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Ada @lemmy.blahaj.zone

Admin update - Hexbear

This is an admin post, intended for blahaj lemmy users. Top level posts from members of other instances will be removed.

==

After recent events, it feels to me that sentiment has shifted and more people are asking for defederation of hexbear than previously.

I've been doing my best to try and mend bridges and keep us connected, as it's my hope that we can maintain trans solidarity and work with them, despite the friction, however, ultimately, I feel that this is an issue for the blahaj lemmy community to decide, not the admins alone.

So here's what we're going to do.

We're going to leave things as they are for a week. That will give time for things to calm down whilst we see if we can work together. After a week, I'll put up a vote and get a feel for where the community is at in regards to our continued federation with hexbear. That poll will run for a week. If there is a strong will to defederate (a clear majority), then that's what we will do.

207 comments

  • I really don’t understand the hate towards Hexbear – sure, some users may be problematically argumentative, but that seems to be true of many instances. Meanwhile, as a trans person, Hexbear was actually one of the first places I felt safe when I started looking for a reddit alternative, and, to me, that means a lot. I’m glad I eventually found Blahaj Zone (both the lemmy and hajkey instances), but Hexbear really does feel like a good, queer-friendly, solidly leftist space, which we need more of on the internet, imo.

    Like, we may disagree with their politics at points, but I’ve seen conservative and neoliberal users from other instances being awful to Hexbear users far more often than the other way around. I also think it speaks heavily in favor of Hexbear that some of the anti-Hexbear comments on the previous meta thread were from transphobic users from other instances.

  • Thanks for this! I personally find most of Hexbear annoying on a personal level, but that’s a problem I can personally solve with community blocking (and I mostly surf my subbed communities anyway). The way the original metathread devolved put them on thin fucking ice as far as federation is concerned. They seem to have a large proportion of people who are assholes for assholes sakes and haven’t learned that just because you believe you’re right about something doesn’t mean you have a pre-ordained right to be a fucking asshole. Or at least I’ve seen a lot of those folks, which has left a bad taste in my mouth.

  • Just want to throw some admin appreciation in here. Sudden drama like this taking off like a wildfire can be pretty difficult to handle (particularly in the face of brigading) and I appreciate y'all staying level headed and legitimately trying to foster broader trans community outside of our instance. It's an important niche and I'm glad to be a part of it.

    EDIT: I think this is especially important to mention as the discourse has kind of soured from both sides. Sure it's understandable that tensions are running high but it's important to remember that there's real people on the other end of it, in some cases doing free labor for a community that they love.

  • I followed the previous threads without participating, so let me just quickly say I'd rather we stay federated. I can see how some people might get really annoyed by their more vocal shitposters and political takes, but I think they're overall good.

  • I hope we can have camaraderie between them. This issue is very polarising here, so I'm really interested to see what the vote is gonna be.

  • I'm pretty new to this instance, having moved from .world recently. I haven't interacted with anyone from hexbear yet but I've seen some of their members behaviour on other instances and followed threads back to that instance.

    They seem to have a self fulfilling persecution complex centred around their political opinions. I see them on their own instance saying things like 'any instance that doesn't believe the exact, very narrowly defined ideology that we do are stupid and they hate what we stand for', then they go onto the other instances and make even the most innocent posts that have nothing to do with politics into commentary on their ideology. It's like they can't see the world in any other way, or respect that others might. Then, when they get banned, they head back to their instance and say 'see? they're just intolerant boot lickers'. It often feels like they're trying to get banned, or their instance defederated simply so they can happily confirm to each other their belief that everyone is out to get them.

    It can get pretty mentally exhausting seeing people say something utterly innocuous like 'I like chips' and then a bunch of hexbear users launch into a long winded political sub-thread on what a dick you are for liking NATO-loving, liberal, colonialist chips.

    They are trans and lgbtq+ allies and that's a good thing. I'm just not sure that that one aspect of their makeup drowns out all the baggage that comes with it. I always feel it comes with conditions attached - we'll be your allies as long as we can flood your instance. I have no doubt that if this instance were to defed with them, their allyship would no longer extend to blahaj members.

  • Hexbear users seem to have been fine here in general. A post here calling to block them ended up on their All feed, and it still didn't get that bad. It'd be doing more harm than good to defederate from the only other truly trans friendly instance. There would be much fewer trans friendly communities accessible from here, and you'd be cutting off people in Hexbear from the great trans focused communities here. This change would suck.

    • A post here calling to block them ended up on their All feed, and it still didn’t get that bad.

      It really did. I was the target of a lot of it, and I had to moderate the rest of it.

      It also didn't end up in their "all" feed as such. It was posted in their "dunk on a lib" community, and that made it to their all page. And then a great many of them jumped on over here and trolled.

      Their admins stepped in and clarified things to ensure it won't happen again, but before things calmed down, it was pretty bad.

      I have hope that we can make things work going forward, but the stuff that happened before was absolutely not sustainable.

      • Does the fact that they have a community dedicated to organizing dogpiling and brigading not bother you?

        Does it only bother you that they used it on you?

      • I think having the rule about top-level comments on defed posts being from Blahaj members only has helped a lot. What would you think about making it a permanent rule in the sidebar of this community?

        Also, I was wondering if it might be worthwhile finding a trusted community member or two to add as moderators to this community. That way it wouldn’t just be you and supakaity having to remove those comments. That way y’all could focus more on the decision-making aspect of a potential defed, as well as more pressing server admin tasks.

        Edit: I was going to add, my reasoning for these two things is that these questions around defederation are only going to become more frequent as Lemmy grows, especially here on Blahaj where we have a higher standard than most instances do.

    • They also had posts on their instance directing people to our meta post. If you look at that thread, it’s mostly hexbear users now

      • That post was deleted by their admin and their admin said to leave it alone, which it seems they did after being told to. Seems worth mentioning.

  • I'm from hexbear and ngl i'm like, idk, pretty embarassed by how a lot of the other hexbear users were acting in regards to the news of the defed question, i decided to like make an account here too in case of defederation so i can still post in your queer communities too - though i've decided to like not upvote any posts in this thread or cast a vote in the poll next week since i have an obvious bias towards remaining federated with hexbear and think it would be unfair to like, interfer with the blahaj community's decision

    ::: spoiler Edit: ok wtf, I've been looking through the blahaj communities to see which to sub too and it's literally 1984 that the hexbear mods purposely didn't let us federate with this comm:

    (iirc they purposely turned off federation with all communities marked as nsfw, since they couldn't specifically defed individual nsfw comms that they thought were problematic)

  • I'm going to use my last post here before the vote to say, it was massively irresponsible to federate with these trolls before consulting with the community you administrate. I'm sure they spun you a good sob story but they've hurled abuse at your users that you're apparently happy to let go unanswered. And you say they deserve a second chance. Wait staff gets your order wrong? That deserves a second chance, restaurants are chaotic and shit happens. Person shows up to work late? So much shit happens in the Dat to day, you can't possibly plan for everything, absolutely give a second chance. A bunch of tankie trolls use your instance as their entertainment? Absolutely fucking not. You get a second chance for a mistake, not active malice. I'd buy into the "Trans solidarity" lie if they didn't admit in their own instance this was about "dunking on us". They're here to recruit and make fun, and they made no bones about it on their own server. Not to put too fine a point on it, you fell for the first nazi at the bar. For the tankies, I know you're not nazis, you just use the same style arguments and are equally as tolerant of people who dont share your beliefs.

    Long story short, I could not give less of a shit what Hexbear does on their own server but they've been extremely detrimental to our own communities and that not being considered a factor at all is beyond absurd

    As an admin you have a duty to those you administrate and you've essentially told them that the abuse they've suffered is inconsequential in the face of Trans solidarity The same Trans solidarity Hexbear uses to abuse your users, willfully and maliciously. That's not good enough for me.

    • I’m going to use my last post here before the vote to say, it was massively irresponsible to federate with these trolls before consulting with the community you administrate

      That's how federation works. We are on a blacklist system, which means we federate with anyone and everyone unless they are added to a blacklist, and you don't add good faith communities on to the black list without exceptional circumstances.

      Whether this is exceptional enough to add them varies depending on who you ask within our community, and that is why there is a vote

      I’d buy into the “Trans solidarity” lie

      That's my wording, not theirs

      As an admin you have a duty to those you administrate and you’ve essentially told them that the abuse they’ve suffered is inconsequential in the face of Trans solidarity The same Trans solidarity Hexbear uses to abuse your users, willfully and maliciously

      I have users telling me that they want to stay federated, I have users telling me I shouldn't federate. There is no path I can take that keeps all of the community happy. Which is why I am administrating, talking directly to their admin, pushing for changes in their rules and behaviour, and putting the final decision up for a vote.

      I'm pushing for change, and then making sure that the choice is still there.

      That's what's involved in administration.

    • I don't think admins owe anyone a vote on federating in good faith. I have no critique of your others points, as they are all your opinions and my disagreement with them is simply my opinion. But I think calling out an admin for trying to grow the Lemmiverse (federate with a new instance) is asinine. It's on them to take proper action as needed after, not before.

    • What communities exactly have they been detrimental to?

  • Isn't the significant presence of hexbear folks here pretty solid evidence that their admins don't have good control over their users (or rather that they have no interest in following their own rules)? They were specifically told to stay out of metas for other instances.

    • We were told to stay out of metas where it's clear we're not welcome. The OP here implies that it's okay for us to reply to comments, but that we are unwelcome to make top level comments. If that is incorrect, all the mods need to do is make that clear and we'll go away.

      Our mods are extremely active and responsive, they do not have trouble controlling their users lol

  • I honestly don't know about them that much but I'm fine with what people decide :)

    Mostly I just wanted to add that Lemmy needs a way to limit who can reply to posts because it would solve a lot of problems

    • Yep, local only posts/communities would be really helpful!

      • Until thats done, i think that could be done with an automoderator. E.g. iff a post title begins with [ONLYLOCAL] then trawl the comments every n minutes and remove all comments from nonlocal users. Maybe it would fall apart at scale? But im not sure. It would certainly be more performant as part of the software itself, but i do think its possible with an automod.

207 comments