Thanks for the pings and support, both of you.
I wrote the thread in a mature post that was already several days old, primarily as an exercise in organizing my thoughts. I didn't think anyone besides @gabe would see it, so I'm really pleased it has reached a larger audience and brought more attention to the instance.
I just finished writing a small book in a thread about federation on literature.cafe yesterday, the thrust of which is that moderation, not federation is the threadiverse's killer feature, and when in doubt smaller instances shouldn't federate with larger ones. This list makes a perfect post-script to my point. Do you mind if I crib it? I'm a big fan of what you're doing here. I'd also love your feedback on my observations if you have time.
5/5 -- Caveat Federator
Hexbear's success isn't the only example of federation being over-rated. BeeHaw caused controversy by defederating from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world to protect their moderators' sanity. Two months on, it is obvious they made the right descision for the right reasons. A number of positive contributors joined precisely because they took this bold action. BeeHaw is currently the second fastest growing server, and has become an instance with a unique character and community that attracts positive participation from across the Threadiverse.
Federation creates the potential for a diverse variety of instances to independently find their voice and niche. Ironically, premature federation with larger instances can overwhelm a new instance, washing away its unique character or preventing it from developing an identity in the first place.
It's commendable you're seeking feedback from your users on the decision, and I'd suggest you continue to be open about your politics and preferences. You're not going to please everyone, and it's important that you grow a community that you feel welcome in and are supported. Your commitment to the principle of federation or the diversity of the political discourse here isn't going to matter much if you burn out and have to shut it down.
You obviously have reservations about federating with Hexbear. Regardless of what the current consensus appears to be, don't do it. In fact, consider defederating from other large Lemmy instances too, at least until you've built a stable community with experienced moderators, and you all agree the moderation technology is now up to the task. You may lose some current users, but you'll attract others who agree with your decision and are more supportive of the kind of community you're trying to build.
4/5 -- Brigading is when you click on threads that appear on your front page
On Reddit, brigading was the initially common practice of linking to a thread or comment that was anti-racist for example, and inviting people from a racist sub to downvote and respond to it. Their sheer numbers would send an initially positively received comment into deep negative numbers and overwhelm the poster with personal attacks. The Shit Reddit Says (SRS) movement saw the positive potential of this tactic, and built several subreddits dedicated to calling out misogyny, homophobia, and racism on the site. At that point Reddit began listening to brigading complaints and built anti-brigading measures like a link style that enforced non-interaction, and threatening to ban subreddits that linked interactively to comments or encouraged bullying the posters in their original context.
Brigading still happened but the bullies had to do a little more work. Some would manually enable interaction, with the miniscule risk that Reddit would respond with consequences. Other bullies would coordinate attacks in a discord chat or other offsite communities. Whenever you received an unexpected flood of negative replies or a surprising amount of downvotes to a typically innocuous comment, it wasn't paranoid to think that the interaction was not organic.
A similar phenomenon happens regularly on Twitter, where bullies search with keywords to find conversations between total strangers and people they would never follow to interject their unwelcome 'hot takes.' For this reason search on Mastodon is limited by design.
Whether brigading is intentionally organized or not, the experience of being brigaded is real. Slashdot was a famous chat forum that predated Digg and Reddit, and became known for the Slashdot effect, where the overwhelming traffic from the popular site would overwhelm the bandwidth of a smaller site it linked to, removing it from the internet with a mechanism identical to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. Similarly, Hexbear is such a large and active site, its users will overwhelm any small community or new instance with their traffic just by virtue of its content appearing in its general feed. Any headline the site finds controversial is going to experience brigading regardless of whether it is intentionally organized or not.
The idea that this can be mitigated by warning and banning for disruptive and abusive behavior ignores the fact that this represents free labor by you and your moderators. It is extremely emotionally taxing to make these kinds of decisions and inevitably defend them, and the sheer volume from dealing with a site like Hexbear will absolutely burn out most people tasked with this responsibility.
3/5 -- Moderation, not Federation, is the Threadiverse's killer feature
Lemmy is not Reddit, and calling Lemmy a Federated or Open-Source version of its inspiration is doing it a disservice. Since Lemmy instances are not venture capital funded, continual growth is not the criteria for success. On Reddit, people who read, post, comment, and vote are the product, advertisers are the customers, and investors set the policy. Return on investment trumps all other concerns, and Reddit must continue to grow to be successful. Lemmy allows for a much more diverse set of definitions of success.
So the 0th step in becoming a successful Lemmy instance is deciding what that success looks like. That's obviously up to the admin(s), but it can't be achieved without skilled and dedicated moderators. Moderators do obvious tasks like remove spam and ban hate-speech, but they also encourage community activities, model conflict resolution, and produce content. A healthy community is a well-kept garden, and a successful Lemmy instance must include a collection of healthy communities. Moderators are the gardeners that help a community grow.
Moderation is a difficult and emotionally taxing job. I've alluded earlier that Reddit made an unforced error, degrading the moderator experience by killing 3rd party apps, and that Lemmy is missing those same essential tools due to its current stage of development. But Lemmy has an advantage over Reddit in there are plenty of instances where admins will listen to and respect their moderators. Lemmy's codebase and 3rd party software is improving, and while Reddit may be able to improve their internal moderator support mechanisms, moderators will never be more than exploited rubes for them.
Since moderation is so difficult to do well, and is so essential to the Threadiverse project, the effect on moderators should be the primary concern in making any decision that changes the policy, culture, or performance of a Lemmy instance.
2/5 -- Hexbear is a successful Lemmy instance
I support your account of Hexbear's predecessor. I don't share your background and naturally had a different experience. I think its useful to explain the history here for the benefit of other readers to better understand Hexbear's current contrarian character, even if it is filtered through my limited experience.
Hexbear has its origins in the subreddit ChapoTrapHouse (CTH), a community that began its existence when Reddit was an open platform for fascist propaganda. Several subreddits were dedicated to mocking black people, spreading jewish conspiracies, bullying fat people, othering queer people, and sexually harassing women. My interaction with CTH was limited as a Redditor, but their participation as an antifascist group who were fighting back against those trends was a welcome presence. When the mainstream media started making a story about the racism, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, and the bad press threatened advertising revenue, Reddit banned the most overtly embarrasing subreddits. In an act of 'enlightened' centrism, Reddit banned CTH along with them. Perhaps Reddit blamed them for drawing the press' attention, perhaps they didn't want to be accused of being left-wing by going after fascists exclusively. But in any case, CTH needed a new address. That's how Hexbear became one of the earliest Lemmy instances.
With several years to grow from a Reddit refuge to a full-blown social platform Hexbear has found its audience. They have site-wide movie nights where films are free-streamed and co-watched in chat. They've developed an internal stalinist-emoji based language (incidentally famous for causing problems because federated sites display the images at full resolution.) They have very active moderation, responding swiftly to non-party users stepping out of line with permabans. Dying communities like !anarchism are kept on life support with activity like mods creating regular general megathreads there where the community topic is irrelevant. If you're transgender or non-binary and are looking to connect with others over North Korea apologia, there's not a better place on the web to be.
While Hexbear is more eager to federate with others than others are with Hexbear, its size and activity proves an often overlooked point: Hexbear has become extremely successful Lemmy instance in spite of (or perhaps due to) having extremely limited federation.
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:
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 love the short story The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove. There's of course the alien invasion trope, where aliens are space conquistadors pillaging the earth with their extra-terrestrial powers, and its complement, the Star Trek trope, where humans are culturally and technologically superior secular humanists descended to a backwards planet. And then there's this story.