cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/114721
My humble takes on the most popular Lemmy instances, or "how to piss off the whole Fediverse with a single meme".
Here are the links to each one of the mentioned instances:
Far Left Centre Left Centre Right Far Right Lemmygrad Exploding Heads Hexbear Lemmy.ml Lemmy.world Beehaw Pricefield Lemmy Based Count sh.itjust.works Blåhaj Lemmy Divisions by zero Lemmy NSFW Hack Liberty
I'm going to ~~shill~~ suggest lemm.ee, it's a lovely instance that isn't defederated from most (for better or worse, some people can't stand hexbear but soon lemmy will add the ability to block instances at the user level, rather than defederating) and the lead admin is very sharp with the development - he's even helped other instances when they've had major issues and he's made various contributions to the lemmy codebase. It always feels like we're getting the latest and slickest version of everything, with fewer bugs than other instances.
Blocking instances on the user level doesn't solve the core issue which is that Hexbear brigades, trolls and harasses enmasse in the first place. Their comments might be hidden for you, but they're still a problem for everyone else. Blocking them is really just putting a bandaid over the problem.
Hexbear doesn't brigade from what I've seen, there's just more of them and they're very active. If a post is at the top of your feed it's likely to be at the top of theirs also.
If you haven't seen it, that's genuinely surprising. It's what they're known for at this point. Any thread about China, Russia or Ukraine gets flooded by them on any instance still federated with them. They shut down discussion, spam huge ugly emojis, and argue in bad faith to defend authoritarian regimes. They aren't being defederated enmasse for being well-behaved.
The huge emojis is a lemmy bug, one which has basically been fixed (at least the lemm.ee admin seems to have fixed it, I imagine he's pushed the code to the main stack but others won't necessarily have adopted it yet).
I remember seeing a bit of a burst of them interacting with stuff when they first federated, but since then it died down massively - and not just because they'd been defederated, but in the threads they were still a part of. The novelty quickly wore off and users on both sides started noticing where they were posting more (hexbear users when they step out and lemmy users when they went in to hexbear) and behaving accordingly. Frankly, I've seen far more posts spamming moans about them than actual things to moan about.
Do you still feel this way? I bought that excuse prior to our federation with them, but they literally made 1000 comments on the first post made on our main community about them. Then when another user made a post on our main community asking how to block them, they brigaded that post too. I understand that they have a large and active userbase, but that's completely irrelevant. Lemmy.world is 10x the size of hexbear and their users have never disrupted out local communities like that in 3 months of federation, hexbear did it multiple times within 24 hours.
I don't understand how that can be classified as anything other than brigading. They did the same shit to blahaj.zone and lemmy.nz, and those are only the ones I witnessed firsthand, I'm sure there are many other examples.
Brigading is where people go from one post in one place to another post. Eg, when hexbear have a post about some argument they had somewhere else, if users came from that post and found the original post that could be brigading - particularly if users are calling to arms to get people to go there, or linking directly to it. Generally, hexbear users do not do this. Hexbear users see the same feeds we do, as such they see the posts and they participate in them.
I think they're abrasive and many of them seem to get off on that, but the best way is to generally not engage with those ones and have civil discourse with those that are a little more mature.
According to whom? Simply because they're not stupid enough to make a post on Hexbear saying "let's go here and spam" doesn't mean they aren't brigading. Not to mention that for all we know, they do coordinate via discord or any other channel; the only evidence we have against that is their word, which is obviously bereft of value. And by the way, they constantly discuss dunking on other servers, by which they mean brigading.
Just because Reddit used public posts calling for brigading as unequivocal evidence of brigading in order to justify disciplining subreddits doesn't mean that such evidence needs to be present for it to be called a brigade.
The top definition on urban dictionary states brigading is A concentrated effort by one online group to manipulate another. (e.g. by mass commenting)
The second definition states: When people from one group, organization, fandom, forum, server, etc. aggressively infiltrates, usually spontaneously, a rival forum, server, or stream; negative criticism is usually given to the victim of a brigade (the event itself sometimes being called a raid), with insults and counter-signaling common. Usually used in the past participle ("brigaded").
Deliberately and repeatedly, they spammed threads that are clearly intended for local discussion with hateful comments, emoji spam, and inside jokes. If you refuse to acknowledge their behavior constitutes brigading, then you're surely being willfully obtuse.
I had a very similar opinion fewer than 7 days ago, but now I am compelled to dispute it, because I recognize that their toxicity is far more disruptive than I realized and in fact frequently prevents any civil discourse from even being possible.
I don't have the opportunity to engage with any of them anymore because they brigaded the shit out of my server for 2 days and forced defederation. Now the only way for me to interact is to comment on their server, where I'm even more exposed to the numerous hateful and abusive members of their community. As you can see, the "abrasive" members of their community dictate the terms of interaction for all of their users. You cannot simply choose to interact with one member of their server, they come as a package deal. If I try to debate a point with one, I get 5 other tangential bad faith discussions to distract from the argument at hand.
TLDR Hexbear without brigading is like communism without authoritarianism. Technically possible, but I doubt I'll see it in my lifetime at this rate.
According to the people who coined the term. You're attempting to change the definition based on what you think looks like brigading, rather than what it is.
Brigading was coined on reddit, and it's always had a chunk of grey area. Merely seeing a post in your feed and commenting on it isn't brigading, even when you're also subscribed to the group that people are accusing others of brigading from. You have to actually start in one place and go to another for it to be brigading, and in particular it's brigading when it's encouraged for users to go to the original post and comment/harass.
Because of this, it's often quite hard to prove brigading. It's essentially impossible to differentiate between someone who found the post naturally and someone who found it via another post criticising it. That's why reddit never seemed to get it right, either they would be too permissive, or they would just ban people for having commented in the other sub regardless of how they were behaving.
Looking at your own definition, you're basically saying that federation itself is brigading. Because that's all that's happening here, we are linked with Hexbear and now we all share the same content feeds. They're brigading us, and we're brigading them, because we have been "aggressively" stitched together. Obviously, that's a silly way to look at it. You're supposed to look at individual communities or posts.
But people generally don't come from individual posts. They come from their feeds. They organically find the threads and comment in them of their own volition. There's a lot of hexbear users, so a lot of people doing this who previously weren't a part of our communities. However they don't start in one community, start in one post and then talk about another post and go raid that place together. There's no mass organisation. We're linked en mass to the same feed, but we all browse as individuals.
Granted, there may be some cases of people going from one post to another. They certainly have enough screenshot posts with enough information to find the source. This is brigading, and this can be a problem, however it is very difficult to differentiate this from legitimate organic traffic, and the legitimate traffic shouldn't be punished just to make sure you catch the brigaders.
I agree they can be annoying. However your mistake is that you feel like you need to reply to every one of them. It can be easy to get wound up - they certainly come out the gate that way. If they bother you so much just block and move on - before long you'll have the annoying ones out of your way.
It bears saying though that lemmy threads are generally sparse of comments as it is. You say they prevent actual discussion from happening, I query whether any discussion would have happened, with or without them.
Yup I was on world and switched to lemm.ee and I love it for the above reasons