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Should we defederate hexbear? (aussie.zone)

submitted 2 years ago by Zagorath@aussie.zone to c/meta@aussie.zone

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We’ve already defederated one tanky instance, and frankly I think I’ve rarely had a positive interaction with Hexbear users. Their defence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or of China’s genocide against the Uighur people, is hard enough to stomach. But what prompted me to post this is their commentary in this thread where even without any of the propaganda-based reasons to justify their beliefs, they seem to delight in being rude arseholes to people.

Personally, I don’t think they provide us any real value, no we’d be better off without them, just as we are better off without lemmygrad and exploding-heads.

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[–] Nath@aussie.zone 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Go to Settings in your browser.
Go to blocks.
Scroll down to instances.
Search for and block your instance(s) of choice.

Done! You'll no longer see any content from Hexbear.

We're pretty light touch with federation, and blocking instances is an extreme measure. It affects everyone. I don't think we would do it again without user consultation.

While I'm not personally a fan of their tendency to use their custom emojis in threads, they're an ok crowd. Some of their users do have alternate views on world events, but that's not illegal. They mostly keep that stuff on local. I'd probably step in if any actual misinformation or propaganda appeared here.

I can't recall them being among the commonly reported instances.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 1 points 2 years ago

My question about that option is: what effect does it have? My understanding is that if we defederate, they can see our content and reply to it, but only other users on their instance will see those replies.

Does an individual blocking them do the same thing? If so, perfect.

But if, as I suspect, it still allows them to see and reply to comments and everyone else in the fediverse can see it, I cannot support it as a solution to dealing with the kind of bad faith interactions engaged in by Hexbear. It allows them to continue peddling their rubbish without even enabling the person they're cribbing off of to respond.

[–] fine_sandy_bottom@aussie.zone 1 points 2 years ago

I respect your absolute discretion as administrator to run the instance as you wish, but I would like to provide my humble perspective.

User's blocking an instance is not an alternative to defederation. I'm not talking about hexbear but if an instance is promulgating hatred and intolerance, then their impact can still be felt through comments and vote manipulation. I'm not talking about an antisocial comment that would attract a moderator's attention. I'm talking about the insidious manipulation of perspectives through vote manipulation that we all know occurs on social media.

FWIW I think every large and well run instance ought to have a policy & process where by federation / defederation is resolved. These are the circumstances in which we will defederate, and this is the process we will follow when considering whether or not those circumstances have been met. Although of course I acknowledge that the time and resources required to develop such a thing are limited.

As an aside, I suspect that the lemmyverse will fracture in the coming years. I'm not suggesting this for aussie.zone but in the future, I think many users will want to have instances federated by white list rather than black list, as in "we only federate with these other instances" rather than just federating by default.