This is an admin post, intended for blahaj lemmy users. Top level posts from members of other instances will be removed.
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Edit - Hexbear announced plans to deferedate from us.
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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
Thank you moderators, but especially Moss who I witnessed in the trenches dodging bayonets from those jerks.
No. Moss just stirred up drama by acting like a child. All they did was give poor Ada more to deal with
Moss did the best they could to spare their community from tankies. It’s constant vigilance in a leftist shitposting community to make sure you’re proactive in dealing with tankies otherwise you now have a tankie community. You can’t engage them in good faith, you have to make sure they know they aren’t welcome.
They shouldn’t have leaked dms though. The admin of hexbear did ask respectfully, and Moss could’ve just kept their response private. I personally think that the banner is fine, but Moss should have acted more mature.
No they fucking didn’t. They posted private dms with “lol. Lmao even” to stir up hexbear, and then when Ada asked them not to they acted like a child by scribbling over the DM with big text saying “ADA MADE ME CENSOR THIS”. If they don’t want tankie’s in their community, fine. But they dealt with this TERRIBLY and only made things far far worse. They should not be a moderator of any community here
Agreed. this would be borderline unacceptable behavior from a regular user… mods should be held to a higher standard. +1 for demodding
What is this bullshit? You shouldn’t give tankies a voice anywhere. They are absolutely bottom-feeder scum and no better than right wingers. They support regimes that are against trans rights.
Thank you, Ada, for your hard work.
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.
Agreed. And I had not intended to cause the drama that it did. I was hoping for a civil discussion about hexbear because I was getting really frustrated by constantly seeing their communities show up in my “All” feed while I’m still building my subscription list. Like seeing a story I thought would lead to an interesting discussion, opening up the comments and just saying “goddamnit” and blocking another community was really frustrating.
Now they I’ve blocked most of their big communities it’s been better, but their behavior in they thread as well as some of their community’s reaction to proposed rule changes has me thinking that maybe my initial reaction was correct.
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That will solve so many problems!
Oh and I had a suggestion. If you’re able to, look at the poll figures for accounts created after this announcement vs the figures for pre-existing accounts. There may be evidence of people attempting to steer the results one way or another.
Yep, that’s the way I’m leaning
The Android app “Connect” does instance blocking and it’s so useful!
I’m not a GitHub user, although I’ve done some browsing of open issues. Am I seeing that this feature has been coded (or is actively being coded) or am I just seeing that people are still discussing the issue?
I ask because last time I looked (probably 2-4 weeks ago), I saw some discussion on the issue dating back to over a year ago, but nothing that looked like actual traction on it getting implemented.
Its a pull request so its probably at least mostly complete
Thanks for that. Looking again, I see now at the top that I’m looking at pull requests and not “issues”. And because I don’t really know, I just looked up what pull requests are:
Pull requests let you tell others about changes you’ve pushed to a branch in a repository on GitHub. Once a pull request is opened, you can discuss and review the potential changes with collaborators and add follow-up commits before your changes are merged into the base branch.
So that means that code has been written and requested to be merged into the main branch. Does that mean it’s already been tested in a non-main branch and is (hopefully) ready for prime time after some final review?
Yeah, assuming the code is ready (im not very good at programming so idk) the owners of the repository just have to merge those commits and the feature will end up in a subsequent release
It’s too bad that it doesn’t also block comments from users of blocked instances. Isn’t there a uBlock Origin cosmetic filter that does that? Does anybody remember what that was?
Also, does anybody know of a way to browse two instances as one feed, and easily switch between users? I swore I heard there was some way to do that, but I don’t remember the details.
It’s too bad that it doesn’t also block comments from users of blocked instances.
That is indeed my main concern.
The communities they host may not be my cup of tea (although many are) but I curate my home feed and I’m prepared for literally anything when I browse all.
The problem is that a number of accounts on that instance seem to have a serious case of “fite me bro” they take into the rest of the system.
Also, does anybody know of a way to browse two instances as one feed, and easily switch between users?
I’ve heard the Liftoff app allows that but I’ve stuck to the webpage installed as an app on my phone so I can’t check to confirm.
Thanks, I’ll look into that.
I think not much value would be lost by defederating.
They are denying genocides, they are supporting regimes which are not compatible with LGBT+, they don’t discuss in good faith, there is a lot of whataboutism. They want to dunk people and be right and not have their view challenged.
Unfortunately they have so radical ideas about it all (mostly US centric whataboutism as far as I can tell). They fall into fascist/authoritarian traps where they can’t even recognize they are fighting against people like me or us. They dehumanize people.
I don’t think their views are compatible with LGBT+ spaces and values even though they claim to be one while cheering for the people who would remove them from existence the first chance they would get.
Some people are moderate over there and that were the only pleasant interactions I had with them. I can’t tell if the radicals are a loud minority or the majority. They poison the well though.
Even after all that said I don’t know if defederation is the right choice. I mean they provide some good content and in the end they are a big community. On the other hand I have already blocked the instance using the Connect app and my experience improved a lot.
I think in summary they create a hostile space for all people. Even left leaning people are not safe due to their radicalized views and it is exhausting to have every thread derailed with some unrelated rant by them.
I don’t believe anyone on hexbear is actually cheering for people who would remove us from existence. I’m LGBT+ myself, and a huge part of why I’m against the current capitalist system we live under is that I see it as incredibly harmful for people like me. There are numerous examples, such as anti-trans laws in the US, the extreme anti-trans rhetoric in the UK, the American funding of draconian anti-LGBT+ laws in African countries. I also truly don’t value people in western countries higher than people in the rest of the world, so when I see the death toll from our military interventions and siege warfare in the form of sanctions, it makes my blood boil. 100s of thousands of people were killed by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan alone; statistically thousands of them were LGBT+. This means the coalition forces killed more queer people than the countries that have actual death penalties for homosexuality.
I don’t love Russia, they’re a capitalist country with terrible laws and a regressive culture, but Ukraine isn’t really any better. They’ve elevated right wing militias which have targeted people like me and banned trans women from leaving the country.
China is behind on LGBT+ rights, but seem to be moving in the right direction. Cuba has the most progressive LGBT+ laws in the world. Vietnam is moving in the right direction pretty rapidly as well.
I hope this helps you understand why at least one of our users thoughts on these issues. I don’t speak for anyone but myself, but I feel certain my views are quite close to the majority of hexbears.
At least half of it is reasonable and I would fully agree with it. Unfortunately then it went of the rails.
I read the same argument the other day with the US/NATO wars/invasions and equated to the persecution of other countries and that’s just ridiculous. If they were sent there and died because they were queer it would be a whole other story, but if they were there because they were equal to their comrades then it was the actual equality we strive for. Not that I support any wars or any military, but that rhetoric is just dumb. Also guess what this is true for any military ever. Queer people exist even if they don’t have the freedom to live their lives in the open.
Regarding Ukraine it doesn’t really matter. Russia is the agressor here. There is no way Ukraine was ever a threat to Russia yet here we are. It is a developing souvereign (!) country with many problems they try to solve one step at a time. Russia is actively working against everything we fight for. Whatever you believe Ukraine is the situation got only worse due to Russia and there is no way the invasion should ever be glorified by any sane queer person at all.
Funny you mentioned Cuba. Cuba still has major problems with corruption and all the LGBT+ laws are very, very recent additions. I want it to be a success story probably for the same reasons as you, but let’s wait and see for a few more years or decades. I dearly hope they manage and so far it looks better than ever, but unfortunately that’s not great yet.
Anyway this post is also a great example for the US centric whataboutism I talked about in my initial post.
I’m very confused by what you mean about sending people to die? I’m talking about civilian deaths due to invasions and sanctions. I don’t believe you can actually be supporting queer people while bombing them and/or starving them with sanctions.
I also don’t fully agree that my arguments are us-centric. I focus on the US and UK because I am Anglo and so am more aware of the role they play in the world.
Wars are all the same. The argument is just dumb. Either queer people are targeted specifically or it is irrelevant to any discussion about queer persecution.
I had not thought about the similarities between sanctions and siege warfare, that is an excellent observation
It’s not an original observation, but it was something that once I was aware of really made me question why sanctions are so normalized.
If you’d like a better explanation from people who are much smarter than me I recommend the podcast Citations Needed. They’ve got an episode that goes into the harm sanctions cause, especially to the most vulnerable people in the target country.
The following link has both the podcast and a transcript if you prefer reading over listening:
https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-106-the-sanitization-of-sanctions-56f976af6019
Thank you! I will give it a listen/read
Thank you for the link!
Sanctions are only meant to hurt people, not leaders. In fact, they politically weaken poorer people who end up trying to stay alive over trying to overthrow the government.
Yes I know it’s just the specific point about it being modern day siege warfare is new to me
I don’t love Russia, they’re a capitalist country with terrible laws and a regressive culture, but Ukraine isn’t really any better.
Fuck off with this bothsides bullshit. Russia did literally outlaw offering gender affirming treatment to trans people last month. Ukraine is far, far behind what should be acceptable both legally and socially, but you can receive gender affirming treatment and change your legal documents. One country is actively regressing in human rights in an attempt to distance themselves from everything they consider “The West”, while the other is doing the very opposite.
It’s still a shithole of a country, but equating them is an insult to all trans people living in Russia and you only felt you had the need to do it because of the never ending struggle of some miopic political factions to instill anti-interventionism sentiment when a country edging on the border of fascism has invaded their neighbours.
Are you familiar with the concept of atrocity propaganda? Like, for example, the Nayirah Testimony?
As I was telling someone else, it is very difficult to discuss the criticisms of us without talking about political issues because those criticisms are predicated on political claims, such as what you accuse us of here.
Of course there is some propaganda around. That’s nothing new, never was. Stop the notion that you are somehow enlightened or have any information others don’t have. It is ridiculous.
The thing is big lies historically never lasted long if many people are involved. With digital communication around it has become even easier to receive first party accounts of events.
I honestly don’t know what in particular you are hinting at here. None of the things I mentioned would even be terrible if they were lies or have otherwise a huge ilnegative impact. With all the information around it is unlikely that anything is completely untrue though. Not recognizing any of the atrocities and ignoring the situation is seriously terrible though.
Always keep in mind the same argument is also used to deny the Holocaust, other genocides and massacres to this day. It’s a huge gamble all for the sake of dunking whoever…
I’m happy to remain federated; I think the communities, mods and the instance admins (thanks!) do a good job of curating the community, and by and large hexbear users interacting with us on this instance seem to do so in good faith.
That being said, I would make the observation that, from my perspective at least, there seem to be more than a few hexbear users that are apologists for authoritarian regimes. I want to preface this by saying that I am of an anarchist bent, so am not exactly enamoured with ‘Western’ political systems either, but this should not preclude criticism of (bringing up the most often contested examples) the USSR or China.
That being said, discussion of these things are important and differing views should be seen, as I have often found enlightening articles or overlooked areas of history through reading these kinds of discussion.
Bottom line: I would remain federated, but ensure we maintain the character of our instance.
Yeah. I certainly do not like the support for authoritarian regimes. Like, sorry if I don’t like the idea of putting my trust and life in the hands of some small handful of people in power. No matter whether they are the capitalist owner class or dictators. We don’t need to apologize for Russia or China to oppose and criticize the west.
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Holy shit, shut the fuck up. You don’t understand socialism or neoliberalism well enough to speak for either if you think the George Floyd murder was “democracy at work”. Delete the comment and maybe your account.
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Very similar thoughts, also consider myself to have an anarchist bend.
I honestly think the hate toward hexbear is mostly manufactured. A lot of the people complaining are the same ones erroneously comparing them to places like exploding heads, claiming they’re nazi trolls, that they go on downvoting raids (they can’t even downvote btw), accusing them of terrible things, but then don’t (or won’t) provide any proof of them acting this way. And when people like me who aren’t on hexbear question it, we get accused of being a “hexbear in disguise” and ignored. It all feels very dramatic and reddit, and I thought the point of lemmy was to not be like reddit. Defederating from problematic instances I get, but defederating because you hate tankies or because of a few bad members seems more of an ‘echo chamber’ choice than a ‘keep the community safe’ choice to me.
17 of the favorites on this comment are from hexbear users
I’m sorry are you trying to imply that not all lemmy users should get the right to vote on comments?
??? No?
Then what was your point?? Cause it sounded like you’re implying that hexbears don’t have the right to vote on comments. And if that’s what you meant, thats kinda messed up honestly.
It’s the top comment on a post where users from other instances are not allowed to make top comment posts, the OP specified the thread was for Blahaj users specifically, so I think that’s relevant information to put up front
users from other instances are not allowed to make top comment posts
but I’m from this instance??
Have you really not seen any threads on stuff like Russia’s war? There’s
liberalliteral defense of genocide coming from there. They swarm threads, in a way that looks somewhat coordinated.Defederating them doesn’t create an echo chamber. Keeping them around is giving them permission to build their own echo chamber in your spaces by chasing away everybody else who want a chill space to hang out in.
Have I seen individuals say shitty things? Of course, but I don’t assume every person on hexbear is an enemy. For instance, over on lemm.ee I just had a convo with someone who was vehemently pro-landlord and hated “communism” while admitting they’ve never read any communist literature. Should I assume this is what everyone on lemm.ee is like? I’ve run across a TON of trolls and anti-leftists on lemmy.world… should I assume everyone on lemmy.world is a troll? Lemmynsfw is constantly throwing up communities that somehow bypass the nsfw filters. Should I make assumptions about everyone on lemmynsfw too now? That is a slippery slope into an echo chamber imho.
Give users the ability to block whole instances, and only defederate when a WHOLE instance is geared towards disruption, like explodingheads. I wandered around hexbear yesterday looking through their communites and posts, and there’s definitely some opinions I don’t agree with, but I’m not seeing calls to flood posts on other instances like people are claiming. All I’m seeing is a lot of in-jokes, memes, and civil discussions.
It’s not just singular anecdotes. It’s the proportion of users who are like that. A huge fraction of the activity from that server is specifically this type of horrible replies, and their admins aren’t doing anything about it. They absolutely flood many threads with trash and make many conversations entirely unreadable. At that point when you do nothing about filtering out that trash then you’re inviting them to hijack your community.
Show me where “a huge fraction” of them are doing that NOT IN RESPONSE to people badmouthing them and accusing them of shit, but for no reason. Show me these hijacked communities you keep mentioning. Show me these many conversations that are “entirely unreadable”. Show me anti-trans rhetoric that isn’t swiftly dealt with by their admins.
Defederating isn’t the answer, giving individuals the ability to block whole instances on every platform they use is the answer.
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Is this link supposed to be something other then a yahoo finance article with no comments
This exactly! In posts about defederating, they’re commenting like war documents and saying that if you live in the US you’re in support of them commiting genocide. And the amount of comments I’ve seen with nearly identical wording about how Cuba is the most LGBTQ+ friendly country in the world.
Like ok, yeah, the US is a horrible country that’s committed war crimes, and maybe Cuba is LGBTQ+ friendly, I don’t really know, but that has absolutely nothing to do with defederating from an internet forum. They have a very holier than thou vibe.
They swarm threads, in a way that looks somewhat coordinated.
They are not subtle. If you check their post history you can see the communities where they coordinate.
Now, I get pointing terrible posts and laughing at them. I’m ex-SRS. But you gotta show some restraint when you post in the threads or people will end up hating your guts.
Hexbear is a bare-knuckle community that encourages group think and hair trigger mockery (“LIB!” and variations). In general, they bring that mentality wherever they go. It reminds me of the Goons from SomethingAwful in that way: you could spot a group of Goons regardless of the game, site, whatever.
Those communities can be fun (a supporters section at a football match, for example), but you have to go in ready to take a stray punch or two.
I have an account on another instance for when I want to be out in the world and suffer the slings and arrows and look at shitposts on !chapotraphouse. Sometimes I’m in the mood.
But I think part of the intended vibe of blahaj.zone is that it’s somewhere that as highly marginalized people we can come and not expect to have slurs thrown around, 0-100 name calling criticism, etc.
The culture of hexbear is the opposite of that; it’s not about not subscribing to !chapotraphouse, it’s about how the instance approaches the whole idea of online interaction.
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not expect to have slurs thrown around,
Are you suggesting that you expect to be called slurs by the overwhelmingly queer users of Hexbear, who swiftly ban anyone using basically any kind of slur, and whose mods have recently had comments removed for calling out users on this instance for using slurs???
The hell? I do not understand why anyone would remove the first of those comments, and the second is a bit abrasive but still not moderation-worthy, imo.
Yes, honestly, since we’ve seen the moderation is subpar
Hexbear users are literally not capable of throwing slurs at people since the fork hexbear runs on has a slur filter hard coded into it
Also, that particular incident is a prime example of the problem.
Here, we’re used to de-escalate and talk about stuff. That poster has started at least three threads just escalating and escalating.
We’re just not compatible.
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.
after I saw the first 2 posts about hexbear i actively searched for posts and comments from hexbear users to get an idea how big of a problem it really was and I found very little. I think defederation should always be the last resort. as long as there is no coordinated brigading and the admins can bereasonedd with to sanction the worst behaving users I simply see no need for it.
Hi everybody! I have joined here from Hexbear. I’m not going to vote in anything. I hope we all stay federated but if not I now have two places I can post at from work.
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I’ve held my tongue in accordance to our new rules on Hexbear, but this is sickening transphobia and I have seen this levied dozens of times against trans users on Hexbear from users on Blahaj. Hexbear rightly bans people for doubting the validity of people’s genders, and would ban anyone upvoting the post as well. I believe in trans unity to the nth degree and I have worked as a volunteer at trans organizations for 10 years helping hundreds of trans people with medical access. To doubt the validity or sincerity of our trans users is beyond the pale.
Yeah it is a bit messed up to question if people are really trans. They are if they decide they are. Questioning someone’s politics and beliefs is fine, but not who they are.
I stand with you on this, Hexbear. I don’t understand why this is the thing that people are going with, especially on a trans instance like this. Hexbear is so obviously queer and so aggressively supportive.
The thing most concerning to me is that it has 11 votes thinking it was fine.
My issue is their antagonistic behavior that I find unnecessary. It gives off the_donald vibes in the sense that everyone acts like trolls in a circle jerky manner. I was hoping lemmy would have a better standard than Reddit where people don’t shit post all day long.
This nerd talking about standards after that garbage lmao
I can see you haven’t been banned and have yet to apologize for the blatant transphobia you just posted. Gives off trolly vibes.
If this is the kind of transphobia that’s accepted on blahaj zone, then I hope you do defederate us.
Maybe I’m not seeing it, but what is transphobic about this post?
It was in reply to the now deleted post accusing trans hexbear users of not really being trans.
A user that wasnt banned and had 11 upvotes, and +4 on their second post, for the record
to clarify, you can’t see what’s transphobic about accusing trans people of not actually being trans?
Maybe something’s not rendering right in Memmy. There was no reference to anybody saying “you’re not trans” in the parent post to what brain_in_a_box was responding too. Because I didn’t know what they were referencing, I asked. They responded.
I hope that clears it up for you.
they were speculating that hexbear’s userbase was using pronoun tags to pretend like we’re queer friendly – we’re 1/3 trans and that was deeply offensive to all of us. it literally erases our existence.
Lots of good points in this thread, but I’d like to offer that even if everyone on hexbear were terrible annoying people, I’m an adult who can block content for myself.
Defederating is good for when an instance is hosting illegal content and you need to keep it off our servers, or if an instance is spamming stuff with bots and abusing the fediverse, but when it comes to content I do or don’t want to see, I want to make that decision myself.
Yes, this exactly. I left another instance because of too heavy-handed moderation, don’t really want it again, and especially not over a problem that began when someone didn’t like seeing annoying things in the All feed and Lemmy’s broken sorting.
Right? People talk about how frequently they utilize the block button and it’s like… keep doing that! Don’t ruin federation for everyone else because your sensibilities and your politics make it hard for you to interact with others!
We should primarily defederate:
- nazis, because their ideology inherently calls for violence against marginalized groups based on their race, religion, sexuality, etc.
- Gore, due to its ability to cause trauma simply by viewing
- Illegal content for which Blahaj could be held liable
Very, very, very much agreed.
