I am not sure where to post this - most of us on this instance probably use it as a “general-purpose” one to launch ourselves into the wider Fediverse, with only a few communities being here locally. @jgrim@discuss.online @lazyguru@discuss.online
I would like for Discuss.Online to defederate from the troll instance hexbear.net, to protect new users (who don’t understand how communities work, local and remote) from being exposed to their toxicity and therefore drive people away from the Fediverse. I personally made the mistake of responding to a comment in a post in !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net and continued to receive messages from them - each one triggering my Notifications - for WEEKS afterwards (and then did the same for lemmygrad.ml as well, though iirc at least one and probably both of these occurrences likely was from my prior instance StarTrek.Website, which I moved from to here b/c of Discuss.Online’s much better admin practices e.g. significantly higher uptime). I almost quit the Fediverse entirely after those incidents, though thankfully I recalled how Kbin used to be better, less toxic I mean, than Lemmy, and pushed through to figure out how to block things, especially instances (which sadly does absolutely nothing to stop this effect, when in communities not actually located on those instances, since the “instance block” is more of a “community mute”). Though I am by no means the only one that this has happened to - it seems to continually occur for each new user that joins here, almost like a rite of passage to learn which instances need to be avoided, and yet we don’t even know how many users this is turning away from us.
Such instances and hexbear.net in particular either cannot or will not control their users, and in fact there is evidence that the admins themselves have lied to other instance admins, at which point any further communication to them is already known to be in bad faith (admittedly, the other possibility is that the admins lied to their own userbase - although is that really much better?). You can read all about this particular incident in e.g. https://discuss.online/post/13387124 (and others e.g. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6205969), although it is only the latest in a long string of such occurrences. Another good read is https://discuss.online/post/434998, which cites several examples that caused the admins of Lemmy.World to defederate from hexbear.net (much of the content has since been deleted, either by mods or by the OP, but it should be visible somewhere e.g. the modlog?). Many of the largest instances across the Fediverse have eventually already defederated from this instance - e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/post/4279462 and https://lemmy.ca/post/3326347 and https://feddit.org/post/41472 (I don’t understand German so that’s the best example I could find there).
Personally I want very badly to defederate from users on lemmy.ml for similar reasons, and also the admins there likewise are not transparent with their policies of saying one thing while doing another, in particular site-wide banning people for comments that they did not know were taboo, b/c it says so nowhere that people know how to read what topics are prohibited (e.g. in the sidebar it just says “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”, and there is a link to “What is Lemmy.ml”, which is just a broken link). That one I understand may be more problematic to defederate from although I think there is a strong case to be made for it. Fwiw, it was recently discussed in https://discuss.online/post/13727946 including that incident where a mod told a user that they (the mod) wanted to kill them (the OP) (sadly, I am not anywhere close to joking or exaggerating - read it for yourself e.g. at https://hexbear.net/post/3706906/5518427 where even the unremoved comments from the mod doubles down with “nono I don’t want to shoot for pointing that it’s a game, I want to shoot you because…”, and then later tripled down still further, e.g. stating “I hope you die soon.”). To be clear, the incident occurred on hexbear.net, but the mod is from lemmy.ml - those instances are often intertwined, along with lemmygrad.ml.
But regardless of what happens with lemmy.ml, the case for defederation from hexbear.net seems much more clear and straightforward - and really, why not?
Tangentially, @Blaze@feddit.org does great work in enticing mainstream Redditors to come to Lemmy, and is looking for an instance to recommend that new users to come to, though the current federation with hexbear.net is a dealbreaker. I don’t know if you would even want to see a large influx of new more mainstream users from there, and to be clear I think that Discuss.Online should defederate from hexbear.net (and possibly lemmy.ml) either way, but I wanted to point out how defederation is not necessarily a bad thing i.e. in terms of decreasing available content, as doing so would open up new possibilities to be more welcoming to an audience that gets turned away by such toxicity and political extremism as is constantly flooding over here from those sources, i.e. increasing content overall.
Discuss.Online is such a welcoming instance, I feel, and you are doing a fantastic job of being admins, e.g. as evidenced by the uptime stats, and upgrade timeliness, etc. The only downside is being willing to host such toxic content on this instance that derives from other sources that are not nearly so welcoming and friendly - and yet are presented side-by-side here along with all other content as being equally worthy of attention (especially when browsing by All, which I note is the default behavior, rather than Subscribed). We can do nothing to control others, only ourselves, but deciding to remain federated with them is a choice that reflects poorly on us imho (even if most of us have already blocked or otherwise avoid those communities personally, being more tech-savvy than your average mainstream Redditor), so I hope you will give strong consideration to these points, regardless of whatever the outcome may end up being. And thank you in advance for that!:-)
Prior to the Rexodus, during the protests, after reading some articles about social media, I decided that I was going to leave Reddit to get away from the toxicity. I did not know yet if I would replace it with anything else online (as opposed to e.g. reading books & otherwise touching grass irl & offline), but I definitely had to get away from that as it was seeping its way into me, and I did not like who I had become (yet as a mod of a couple mid-sized gaming communities there, I couldn’t exactly just not see such stuff as continued to come my way).
I truly do want to hear from a wide diversity of opinions - so long as they are offered in good faith. The lack of the latter though… why should someone else’s right to speak infringe upon, even trounce (the better word might be “trump”?) my right to not have to listen?
Btw, we did have a heavily conservative (group of?) instances here, exploding-heads.com, although the entire Fediverse individually defederated from them, after which they ceased to exist (I have no idea if those are related somehow or if they simply fell upon themselves due to in-fighting; but either way newer ones did not spring back up, which is the important thing). Hexbear.net, and to a significantly lesser degree lemmy.ml (complicated by their admins also being the main developers of the Lemmy codebase), seems basically to be the leftist equivalent. And the admins of hexbear themselves know and admit to their users trolling the entire Fediverse, as reading my link to the hexbear statement and the links to similar statements within hexbear shows. Even so, they cannot - or will not - control their users. At which point it falls upon others to have to make the harder choices.
PieFed allows such - every single post involving Beehaw is given this message:
With that link going to the very own words that Beehaw chooses to say about their own platform, rather than words being said about them by someone else. However, Lemmy does not offer this capability, more’s the pity. I hold out strong hopes that Sublinks will though, one day:-).
As you say, people will go turtle and refuse to engage, unless they feel that it is safe to do so, thus ironically in order to try to encourage additional content we need to block out content that is hindering that growth? :-)
Btw, your instance did not choose to defederate from beehaw, it was rather the other way around - here is the original notice. TLDR: those are 2 of the largest instances, and mainly they wanted to reduce their EXTREME moderation burden to have everything “just so” as they prefer things to be for them, though they seemed to have made an exception for lemm.ee for whatever reason - see also this recent discussion about it that mentions lemm.ee and discuss.online and in particular this interesting comment.
I would like to see the Fediverse grow, but for that to happen we need to prune some branches first.
So perfectly put. I am here to have honest and open conversations, be disagreed with, corrected, and informed of the flaws in my own thinking, so long as that is done through respectful dialogue.
You can disagree without being a douche but those that are only there to troll and hurt others don’t have a right to my time.
And as Lemmy grows, striving to federate healthy and well admined and moderated instances is essential if it is to be a desirable place outsiders will want to join.
Also I’m really impressed by the quality of discussion that goes on on your instance. Dropping in here today has been a pleasure. You’ve got a good thing going over there!
Exactly! Whenever I bring up an issue involving downvoting (by used of hexbear, or perhaps lemmy.ml) people usually ask why don’t I just move to an instance where downvotes are disabled? The answer is always that I WANT feedback, if delivered genuinely and authentically, by people whose opinions matter i.e. ones who don’t preemptively start by lying to themselves routinely, before they then tell their alternative facts to others. In this manner I literally am aided into becoming a better person, as I used to be wrong and then afterwards am (hopefully gently) guided into being correct.
So then to be “corrected” by those for whom no means yes, does me no good. Instead, it encourages me to just stop offering content, knowing what feedback will occur when I do. Toxicity kills discussions, and if our entire purpose here is to facilitate discussions, then by allowing toxicity we have failed (though there are “details” here that matter ofc, like whose responsibility it is to moderate content on what instance - usually it is the admins, except what happens then when that practice breaks down and the admins themselves join in? at that point defederation is all that remains open to us, bc we have no capacity let alone capability to moderate not only content on our own instance but also another one too, especially one like that that self-admittedly thrives on conflict).
Quality over quantity you might say. Except that’s not true bc when toxicity abounds, it not only lowers quality, but quantity as well. This is ironically even true on Hexbear itself, as they have managed to run off even some of their own devs (https://hexbear.net/post/1712067/4540345) - and if allowed to spread further, will run off many other users too.
I think the best part of Discuss.online is that its not trying to be the largest instance or recruit people constantly. It just is.
Its lowkey, minimum moderation, with good people.