Hey folks
I have been receiving a lot of messages every single day about federation with hexbear. Some of our users are vehemently against it, others are in full support. The conversation does not seem to be dying down, rather, the volume of messages I receive about it seems to be increasing, so I am opening this public space where we can openly discuss the topic.
I am going to write a wall of text about my own thoughts on the situation, I’m sorry, but no tl;dr this time, and I ask anybody participating in this thread to first read through this post before commenting.
Before I go any further, I want to be clear that for anybody who participates here, it is required to focus on the quality of your posts. That means:
- Be kind to each other, even if you disagree
- Use arguments rather than calling people names
- Realize that this is a divisive topic, so your comments should be even more thoughtful than usual
With that out of the way, there are a few things I want to cover.
On defederation in general
First of all, I am a firm believer that defederation must be reserved only for cases where all other methods have failed. If defederation is used liberally, then a small group of malicious users can effectively completely shut down the federated network, by simply creating the type of drama between instances which would inevitably result in defederation. In my view, federation is the biggest strength of Lemmy compared to any centralized discussion forum, so naturally I think maintaining federation by default is an important goal in general.
I am also a believer in the value of deplatforming hateful content, but I think defederation is not the best way to do this. Banning individual users, banning communities and establishing a culture of mutual support between mods and admins of different instances should be the first line of defense against such content. There are some further steps that can be taken before defederation as well, but these are not really documented anywhere (in order to prevent circumvention). The point is: for myself, defederation is the absolute last resort, only to be used when it is completely clear that other methods are ineffective.
Finally, I am wary of creating a false expectation among lemm.ee users that lemm.ee admins endorse all users and communities and content on instances we are federated with. Here at lemm.ee, we use a blocklist for federation, which means our default apporach is to federate with all new instances. We do not have the resources (manpower, skills and knowledge) necessary to pass judgement on all instances which exist out there, as a result, users on lemm.ee are expected to curate their own content to quite a high degree. In addition to downvoting and/or reporting as necessary, individual lemm.ee users are also able to block specific users and communities, and the ability to block entire instances is coming very soon as well.
Having said all that, in a situation where all other methods do indeed fail, defederation is not out of the question. Making such a call is up to the discretion of lemm.ee admins, and doing it as a last resort is completely in line with our federation policy.
Regarding hexbear
Hexbear is an established Lemmy instance, focused on many flavors of leftism. They have quite a large userbase who are very active on Lemmy (often so active that they leave the impression brigading all popular Lemmy posts). One important thing to note is that while some forms of bigotry seem to be quite accepted by many hexbear users (but seemingly not by mods - more on that below), they at least are very protective of LGBT rights (and yes, I am quite certain that they are not just pretending to do this, as many users seem to believe). Additionally, while I have noticed quite high quality posts from hexbear users, there are also several users there who seem to really enjoy trolling and baiting (very reminiscent of 4chan-type “for the lulz” posting), and it’s important to note that this kind of posting is in general allowed on hexbear itself.
The reason this whole topic is important to so many people right now (despite hexbear being a relatively old instance), is that hexbear only recently enabled federation. A combination of their volume of posts, their strong convictions, the excitement about federation, and the aforementioned trolling has made them very visible to almost all Lemmy users, and this has sparked discussions about the value of federation with hexbear on a lot of Lemmy instances.
My own experience with hexbear
I want to write down my own experience with interacting with hexbear users, mods, and admins over the past few days. I believe this experience will highlight why I am hesitant to advocate for immediate full defederation from hexbear at this point in time, and am for now still more in favor of taking action on a more individual user basis. Please read and see how you feel about the situation afterwards.
Background
My first real contact with hexbear users was in the comments section of a post in this meta community requesting defederation from hexbear by @[email protected]. That post is now locked, because several hexbear users very quickly started doing the aforementioned “for the lulz” type spamming of meme images in the comments (these are actually just emojis, but they are rendered as full-size images on all instances other than the source instance, due to a current Lemmy bug).
I did not want to take further actions in that thread in general (for archival purposes), but I did take one action, which in retrospect was a mistake: I removed a comment which contained the hammer and sickle symbol. I ignorantly associated this symbolism with Kremlin propaganda, and the atrocities my own people suffered at the hands of the soviet union during the previous century. Many users (including hexbear users) correctly (and politely) pointed out to me in DMs that the symbol has a much broader use than just as the symbol of the USSR, and people elsewhere in the world may not associate it with the USSR at all. I am grateful for users who pointed this out to me without resorting to personal attacks.
Let me be clear here: while I do not have anything against leftism or communist ideas in general (in fact in today’s world, I think discussion of such ideas is quite necessary), Kremlin propaganda has no place on lemm.ee. Any dehumanizing talking points of the Kremlin on lemm.ee are treated as any other bigotry, and if communist symbolism is used in context of Kremlin propaganda (that is the context in which I have been exposed to it throughout my whole life), then it will still be removed. But there is no blanket ban on communist symbolism in general on lemm.ee, and discussing and advocating for leftist and communist topics (as distinct from the imperialist and dehumanizing policies of the Kremlin) is certainly allowed on lemm.ee.
Hexbear user response
Coming back to the events of the past few days: soon after my removal of the comment containing the symbol from the meta thread, two posts popped up on hexbear. One was focused on insulting and spreading lies about me personally. Another was focused on diminishing the horrors of the soviet occupation in my country. In the comments under both of these posts (and in a few other threads on hexbear), I noticed some seriously disturbing bigotry against my people. There were comments which reflected the anti-Estonian propaganda of the current Russian state, things like:
- Suggesting that my people has no right to exist
- Stating that my people (and other Baltic nations) are subhuman
- Claiming that anybody critical of both nazi and soviet occupations is themselves a nazi and a holocaust denier
I expect to hear such statements from the Russian state - here in Estonia, we are subjected to this and other kinds of bigotry constantly from Russian media - but to see it spread openly in non-Russian channels is extremely disturbing. Such bigotry is completely against lemm.ee rules in general. Additionally, my identity is public information, because I feel it’s important for the integrity of lemm.ee that I don’t hide behind anonymity. Considering this, I’m sure you can understand why I am very worried about my own safety when people leave comments in many unrelated threads (where my original posts are not even visible), baselessly calling me a nazi and a holocaust denier.
Note that the goal of this post is not to start a new debate in the comments about the the repressions of the soviet union in Estonia or other occupied territories, but if the topic interests any users, I can recommend the 2006 documentary The Singing Revolution (imdb). The trailer is a bit cheesy, but the actual film contains lots of historical footage from the soviet occupation, and also many interviews with people who experienced it, who share stories which are deeply familiar to all Estonians. If anybody is interested in further discussion, then I suggest making a post about it in the Estonian community here: [email protected].
Hexbear admin response
After the above events had played out, I reached out to hexbear admins for clarification on their moderation policies and how they handle such cases. I was actually very happy with their response:
- They immediately removed the personal attacks and dehumanizing comments containing Kremlin propaganda from Hexbear, and assured me that such content is always handled by mods
- They told me that while there are all kinds of leftists on hexbear, Russian disinformation is generally either refuted in comments or removed by mods
- They implemented some additional rules on hexbear to try and reduce the trolling experienced by many other instances, including ours: https://hexbear.net/post/352119
My personal take-aways
Let me play the devil’s advocate here and employ some “self-whataboutism”: among all users that have been banned on lemm.ee for bigotry, the majority were actually not users from other instances, and in fact people with lemm.ee accounts. If we judge any larger instance only by bigoted posts that some of its users make, then we might as well declare all instances as cesspools and close down Lemmy completely. I believe it’s far more useful to judge instances based on moderation in response to such content. Just as we remove bigoted content from lemm.ee, I have also witnessed bigoted content being removed from hexbear.
At the same time, I am aware of some internal conflict between hexbear users over the more strict moderation they are now starting to employ, and I am definitely keeping an eye on that situation and how admins handle it.
I am also still quite worried about the amount of distinct users on hexbear who have posted Kremlin propaganda. I so far don't have reason to believe that these users are employed by the Russian state, but the fact that they are spreading the same hateful content which can be seen on Russian television seems problematic to say the least, and it remains to be seen if moderators can truly keep up with such content.
Where thing stand right now
I am not convinced that we are currently at a point where the “last resort” of defederation is necessary. This is based on the presumption that our moderation workload at lemm.ee will not get out of hand just due to users from that particular instance. My current expectation is that as the excitement of federation calms down (and as new rules on hexbear go into effect), the currently relatively high volume of low effort trolling will be replaced by more thoughtful posts. If this is not the case then we will certainly need to re-evaluate things.
Additionally, nothing is changing about our own rules regarding bigotry. Especially relevant in the context of Kremlin propaganda, I want to say that dehumanizing anybody is not allowed on lemm.ee (hopefully I do not have to spell it out, but this of course includes Ukrainians, LGBT folks, and others that the Kremlin despises), and action will be taken against any users who do this, regardless of what instance they are posting from.
Finally, I am very interested to hear thoughts and responses from our own users. I am super grateful to anybody who actually took the time to read through this massive dump of my own thoughts, and I am very interested to get a proper understanding of how our users feel about what I’ve written here. Please share any thoughts in the comments.
At 21 hours old, this lemm.ee meta post has 1123 comments and 3/4ths of the comments are from hexbear users. They brigade every thread with their non sense and it is impacting lemmy in a very negative way. We wouldn't be having this discussion if it wasn't. I don't really like defederation if it was a tool to silence ideology but what hexbear users do is not really debate ideology and more aggressive in your face bad faith argument trolling. This is a spam instance that should be treated as such. Block it.
Can you explain what the difference is between 'brigading' and just users posting? How can a community that's been the or one of the most active for over 3 years when it wasn't federeated or connected with anyone, be a "spam instance"?
It's not brigading, this is the top thread on both of our instances and the admin OK'd our input. blahaj had 2 Hexbear federation threads, one including everyone and one just for blahaj users.
Also hexbear doesn't have downvotes, so we have a culture of responding to add or refute information.
We're pretty disdainful of debate culture. A discussion where both people are trying to appeal to a third party instead of have a genuine discussion is inherently in bad faith.
I keep hearing a lot about "our culture" to excuse behaviours that are getting peoples backs up. However in real life it's pretty wide knowledge that you may have to temper your behaviour outside of your culture if you go abroad or the like. Should this not apply if you're in someone else's instance on here too?
They just explained that they lacked down votes in their instance. So instead of downvoting, they reply and explain their thought process. I haven't seen anything rude in the replies either.
And what the fuck does "temper your behavior outside your culture" mean? That just sounds like anti immigration bullshit lol.
I mean, I was kind of talking the other way around, if I go from the west to a Middle Eastern country I'd have to change my behaviour, what I wear, etc.
Tipping is a good example here, in the UK we don't do tipping in the same way as the US, but if we travel there we would be expected to and "we don't do it like that in our country" isn't an acceptable answer. Same here, I don't buy, "we don't have downvotes so have to send a picture of a pig having a Tom tit" as a valid excuse for behaviour either.
Sure one might change their behaviors when traveling accordingly, but I think people would be generally understanding if an American tried to tip in the UK, and I would hope a waitress in America would understand why someone from the UK might not tip. With federation that cultural overlap is even more understandable because it's not like I'm getting on a plane and traveling across the ocean, I'm just clicking a link that was already on my All on Hexbear. We're also a lot larger/more active of an instance with almost quadruple the active monthly users of lemm.ee, and Hexbear has been around for about 3 years. A lot of the "brigading" people see is just the result of there being many active bears + this stuff showing up on our feeds + it being directly about us. When you consider all of these things, does it make a bit more sense why we might show up like a swarm of locusts throwing around our own inside jokes?
It does, for the most part we do, and we a have specific, different set of rules for posting in other instances.
You're also elsewhere in this thread throwing unprompted insults around.
Yeah, they didn't go up until you'd spent several days posting pigs shitting all over the place and getting defeded from other subs though did they?
I believe we were preemptively defederated from those instances, with a common rationale being that we weren't pro-NATO and them not sharing our politics in general.
As for the rules being new in response to federation, you seem to be complaining that we're doing exactly what you asked us to do above.
I suspect there's no behaviour or amount of effort you'd accept. If that's the case you should just say so.
Didn't the Canadian instance have to defed you because you wouldn't stop wishing violence on people?
Also, I'd imagine most people in this instance are pro-Nato, most sensible people are, what's the difference?
No
I just went and checked. That rationale was based on one tongue in cheek 'execute the landlords' type comment in response to thr speculative housing market making Toronto unaffordable to live.
so it was in fact over wishing violence on people
There's plenty of implicit calls for violence on that sub, they dug for a specific example to use as an excuse because of their political stance, and that example was basically the equivalent of someone saying 'Eat The Rich' by a user with no power to do anything about it. I don't think anyone thinks actionable threats and comments like that are analogous, but even if they do, surely all promotion of violence is objectionable or none is.
did they actually give any reason to believe that theyre a hypocrite with a political chip on their shoulder as opposed to just being against calls for violence
i also just dont really agree that all promotion of violence is equal, and considering the content, culture and even moderation policy of hexbear i honestly doubt that you or most hexbear users do agree with that stance
Because as far as I can tell that's the only one they've ever used to defederate. Because it's such a silly, jokey, slogany, non-actionable example. And finally because this has been a pattern with numerous instances that pre-emptively defederate before we'd ever even engaged with them at all, based on absurd deliberate misrepresentations of individual comments. We had one the other day which claimed that when some one off handedly said Death to NATO they were advocating and planning the genocide of every single person living in a NATO aligned country.
As for your other question, I don't believe that all violent rhetoric is equal (and I doubt many other Hexbear users would either). I thinks it's dependent on context, arguements of credible self defense, and the risks of how actionable it is amongst other things. But if you deliberately choose and only enforce the silliest, least serious example then either you're doing it disingenuously or it's a blanket, no tolerance approach that treats all cases equally. This is what they went with and as I've pointed out it's not the latter, so I think it's the former.
thats fair
if this is the case i think it is, i understood 'people of NAVO' to mean actual NAVO officials, with emphasis on the fact that those are people, especially after their elaboration
as such i didnt read their comment as framing 'death to NAVO' as calling for the genocide of every NATO aligned country, rather assuming that it was calling for violence against the people that actually make up the organization
given the image of NATO officials on hexbear, i dont feel like that was an unfair assumption even if its not necessarily an accurate one, and I dont feel like assuming it was done disingenuously is fair especially when taking into account that the person in question still seemed to prefer federation
again, assuming were talking about the same case
I think we are, but I only briefly saw it in passing. I don't think anyone on Hexbear read it as a call to kill people in the organisation of NATO (although I doubt many would she'd many tears either) but as a wish to see the demise of the institution. Our instance also has specific rules about that sort of thing.
Anyway, I was using it to help illustrate the barrage of bad faith misrepresentations we've been dealing with constantly, especially from instances that we've never even interacted with, but it's by no means the only one. Other preemptive defederations for example have all fixated on these kind of wild misrepresentations only to finally concede that we weren't pro-NATO enough. So when we see these kind of bad faith takes and plumbing the depths to find a comment amongst an instance of 20,000 users and 3 years of posts (usually mixed with generic anti-commie abuse in the threads for good measure) we definitely tend to assume the actual reasons are political.
Even here there's a lot of those same signs. I'm not saying that's the case by the way, and I think it's clear from myself and others that plenty of us are engaged and here in good faith. But I mention it because it's part of the reason there's also been some pretty salty and skeptical Hexbears users pop into the thread too - especially in reaction to some of the more openly hostile comments about us.
I've been very careful to be fair in my other posts on this being a two way street that the majority of people here have been fine, especially those who just came in and said their piece regardless of whether I agree with it or not, like the thread was supposed to be for. I've had some great conversations with people here too and I dig your art comm. I'll be contributing more to that I think, probably elsewhere too.
I just meant to explain that Hexbear can sometimes seem really good natured in some instances and pretty aggressive in others it's that we've put up with a lot of shit, even constant trolling, bigoted actual Brigades, DDOS attacks etc long before federation. We're generally pretty welcoming so long as people come with an open mind and be sincere. But when we get hostility up front we tend not bother in the niceties or take any bullshit to put it bluntly.
Anyway, it's been good chatting with you. I hope this all works out.
No
Yeah and it's fucking right. Kill your landlord
do you feel like hexbear users actively calling for killings, while other hexbear users absolutely swear that 'theyre actively calling for killings' is a total misinterpretation of their wholesome culture, is going to hurt your credibility
do you feel like credibility might be useful, for instance if youre actively trying to convince people to change their political views or behaviours
There a plenty of very sensible people who have issues with NATO. If you're interested in an intro into one of the reasons why that is I'd recommend reading To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia by Michael Perenti.
https://www.versobooks.com/products/1721-to-kill-a-nation
It's on sale for only $3 right now!
"Why do hexbears keep bringing their political opinions into things?"
Lmao in their defederation thread they had one of their guys use holocaust denail dogwhistles. I'm happy they defederated. The fact that you sympathize with those nazis just shows what type of scum you are. I'll be happy when you defederate too.
He just relayed what he read in the lemmy.ca thread, wtf are you going on about?
https://lemmy.ca/comment/2283613
It's bad faith trolling to defend ourselves? It's not our fault you don't understand how federation works. Go back to reddit if you want your enforced echo chamber back.
Conflict is not abuse
https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/C/Conflict-Is-Not-Abuse
Why are you spamming the same comment (calling Hexbear users abusers, a gross and offensive comment to victims of abuse) again and again?
You claim hexbears are brigading, and yet here you are adding nothing to the discussion and spamming. This is both ironic and in extremely bad faith.
this tactic of trying to minimize the victims of real abuse by comparing it to posting on the internet is pretty disgusting and reflects poorly on lemm.ee
appeal to authority. special pleading.
If those long threads were mostly on topic (about federation), that would at least be something. They present interesting view points but at all the wrong times and in huge numbers. This post is about examining their behavior and their effect on conversations. I think they've shown it to us.
This is at least a two way street. People from Hexbear have a right to defend themselves when you call them Nazis and compare them to ISIS like you have elsewhere in this thread.
To avoid misrepresentation, I'll quote my original proposition:
The casual introduction and acceptance of capital punishment and "useful" applications of police brutality, as if they were common tools in a political toolbox, is a mark of the beginning of that very shift.
Anyway, I've spent far too much time in here so I'm trying to put this whole post behind me. My own personal "disengage", I guess? I just didn't want to leave while being lumped in with the other people leaving crude, shallow dismissals as Russian tankies/bots/shills/trolls/whatever. I entered these conversations with a neutral viewpoint on Hexbear, not even in favor of defederation, but that has sadly changed quite a bit.
What are you talking about? Political 'moderates' introduce and accept capital punishment and useful applications of brutality all the time.
You added that rationalization ten hours later and still compared us to Nazis.
Views on capital punishment vary across Hexbear, but in general I'd argue we're generally anti. The idea we're a pro-police brutality sub is absurd, given that ACAB and the police being the violent oppressive shock troops of capital are one of the the only views that's basically agreed upon across Hexbear.
You seem to be misrepresenting the fact that while most communists (and not all of our users are communists) dislike, but understand the sad necessity of some degree of state violence in order to protect itself from hostile forces like coups and terrorism. All states believe this, it's known as 'the monopoly on violence' but communists broadly want to achieve global revolution in order to move past the need for the destructive elements of the state (although I admit this is a pretty utopian, very long term goal). I'd be happy to send you some reading or video lectures on the subject if you'd like, but it sounds like you're not interested.
And just a note in case you do pop over to Hexbear in the future, the disengagement rule we have isn't a tool to send a long post and have the final word. But I'm also not interested in hounding you if you just want to move on. Hope you enjoy the rest of your day.
I'm not going to engage with you on anything other than the "disengage", but part of our "disengage" rule is that you absolutely cannot dump a bunch of text in an argument and end it with "disengage". You need to actually disengage when you say "disengage".