Recently I was asked if we’d be willing to reconsider federation with Hexbear, followed by CARCOSA reaching out to me to see if it was something we’d be open to.

They made a post asking if their community was interested in refederating with us, similarly I’d like the opinion of our local users.

Why refederate?

Hexbear has a decent number of sizable active communities:

These all seem fairly well moderated, giving us access to more diverse posts and viewpoints. A lot of our feed right now is dominated by US centric communities, and it’d be nice to get some more variety.

Why not?

They love trolling and I don’t expect them to follow our rules when commenting (primarily “be civil”).

Just looking at their thread about us, there’s a significant number of immature replies slandering us / Canada. I’m not confident their users will engage in actual discussion in our threads, rather than just showing up to throw out insults and memes.

We can try to handle this by banning users / blocking specific communities, but that’s going to increase moderation workload for both admins and mods. Hexbear is self admittedly quick to ban users on their side, but they also don’t mind ban evasion - not ideal for us.

So what’s next?

This is where we solicit your opinions, how does our community feel?

  • Shadow@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
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    21 days ago

    I think it’s reasonable to say the community is overwhelmingly againts refederation, so we’ll keep the status quo for now.

    • asymmetric@lemmy.caEnglish
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      21 days ago

      Thanks for asking us and then following through by actually listening.

      This thread is the complete opposite of the “Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot” thread lol.

  • Beaver@lemmy.caEnglish
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    22 days ago

    Yes, I’m up for interacting with more leftists. As they have been polite visitors on Vegan Theory Club.

    • MindTraveller@lemmy.caEnglish
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      21 days ago

      Hexbear users aren’t leftists, they’re radical centrists. Preach the virtues of communism while attacking people for being communists. Speak up about the genocide in Palestine while denying the genocide in China. Support capitalist Russia and Imperialist Putin in the name of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. Preach the values of queer acceptance while harassing people for being trans. Every good opinion they have is tainted by acting the exact opposite way the next day. They claim to be leftists, but 50% of the time their actions are the actions of fascists.

    • Albbi@lemmy.caEnglish
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      21 days ago

      I’d be happy with more interaction, left or right. But hexbear seems to be interested in trolling mostly. I don’t see much of their content, but just reading the linked discussion about federating with lemmy.ca was gross.

    • Shadow@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
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      22 days ago

      The problem is they have rules about not abusing vegans, so VTC is safe by default. We won’t have that safety net.

      • Beaver@lemmy.caEnglish
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        22 days ago

        I will be informing Vancity of this hostile comment towards a marginalized group trying to protect animals.

        • Shadow@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
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          22 days ago

          I’m sorry but I think you misunderstood me.

          Hexbear has very stringent rules against bugging vegans, so they won’t brigade VTC for that reason. Lemmy.ca doesn’t have that protection from hexbear, as we’re a multi purpose instance rather than vegan specific.

          That’s all I was saying. I have no issues with veganism at all.

          • Beaver@lemmy.caEnglish
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            22 days ago

            Yes, you’re right about Hexbear having an extra rule about the treatment of animals.

            I appreciate the response however I took issue with the wording “We won’t have that safety net.” I will not pursue further action.

  • LimpRimble@lemmy.caEnglish
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    22 days ago

    They love trolling

    Until we get a decent automod, I’m not interested in fighting off even more trolls.

    • IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
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      22 days ago

      Need an automod that will insta-ban with no recourse anyone posting pig balls.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
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    22 days ago

    I’m somewhat open to it, IF moderation can keep up with the increased workload. We have to make it clear that while we might welcome new opinions, call us all libs or whatever, we need to show no tolerance for users engaging on Lemmy.ca solely to be a nuisance, which we saw quite a bit of last time. If there’s a sizable contingent over there still intending to sow (-🐽-) chaos it’s probably not worth the effort to re-federate.

    Hexbear users can run their communities like a zoo all they want, but they have to leave the zoo there when they visit other servers.

  • lemmyng@lemmy.caEnglish
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    22 days ago

    No. The downsides of refederating far outweigh the benefits: They have a history of acting in bad faith, and the listed active communities have equivalent counterparts on other instances.

  • Canadian_Cabinet @lemmy.caEnglish
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    22 days ago

    I say no. Literally every interaction with HB has been negative. Its like they’re all AIs made to be as annoying as possible

  • IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
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    22 days ago

    Thanks for bringing this to the community instead of immediately making a decision yourselves. It is nice to have the opportunity to be a part of the choice, since it’s open as a possibility.

    That said, no thank you. Lemmy instance blocking still cannot block both posts and users, which means that even though we can avoid their posts as we wish, we will still be inundated by Hexbear replies on every post. Considering that the comments are quite possibly the worst part of Hexbear, this will result in the same shit-show we had last time. The comments on their refederation post just reassure me that we don’t want to be associated with them. I won’t shed a tear to be missing out on the 5 extra meme posts on my all page.

    • Shadow@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
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      21 days ago

      Thanks for bringing this to the community instead of immediately making a decision yourselves. It is nice to have the opportunity to be a part of the choice, since it’s open as a possibility.

      The community is what makes this happen. IMHO any major decision that impacts all of you, should involve all of you.

  • Heotinotu@lemmy.caEnglish
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    22 days ago

    While I don’t like that instance and block most communities from there as I see them, as an end user, I think it’s fair to refederate and instead let users individually block Hexbear users, communities and perhaps even the whole instance if they see fit. My worry, however, is if moderation here on this side of the two instances wouldn’t get too clogged.

    • IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
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      22 days ago

      Two main issues with this approach, in my opinion:

      • Instance blocking does not block comments. If multiple Hexbear users decides to harass you, you will keep seeing their replies until you manage to block every user to blame. I don’t want to go through this.

      • Every new user to lemmy.ca will have to put up with the sea of bad-faith Hexbear users until they also go through this multi-phase blocking process, which is a terrible onboarding experience.

      While these aren’t huge issues if Hexbear plays nice, I don’t trust that to be the case. From my experience of the last time I just have to assume it will be more harassment and more ASCII/emote spam and do not wish for our instance to be polluted by that.

      • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.caEnglish
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        21 days ago

        It’s not a matter of if multiple Hexbear users will decide to harass you, it’s a matter of when. They start threads to summon other Hexbear users to “dunk on” people they disagree with.

  • Bo7a@lemmy.caEnglish
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    22 days ago

    One vote for not refederating. Please leave hexbear where they are.