I’m a mod of !leftism@lemmy.world, and the last resort preemptive defederation from hexbear has me concerned. As a mod, what are the specific rules that I need to know about to make sure our community fits the guidelines of LemmyWorld? We aren’t a huge community and there aren’t a huge number of posts every day, but I want to see this community grow and thrive. I can’t do that without knowing the guidelines hexbear violated to warrant defederation. We’re focused on left unity, so I need to know what we can’t allow.
I can’t speak for the admins but I feel like people are trying to turn this into an ideological thing when it’s really more about the fact hexbear is openly positioning itself as a sort of army with the purpose of going out and spreading onto other instances. Like, regardless of ideology, not wanting instances that are almost explicitly encouraging the brigading of other instances to be able to target yours isn’t the worst decision.
Now personally I feel preemptive defederation is wrong, full stop, but I’m not gonna sit here and pretend I can’t see it happening with that particular instance eventually. But that’s another issue.
I don’t think you need to do anything different than you were already doing.
I don’t want to get into it right now because it’s late for me, but from my perspective it very much appears like it’s along ideological lines. I have been scrolling through hexbear for the last couple hours trying to find other signs of bad behavior, and I haven’t seen anything that stands out. I figured scrolling through active posts would be a better indicator of what they’re like, and it’s mostly articles and leftist humor. Our community doesn’t have a lot of humor, but there is a lot of articles
I wouldn’t say so at all. The admins took action to defederate from the alt-right
explodingheads.cominstance because the content there broke the servers rules here, and they made a similar judgment with HexBear because of their apparent intention to brigade.While the decision to defederate from HB was arguably premature, the admins here do at least seem more concerned with protecting their users than they are with deplatforming specific political stances.
From what I recall about the exploding-heads debacle, there was a lot of polls and hand-wringing before defederating. An actual last resort. I spent hours on hexbear last night, it seemed like they mostly shitpost in the comments. Nothing I saw indicated that they were going to brigade or harass people on LW.
Have you read the admin’s explanation post? They cited posts from HexBear admins which suggested they were intending to stir things up on other instances after federation.
Again, I don’t necessarily agree with the decision, but either way it seems to not be about political ideology as much as keeping out unpleasant behavior.
I saw them referring to a year old post about brigading Reddit which saw major pushback from the community, is that what you mean? Like I said in other comments, I was on HB for hours last night and didn’t see anything that stood out as a rules violation in LW.
I almost commented this reply from my lemmy.world account, but I decided to switch to be commenting from my midwest.social account - an explicitly leftist server - to back up my assertion that I’ve not seen any indication that lemmy.world is anti-left with demonstration of the federation between the servers. Idk why the defederation happened, but I’m skeptical of the idea that it was simply the fact of their leftism.
I don’t want to speculate on their reasoning, but everything about it seems like it was reactionary to their statements about the IMF, NATO, and the World Bank. Those are pretty milquetoast leftist opinions. I don’t think that they’re actively trying to be anti-left yet, but signs are there and I want to make sure the leftism community isn’t breaking the same rules hexbear did
honestly it’s probably a minor part of the decision. IMO the admins on world just seem like they wanna have the final say on things and felt threatened by the potential influence of a larger instance. If hexbear were as small as lemmygrad or newer than world, it probably wouldn’t have been a big deal for them.
You know what, that actually makes sense. Nothing else about the situation made sense other than “we’re anti-communist now”, so it was a pretty easy shark to jump. If there isn’t a rules update within the next couple weeks, I think this is the most likely reason they went with defederation.