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hexbear @hexbear.net
CARCOSA [mirror/your pronouns] @hexbear.net

How should Hexbear federate?

I wanted to open up a post to discuss the two main methods of federation: allow-list and block-list. As well as see how the majority of users felt with regard to the methods.

Due to some of the issues raised with the method of vote counting this will be considered only a check of user sentiment, not a promise of what to do

I will pin two comments, one in favour of a block-list and one in favour of an allow-list approach to federation.

Before the domain issue we were using an allow-list, this means that any instance that wants to be linked to hexbear must reach out to us or be nominated by a user for addition to the allow-list.

The benefits of this is that we are not automatically linked with any instance that spins up. The downside is that we miss federation with any small lemmy instance as well as with any other activity-pub instance (mastodon, peertube, etc.)

Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml both use a block-list approach and for what it's worth they have done well, the majority of reactionary instances already block us (lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ca, sopuli.xyz, slrpnk.net) and the pedo/porn/nazi instance are already on the hexbear block-list.

The biggest upside of a block-list approach is that new single person instances that get created will link up with us without any extra steps, and the biggest downside is that it will add an extra step for moderation (adding a new shitty instance to the block-list after they show their shit)

Within the following spoiler will be the hexbear allow-list and block-list.

Discussion may be had within comments, if you have specific instance additions/subtractions from the allow-list or block-list please comment underneath the respective pinned comment.

For example if you wish to add lemmy.ca to the block list comment under https://hexbear.net/comment/5951093

172 comments

  • Please upbear this comment if you are in favour of Hexbear using a

    block-list

    • Blocklist will open us up to raids, and likely result in members we should be protecting being open to attack by bigots.

      Allow list was fine.

      • Blocklist will open us up to raids

        i think y'all are overestimating the number of 'raids' that are going to happen lmao. who is going to raid us that is not already on our block-list

        • I just wanted to chip in a little behind the scenes gossip, but the last time there was an actual planned raid of the site I was quite excited for days in advance at the thought of ruthlessly crushing the dreams of those little children's planned "snowball fight" here.

          Come the day and the hour of their planned raid and it fucking fizzled after taking a few of them out back behind the barn. I was actually a bit tilted over how low energy it was.

          Now this isn't to say that a block list won't possibly result in what folks are fearing. Personally I think the most common possible dipshit behavior we'd see is one or a few of our perpetual haters would use some of the lemmys with open registration to make dozens of accounts to run amok like the jackass that kept making "debatebroX" accounts because they were too much of a cowardly mongrel to do it with their main

          • I am shocked to hear there was even a planned raid that fizzled out haha, like who has that big of a grudge against us that they'd waste their time trying to get us tilted by posting on our instance? Like honestly I'd even argue that we probably as a community have 'raided' other instances more than we've gotten raided, just by the nature of us being one of the largest ones so whenever someone links a thread that mentions us - inevitably 1-20 Hexbear aligned people are gonna show up there.

            Personally I think the most common possible dipshit behavior we'd see is one or a few of our perpetual haters would use some of the lemmys with open registration to make dozens of accounts to run amok like the jackass that kept making "debatebroX" accounts because they were too much of a cowardly mongrel to do it with their main

            I wouldn't even say this kind of behavior is a bad thing because EVERY time it has happened it has resulted in a bunch of us going

            and turning a random post into a 400 comment thread dunking on them lol.

            • like who has that big of a grudge against us

              We're living rent-free in the heads of a few libs and chuds out there. It's really just a few because we're as niche as it gets, but we've gotten pretty skilled at pissing people off in ways they just can't deal with, and the kind of terminally online weirdo who knows about us in the first place can really double down on a grudge.

          • Yeah it was like 6 of them that actually made any effort and even that was pretty lame

        • if people are determined to raid, they can also join allow listed instances and raid from there. there's no fool proof method to solve things active moderation is required for; and we have very good active moderation

        • Blocklist means that if some chuds want to set up a new instance to do a 'raid' they'd be able to post here until that new instance is also blocked.

          • who is going to do this??? who has done this?? like I said, I really think you all are overestimating how many people are going to 'raid' us lmao.

        • I would have agreed with this until the site auction demonstrated that there's dumbasses willing to waste time and real money to fuck with us

          • We have literally no idea who was placing bets on the auction....it could have been the domain host themselves just artificially driving up the cost. It could have been the guy behind the Hexbear crypto coin. It could have been a bot that has no intelligence.

            Honestly every argument I've seen against a blocklist (and federation in general) can be summed up with "there might be people who come in and try to harass us!!!" which honestly is pretty pathetic imo. Like I get the desire to protect our more marginalized users but I do not think half of the fear y'all have for other instances is warranted given the large majority of them literally have 1/10th of the number of users we do.

            More importantly, I do not think we should be making site-wide decisions based on the actions of a handful of One Guys. Like how many reoccurring trolls or large 'raids' have we seriously had?? I'd argue that 99% of them have been Hexbear users who were banned on their main accounts and decided to just make a new one. Nothing about an allow-list or getting rid of federation will solve this - might as well pack up the entire site!! Raids themselves are something that I'm like 90% sure everyone mentioning has just made-up/convinced themselves it has happened. I've been posting reliably on this site since its inception and I've NEVER seen any sort of 'raid'.

            We have 12 admins and like twice as many moderators, I'm sure any bad actors can be swiftly dealt with.

            • Honestly every argument I've seen against a blocklist (and federation in general) can be summed up with "there might be people who come in and try to harass us!!!"

              Users from other instances make up almost the entirity of mod actions for transphobia, homophobia, reactionary sentiment and liberal chauvinism and most of the mod actions for racism and misogyny even under the allow list model. The mod log has become very quiet during our forced defederation. It's a very different vibe on this site and i honestly do not like that we'll refederate again in the first place, but the consensus on refederating is clear, there's nothing i can do about it and i've given up on trying. I perfectly understand that you do not notice any of this because you've never been on the receiving end of a system that makes every day a little battle for your right to exist and wants to choke the life out of as many of your loved ones as possible for violating the patriarchal order, and i also understand that you can only imagine online harassment in Gamer terms like raids or recurring trolls, as you have never had to deal with being bullied out of online spaces for the crime of your mere existence. Naturally, you do not get that for me, hostility isn't a concerted raid that people have to organize for or a deliberate effort a dedicated troll has to make, but a constant background noise produced organically and automatically by the frothing, piggish mass of perfectly average guys like you, but you could at least try to not be openly dismissive of our concerns. Instead, you accuse us of "making up" our experiences. I could ask what the fuck is wrong with you, but honestly, you simply show the behavior i've seen every single time when me or my friends have brought up our concerns to a cis dude. So congrats for being the most normal type of guy i can imagine. How admirably common your are! What an achievement to not be as pathetic as me!

              • That's a lot of assumption, especially the part about 'never been on the receiving end of a system that makes every day a little battle for your right for exist' but I'm not even gonna bother arguing about that despite how wrong you are because at the end of the day - you're going to think I'm coming at you as some sort of debate bro because my pronouns.

                Instead, you accuse us of "making up" our experiences.

                The only thing I ever said was made-up (and what I clearly meant by that was 'blown out of proportion') is the idea that we are constantly gonna get raided. You're the one who has assumed I was secretly trying to say 'everyone's lived experience except mine is made up' which is a wild takeaway from a very cut-and-dry sentence.

                • you're going to think I'm coming at you as some sort of debate bro

                  Well ... your post read like that. I'm sorry if i'm barking up the wrong tree here, and if you aren't a cis dude you do not have to explain yourself, just say so and i'll edit or delete my post. But i also honestly don't get how you come to the conclusion that fears of getting raided are the main concern that has half of the people voting here in opposition to a blocklist. What we're talking about here is a tradeoff between how much reach we're gaining and how much bigottry we get exposed to in the process, and how bad that bigottry is, and if it's mostly out of ignorance or actively malicious. Banned users from, say, db0 are usually lib debatbros who don't get how to not act like a mask-on chud because that's the default state in the imperial core, that's not cool but a different impact than back in the day when we were federated with SJW. A blocklist would include more of the dregs of the lemmyverse than many people here are comfortable with, while offering very little extra reach in return, and that's a reasonable concern that shouldn't be dismissed offhandedly.

    • Making me up vote like some kind of redditor ew 😡

    • this way of doing the vote is very flawed imo: to even see the option to vote for allow-list i had to either hit a few minus signs or scroll down an entire page's length, whichever is currently in the lead has no extra effort required to upvote

    • I think it would be cool if there is a mechanism for our trans or em_poc comrades could veto this if it goes through. We had a similar issue with federation voting before, I think with lemm.ee federation, where people voted for federating and it was rescinded and the vote voided in a rather intransparent way.

      Or if block-list goes through that communities could vote for local only before federating?

      • that was a special case while we were waiting for local only communities to be finished, which they are now. Good reminder though, thank you. In the event we decide on block-list I'll reach out to community moderators to ask if they want the communities to be local only

        • This sort of thing was my main concern with block list (sorry mods). As long as those communities can have an extra firewall if they desire it, then I think block is the way

          • sorry if I misunderstand. But don't you think people should be safe/comfortable on all kinds of forums, rather than only on certain special forums?

            • I think it's more in relation to the occasional wrecker, etc before being banned. Like, if we're switching to ban list that's going to be a consequence we all share (some reactionaries showing up before a ban). It's rather that I want a place where our most vulnerable comrades don't need to deal with the shit that may crop up from switching to ban list instead of allow.

        • I've seen some talk that local comms might expand to include private comms, which makes them local only and not visible while logged out. I think with the option to eventfully make them invite only if desired. Hopefully we see some progress on that.

          Moderation tools always seems to lag behind on these projects.

        • The arguments are pretty much exactly the same though, dunking and outreach vs safe space from wreckers and reactionaries.

          It still feels like the privileged get to vote on whether the others have to sacrifice their safe space. If they decided that they'd be up for that then by all means, but it feels unfair that the population that doesn't sacrifice much, if anything, gets the same vote as those that would have to give up a lot more.

          • As phrased in the original post this was to see how the userbase was feeling, and while at the moment there does seem to be a majority wanting to change to a block-list I'll be leaving this up for a few more days. With a difference of 0-20 we would err on the side of caution and protection of those most at risk.

    • I can request more URLs to block-list. DMing later

    • Bump. Unleash the Hex on the Lemmy world. The most problematic places will instablock us anyways.

    • The reasons mentioned in the 2024 Federation Check-In Voting Completed for why not to federate with kbin and mbin still apply, right?

      kbin.social and fedia.io are kbin and mbin respectively which is very similar but also distinct from lemmy. These are the two largest instances but we may look to add more in the future. There is an issue with those two as they deanonymize the modlog and allow users to inspect the upvotes for a post/comment. If users vote to federate with kbin/mbin instances and we experience moderator harassment they will be defederated from immediately.
      [...]
      Removed kbin and mbin due to moderation / user self-deletion federation problems

      Also, moderation actions still do not federate to kbin or mbin.

    • Does blocklist federation pose any risk of leaking Hexbears' IP addresses to reactionary instances? The other potential risk I can think of is reactionary instances ending up with copies of every Hexbear's complete post/comment history, but that isn't really any different at the end of the day from the default, inevitable risk of just having reactionaries use crawlers.

      • no when hexbear logs a user id in it's database it anonymizes the IP which is then sent through activity pub to other instances but comments/posts made on other instances or in reply to another instance's user will be logged as well as any direct messages with a non-local user

        • Which is to say "no but actually yes"? This isn't very clear, and I don't have much faith that this won't get screwed up somehow anyways.

          By the way, you mean to have lemmynsfwcom in the blocklist, not nsfwlemmycom. If we're really going to go forward with blocklist federation you better remember to double-check that you've actually spelled all the blocked domain names correctly. It also needs to be a much bigger list.

172 comments