Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.
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Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.
Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.
The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:
- โPlease try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.โ
- โThe West's role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.โ
- โThese organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term "rules-based international order." It is in the Left's interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.โ
The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to "dismantle western propaganda" and "demolish organizations such as NATOโ shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.โ Itโs to push their beliefs and ideology.
In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.
Here are some examples:
โI can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.โ
โAll loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.โ
- https://lemmy.world/comment/121850
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1487168
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1476084
- https://lemmy.world/comment/171595
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3648500
Overall community comments:
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526128
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526086
- https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3652828
To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.
- https://lemmygrad.ml/post/158656
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/882559
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/540170
- https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/446529
Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.
We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.
I'm not going to pretend to be unbiased, being a poster over on chapo.chat (or Hexbear as it's now [embarrassingly] called), but I hope those of you who support decision can at least understand how frustrating the purported justification is. The notion that hexbear has a consistent ideology to push beyond general amorphic leftism doesn't stand up to any scrutiny, so in the end the decision to defederate just comes down to "these people have opinions".
There are surely some decent people on Hexbear, the problem is that there are a lot that are not, and many have explicitly stated that they want to disrupt other instances. And the final nail in the coffin is IMHO that the admins on Hexbear have explicitly stated that they will not moderate their users for things they do on other instances (making the "be a good neighbor" part in their original announcement a fig leaf at best).
The entire point of decentralized moderation in the fediverse is that instances are responsible for their member's conduct on other instances. Any instance that explicitly violates this (as Hexbear admins openly say) needs to be defederated as they actively harm the network.
It might seem that way but I don't actually think this extends much beyond young posters getting hyped up about how leftist they are, in the same way a 17 year old newly converted atheist is going to be mildly obnoxious to interact with in any online space.
See I saw that but I actually read it the other way; there's a lot of dumb ways to run afoul of moderation on hexbear, not liking vegans, complaining about certain users, just relatively easy to catch a ban for totally asinine stuff. So I took that to mean that they weren't going to hold everyone to account for hexbears code of conduct outside of hexbear spaces, so I wouldn't catch a ban over there for talking about the logical incoherence of certain arguments for veganism here.
I can't imagine they mean to say they're willing to serve as a home base for disruptive and rule-breaking behavior on other instances, and they should absolutely be willing to impose bans for that (at the threat of defederating if not), and if they are saying that they should clearly reconsider, but I still think we should give these systems the opportunity to actually develop as opposed to preemptively siloing us all. lemmy.world admins should open up a dialogue with hexbear ones to see if there is some path forward if they actually do have considers that aren't just ideological disagreements.