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.ca
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    2 months 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.ca
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      2 months 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.

    • Luci@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      Thank you for taking this to the community and listening.

  • Canadian_Cabinet @lemmy.ca
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    2 months 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

  • LimpRimble@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    They love trolling

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

    • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

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

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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    2 months 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.ca
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    2 months 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.

  • Beaver@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

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

    • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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      2 months 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.ca
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      2 months 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.caOPM
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      2 months 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.ca
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        2 months ago

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

        • Shadow@lemmy.caOPM
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          2 months 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.ca
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            2 months 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.

  • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Upvoted for visibility.

    I’ve heard of them.
    None of it good.

    I haven’t noticed an absence of the instance in the communities i interact with. ie. I’m happy with the current federated communities.

    There is a peace here that is unlike other sites/forums.

    So, please, NO.

  • MrGG@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    To put it bluntly, if this goes through I’ll probably just delete my account and move on from lemmy.

    I wouldn’t want to onboard more friends to this instance for them to be brigaded by HB trolls. Getting people to wean off Reddit for Lemmy, only for them to be bombarded with HB chaos more akin to /b/, would be a terrible experience.

    In short: no thanks.