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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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guessing this doesn't include hexbear.net because they aren't federated yet but they have 270k posts and 3.6 million comments on their own, mostly well before the start of this graph, so it ought to start at more like 500k
But I'm so glad to see lemmy taking off properly, not just used for some niches. FOSS internet infrastructure that is accessible to end users is so important, it safeguards a lot of important freedoms, etc.
What's the story behind this defederation? I missed that
it does basically boil down to what other people have said but I'll elaborate.
The reasons are political disagreements from the admins of lemmy.world, and them taking the site's zealous left-wing opinions and shitposting culture as prima-facie evidence that hexbear users cannot be trusted not to break lemmy.world rules (unstated which rules) by pushing "their beliefs and ideology". It almost sounds reasonable until you think about it like, at all. It's an explicitly political instance (though honestly >50% of the posting is just news of the day and banter), so of course the users will by and large have those political opinions and post them. As long as they do so within the rules of lemmy.world I don't see the issue personally.
TBH reading "their" opinion on Russia and the Russia war I can see why people would just simply want them to stay within their weird island. Well defederation is still not a cool option in general for the platform as a whole but I can see how admins of instances read stuff like that and can't help but let their own opinion influence their decision. I would probably stay away from these as well.
I can sort of understand why tbf. Just playing the devil's advocate here but the issue is that today it's fine and shitposts are shitposts but Poe's law will come into action at some point.
That's not the actual reason. Hexbear was openly advocating for their "army" to brigade other instances once it was federating. It just so happens that the basis of that brigading was going to be political.
Lemmy.world pre-emptivly decided it wasn't worth the hassle of having to deal with that.
Ohh okay. I didn't know the context but that sounds really bad. Brigading instances should be de-federated.
what's the line between brigading and just getting into political arguments though? cause hexbear is plenty good at the latter, they used to fight among themselves a lot, but doesn't really have a huge history of the former, they mostly keep to themselves since the reddit ban. Most I've seen is a handful of accounts posting in the defed announcement thread here, which like, fair enough, it was clearly a politically motivated decision. It's hard to believe they'd be any worse than lemmygrad for example, if anything they fit the culture of the wider lemmyverse a lot better (not to say lemmygrad should be defed'ed either by a general purpose instance such as this, but there is more culture shock there than hexbear)
What is the similarity?
Brigading is when you are targeting your entire group to a single post and attack users or disrupt the discussion.
it's worth noting that the statement about the war in ukraine is written by the people who run the news megathread, not the whole site, and the degree to which people agree with them seems to vary widely. It's been the subject of a fair amount of arguing on the site in the past.
But the seeming majority opinion of say, lemmy.world, of outright supporting NATO unconditionally is probably further than even the most skeptical hexbear user would go, give or take a few outliers. The majority lie somewhere inbetween, with most people disliking both russia and NATO, and thinking that NATO influence is serving to prolong the war, not shorten it.
So from the perspective of a US liberal they are outliers yes, but they aren't a monolith who all love russia either, and they are very accustomed to being shat on from both sides of the US and EU political spectrum as russian bots, CCP shills, etc. because of their communist views.
Oh I'm not saying the overall opinions there are ironic and will stay that way, they are very much communists (and a notable minority of anarchists), and that isn't likely to change, just that there's also a lot of shitposting, and the general jokey tone seems to be what convinced admins not to take the "hey guys you have to follow the rules of federated instances when you post there" seriously
Hexbear only recently started opening itself up to federation. It’s one of the old leftist instances that was around before the reddit api fiasco. Think lemmygrad but more tolerant and pro-lgbtq.
Basically the powers that be determined that Hexbear "violated" Lemmy's TOS by being a little too right wing (their opinion) and therefore chose on behalf of the entirety of Lemmy that the instance should be defederated.
Source
I live here but to be clear, lemmy.world is not "the entirety of Lemmy".
....I'm not sure you understand how all this works.
Wish I could be as bad ass as you and have it all figured out, to the point that I make dick ish comments to propel humanity along.
Eat a bag of dicks.
So you're striving to raise yourself from full dick to just "-ish"? Otherwise this reply seems a bit ironic.
Hexbear is left wing.
Why is Hexbear so popular? I've never even heard of it
It's fairly big relative to other lemmy instances because it's been around for over 3 years, and it was a lifeboat site for people that frequented r/chapotraphouse before it was banned from reddit (which was a relatively huge sub).
Over the past year or so they worked to switch from a heavily modified fork of lemmy back to a more modern upstream version of lemmy, mostly by redeveloping and contributing features that were missing, like custom emojis, to upstream lemmy. So now there's more attention being paid since it is now using a federation-compatible version of lemmy and intends to actually federate with a limited subset of the lemmyverse
Thanks for the very detailed explanation!
Same, I just found it after seeing the lemmy instances graph. It's nothing to sneeze at.
#LemmyDrama
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wasn't trying to stir shit, its just interesting (though entirely understandable) how that site gets left out of these kinds of posts. It has a lot of inertia to still have 1500 monthly active users, and a huge amount of content, after >3 years of being split off from reddit and receiving little outside attention
I find it funny when people cry "FrEdOoM oF eXpReSsIoN" when instances defederate. Isn't this the whole point and the good thing about federated social media? People who own the instances decide what to do with their instances