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!:-)
Genuinely thank you for your input, particularly not in spite of but because it seems to run counter to the prevailing opinion of the moment. imho we strongly need that level of diversity of opinion that, like your answer here, is delivered in good faith 🙏:-).
The defederations happened just prior to me joining Lemmy, while I was still on Kbin, so while I have read about them far more extensively than most, I can only imagine what it must have been like at the time to live through. I do get a sense that what was known then about hexbear is different than today - there seemed to be more hope about it? While now even hexbears themselves seem to have lost that, knowing that even if someone manages to control themselves personally that so many others in their midst are still refusing to - they see it, and some are truly saddened by it, but they cannot control their instance admins anymore than the admins seem willing to control the users.
Fwiw I probably would have agreed with you, back then. In fact I know I would have, bc I said similar things back then about Lemmy.ml - “it’s just a large instance, and people are humans so we’re not perfect and this stuff will happen anywhere that has a sufficient number of people…” I have really changed my tune substantially since then, seeing it (Lemmy.ml still here) differently than I used to (as more of an institutional outcome of admin+moderation practices than individual decisions). Now back to hexbear: they really did deserve the benefit of the doubt too, at first. Before hearing e.g. about the instance admins lying to other instance admins. It was a grand experiment, to see if it would work.
Also, we hoped for more tools by now. Many of us hoped that Sublinks would be ready - I still do but obviously it’s not here just at the moment - and we were promised instance blocking, which turned out to be such a disappointment, plus it makes hexbear opt-out rather than opt-in which I think is so very damaging for new users. If hexbear could just be opt-in, that would be someone’s personal freedom of choice, but to federate it alongside all of the other content from the entire Fediverse as if it were the same, with zero warning despite how we know now how it is not being delivered in good faith… it’s different now than it used to be, and the tools just simply aren’t there to offer us any truly “good” options. It’s either full acceptance of them, or full defederation, and that’s not a great place to be in but it’s where we are.
Lastly, new users are increasingly being steered away from Lemmy.World even if purely for centralization reasons - they may even start refusing new signups at some point, as they currently have ~80% of all users right now on that one server. It’s too much load and it’s causing problems sending content out to the other smaller instances, even here iirc (albeit much more rarely than most instances).despite how fantastic the uptime has been. And there is a need for a general-purpose USA-based instance, to perhaps host communities such as an AskUSA. So I for one hope that things here as well differ from the past, and that people do not simply jump onto Lemmy.World, but rather that the Fediverse would be more diversified by being spread across more instances such as this one.
Thank you again for sharing your perspective.