literature.cafe meta

Absolutely do NOT federate with Hexbear, but for reasons that have little to do with Hexbear's politics.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the Threadiverse (Lemmy + Kbin centered Fediverse), and I've come up with some observations that are true in August 2023 I think every new Lemmy instance should consider. I've split it into five parts to avoid Lemmy's 10k character post limit.

1/5 -- The Threadiverse is shrinking

There was a huge boom in Lemmy activity during the Reddit mod protest, but Lemmy and Kbin are not as mature as Reddit was when Digg dramatically enshittified. There wasn't enough organic growth to capture the rain squall, and now the flood of users is flowing back to the ocean. It's visible in the active user data, as well the pages of undermoderated single poster communities littering the wider Threadiverse where the last activity is two months old. New Lemmy instances continue to appear, but the total number of active users available for them to share continues to steadily decline. There's a couple of obvious culprits for this:

• Lemmy instances frequently become unavailable for unscheduled maintenance, due to operator inexperience and the rough edges of the software
• Third party apps are still in beta stages or unreleased, and the interface leaves a lot to be desired, leaving many disappointed with the user experience.
• Moderation tools are still in their infancy. Poorly moderated communities and inactive mods create the potential for very toxic experiences.

This does not mean the Threadiverse is failing; Reddit will continue to decline in quality, and if Threadiverse software and community continues to improve, we will reach an inflection point. Another major Spez event after that milestone will kill Reddit like Reddit killed Digg. To reach this goal, each new instance needs to bring something more to the table than extra space for fewer people to spread out in.

I'm not on my author account, as I'm using a device I don't normally, so forgive input from a different account instance. Assuming I get back to where I can freely log in before I have to hit the bed, I'll delete this and remake the comment on that account from literature.cafe

But, before I started filtering hexbear in apps, they had been trolling hard. In the post * hexbear* where they announced federation, users were actively planning disruption of other instances. I'm of the mind that defederation is a last resort, but until the admins there crack down on that (they have claimed they're going to), I would suggest not federating with them. Or, at least do it at a time when you'll be able to spend time actively watching for reports if they haven't sorted out their disruptive users yet.

What I can't tell, though, is how much the trolling is indicative of the broader hexbear user base. It could be bad apples spoiling the barrel. But there are enough actively disruptive users that when I see that instance in a user name, I tend to not engage with it.

Man, this is a hard call. In a former life, I was one of the last journalists trained to unquestioningly respect free speech within the necessary limits to keep it from causing societal breakdown (clear and present danger doctrine and imminent lawless action test). I was also trained that "balanced" doesn't mean every viewpoint gets an equal number of words on the page or number of minutes of airtime. I rather firmly believe that Justice Holmes had it right: “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

That said, I also don't care to drown in a sea of hate and obnoxiousness. I honestly don't know what to expect from Hexbear. From the fragments that I've personally seen, their admin seem to be trying to fit in and participate civilly in the fediverse. Whether their users will behave is yet to be seen. I might personally choose to give benefit of the doubt and take an "innocent until proven guilty" approach, but I'm not sure that it would be the right choice.

And @gabe, at the end of the day, while all of us appreciate your asking our opinions and being open about your own thoughts, it has to be your decision. You're the one keeping the lights on, and you shouldn't allow bad actors to disrupt the community you're building here. I hope I speak for more than myself in saying that we'll support whatever you decide. If you want to give them a chance and defederate again if things go sideways, that seems like a good idea. If you don't want to take the chance, that's also reasonable given their genesis.

I plan to block them whenever domain blocking support gets added. My other instances I'm on, lemm.ee, made a stance not to block them. So I'd prefer to block, but I absolutely agree it should be user choice, just unfortunately the tools are there yet like they are on Mastodon.

I'd hope this defederation discussion gets revisited once the ability to block instances from our accounts gets added.

Rule number 1 reads loud an clear. Keep it Cozy, no biggitry.

I say federate, and anyone violating that rule can have their comment delete with a warning. If it persists, ban the user. If this becomes an overwhelming issue, defederate.

(I'm biased as I think defederation breaks lemmy into smaller, weaker, and more boring communities).

I think a number of people like to troll just a little at least, but I don't think most people make it their whole persona. I suspect we may get some trolls who would genuinely like a community about books.

Maybe I'm an optimist, but I think it's at least worth a try.

That's a hard call, and I'm glad it's not mine to make.

On the plus side, engagement is a fundamental good, diverse viewpoints are beneficial and literature can play a role both ways in a relationship with hexbear users - both the things that they read and share and the things that others might share with them.

On the minus side, some significant number of hexbear users have demonstrated, and repeatedly, that... well... not to put too fine a point on it, they're obnoxious assholes who flatly refuse to act civilly. And as unwelcome as that might be in other communities, it would be doubly so here, since an awful lot of the appeal here is that it's relatively quiet and sedate.

The problem though is that that's not all of their users - it's just the most visible ones. If they were all assholes, the decision would be obvious and easy. But they're not.

So...

I don't think we can have any reasonable expectation that the asshole users will behave like decent humans. In fact, if you read through their discussions on their own instance, many of them are actually determined to be disruptive and abusive, and explicitly to the degree that someone might insist that they not be. Given the chance, they will do it. So the only way to be sure of stopping them is to not allow them to participate in the first place.

But then it becomes relevant that that's not all of their users, and that this is a relatively non-political instance. It's possible that those users won't even bother with this instance, and while they're off trolling whoever somewhere else, those among the hexbear users who actually can and will be civil will be the only ones who actually participate here anyway. Which would of course be fine, and even good.

So the way I see it, there's no means of stopping the disruptive, abusive and bigoted hexbear users from being disruptive, abusive and bigoted other than defederation, but there is a chance, and potentially even a fairly strong one, that that particular subset of hexbear users won't bother with this instance anyway, and the more thoughtful and reasonable ones will be the only ones who do. Which would absolutely be to our benefit.

I guess I would lean toward federating, but with a zero tolerance policy for disruptive and abusive behavior (and with the intent to follow that policy clearly communicated to the hexbear admin). At the worst, we could have a brief period in which the hexbear users prove that they can't be trusted to not be assholes, and then they go back to being defederated.

But mostly I'm glad it's not my decision to make.