewhat valid reason to feel their beliefs are based on a sound logical and factual basis. However the issue becomes clear when they are pressed or when the site disagrees on something.
yes!
and sometimes I think it's ok to acknowledge when we don't know something. That way, when you take a blow in a conversation, it's a blow to you rather than a blow to leftism.
I am also frustrated about the comment of being able to "block" users in response to this discussion. When users are discussing an issue of site culture as a whole, then the solution is not an individual one of "blocking" users. As I wrote on the other thread, if you think this is a solution to a valid complaint of behaviour making this site less welcome, then let's stop banning transphobes and people can just block them individually instead
this is maybe a general fediverse/lemmy question, is there a way to more visually show users when they are posting on another instance or even viewing posts from another instance? Like small symbols or colours.
I think federation on the whole has been a success so far, a funny kind of dialectical process.
I agree and would also like clearer UX when popping out of instance to interact with folx. As far as I’m aware, that’s not a setting that can be be adapted right now. In the future, I’d love to see a bit more of a UX indicator when that occurs as well.
This is all a work in progress. We really believe in what both good federation and Lemmy as a project itself can achieve. Thanks for coming along for that ride, we know dialectical synthesis can be bumpy sometimes.
y'all are great thanks for doing what you do
On the possibility of an "air lock instance", and mainly for everyone here reading who would be in favor - I don't think that can work. It'd be apparent what we're doing from the outside, and the obvious signal to other instances is that our air lock instance would be our dedicated shitposting and PPB instance. It'd get defederated with nearly everyone right away. For better or for worse, having a single instance and federating with it shows our sincerity in participating in the broader discussion.
Wouldn't an "air lock" instance only federate with Hexbear and not with anything else? I'd assume that's the entire point of having one.
I thought of it in reverse, i.e. the airlock is the bridge between hexbear and the rest of lemmy, and the airlock is the channel communications come through. Hexbear would then defederated from everyone but the airlock, and the airlock would federate everyone. I don't know if there's a commonly understood interpretation but either way, the problem I'd see with that is that having one instance that federates and one that's safe means that we'd have our instance that we can shitpost from without recourse and is almost meant for shitposting, and then our "safe" instance where we could wash our hands of the shitposting and come back to isolated discussion. Seeing the amount of PPB we've been dishing out and knowing it'd all be coming directly from one instance, I think I know what would happen.
I’ve always envisioned the airlock as being a place for safe spaces away from newly federated servers.
E: current hexbear is outer heaven, the new zone is inner heaven.
I keep only hearing about the votes after another shit instance full of reactionaries has been added to our allow list. Do these posts get stickied and i just need new glasses or do i have to permanently visit c/anouncements if i want a say in whether to re-federate with a provenly super problematic instance full of the worst bazinga brain techbro reactionary dingdongs? I fucking hated every single user with a @programmingdev behind their username that i've seen so far, they all where insufferable chuds and they fucking reeked, honestly not looking forward to being federated with that insignificant shit site again and tbh i see zero reason to even bother with such a tiny loser instance unless they're super cool (which they very clearly are not).
General feedback on Hexbear: The megathread is only visible if you're subbed to the comm it's posted in. This means I can't use the "subscribed" view option as intended if I want access to the mega, and am instead stuck using "local" and scrolling post random posts from comms I don't care about. Bonus: this also means I can't curate federated content unless I add every single comm I don't like to the block list.
Ideally the mega would have its own global pin. Technically this would mean potentially putting a post from an unsubbed comm in people's feeds, but since the content of the mega is never more that tangentially related to the comm/topic I don't think that's too big of a deal
I know there's getting thoughts about this, but imo it would be sensible to have a "c/mega" comm to host the general megathread
I know that's how many feel, but it doesn't resonate with me personally, is all
This level of transparency and working with the community while self reflecting and being open to discussion is such a breath of fresh air on the Internet. Thanks for all the hard work the team does to help achieve that while trying to ensure the safety of our most vulnerable users.
As for the ND community on here, I'd love to see that revived and also expanded to include disability rights as a whole.
