Hi all,
With regards to our recent integration into the Fediverse, it has become evident that specific rules should be outlined regarding our conduct towards it and our place in it. As such, we are making provisional amendments to the Code of Conduct in specific regard to federation as we find our footing and stake our ground as a part of the wider Fediverse ecosystem. The amendments are as such, demarcated within the dividers:
Federation
In regards to the Fediverse, a dual-pronged approach should be assumed:
Local Communities
Conduct remains as previously outlined [in the Hexbear Code of Conduct], except:
- Users visiting Hexbear should be given breathing room to inquire in good-faith about topics that seem obvious to well-trodden leftists. Assume good faith in even the most obvious of questions, except in cases where a user is explicitly acting in a combative or unreasonable manner.
- Do not ping users from other federated instances with intent to goad or mock.
- Do not directly link to comments or posts of other federated instances on public posts with intent to goad or mock.
- Disengagement rules, whilst not amended, are thoroughly emphasized regarding visiting users.
Federated Instances
Assume the conduct outlined regarding local communities, as well as:
- When in a federated instance, their rules (and their code of conduct) apply.
- Allow instances their own space for discussion, if requested implicitly or explicitly. If said discussion regards this site or its users, you are allowed to discuss said discussion within the local purview (meaning, within a Hexbear community), with regards to the rules laid out prior.
- Conduct that is deemed untenably toxic to the Fediverse and Hexbear’s standing within it (by discretion of Hexbear moderation) may be subject to reprisal, regardless of whether it is explicitly outlined.
We’re thankful to the moderation and admins of the instances federated with us for their patience as we carve out our own little hole within the Fediverse. And to our beautiful posters, thank you for bearing with us in this week where decades happen
IMO admins/mods from other instances should be subject to the same rules for other users proposed above. No pinging, no direct linking etc. They are responsible for their public statements and their statements should be open to criticism. We have seen how easily a scratched liberal becomes a fascist and we shouldn’t ignore it when it happens. Federation is good, but not at any cost.
Tbh I completely disagree that LGBT users were “brigading” an instance primarily stated to be for LGBT people. Most of the people in that thread were some flavor of LGBT. It is right and correct to call out someone for trying to split the largest LGBT communities on the fediverse, on either side of the coin.
Now, yeah, the cishets need to chill out when it comes to blahaj.
yeah that thread and the arguments within just hurt tbh. We’re on the same sideeeee
If it makes you feel better, quite a lot of the accounts were made just to post in that thread and stir shit, and none of the regulars really even questioned it. At least hexbears arent being total losers and pretending we’re something we’re not. I reported multiple accounts that were made within a couple of hours that kept posting repetitive nonsense goading the admin into defederating, but none were banned.
Brigading is a made up by redditors in an effort to stifle anything they don’t like. Idk why you’re falling for their attempt to introduce it here.
Every instance that has talked shit and got dogpiled should be thanking us for breathing some life into their dead and boring ass websites.
They’re whining and crying about this one over at blahaj.zone even as we speak
Multiple blahaj meta threads, all of them crying about Hexbear. They might as well just defed instead of dragging it out since it’s pretty obvious they don’t want to federate with us. I think people place too much value on federation anyways. They know where to find us and we know where to find them, so what’s the problem?
Hope they defed soon. No more annoying libs pretending to be left when they think Bernie was too radical
Nah, linking to their meta threads is apparently violence, so I’ll refrain
For those of you who are lurking from other Instances, I’d like to offer you a little light reading. This is an excerpt from The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins, a book about the mass murder program the United States has been enacting on the world’s communists since the 1960’s. When you see people complaining about the need for civility and respect as they ignore what their own society has unleashed on the world, I invite you to remember this excerpt.
spoiler
This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask:
“Who was right?”
In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?
Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.
Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.
That’s been my view for a while too. In an idealised world, I would be an anarchist. In the world we actually live in, I believe the ML/MLMs have the right approach to actually getting us to power.
Same. I was an anarchist for a long time, am still proud to work with them, and still think they’re second to none in terms of spinning up small but impactful local initiatives and watching each other’s backs in the street. I still absolutely love my arachist comrades. But when it comes to mass movements, defending those movements against other state or capital threats, and potential state building I’m firmly in the ML/MLM sphere. That’s where my silly screen name came from (long before Hexbear).
I don’t really understand. Certainly one can be civil in speech and mannerisms and violent in direct action as they are not mutually exclusive in all aspects? If not is it because civility is always interpreted as incivility? Or any kind of incivility sort of poisons the well?
I guess what I think is that though our manner and decorum is informed by others’ responses, it isn’t solely determined by it.
What do you think?
Liberals largely think you can debate fascism in the marketplace of ideas. This is because they don’t know that they’re already basically living in a fascist world, which I would argue is demonstrated by The Jakarta Method. If you give fascist ideas space, they will use that space to grow until they eventually start killing the enemies who stand in their way… “First they came for the communists…” Influencing the culture is basically step 1 of how to start a coup. That is why the US spends so much money on propaganda organizations across the globe and China has to resort to Great Firewall.
People who demand that we not speak of violence (kill all the landlords, kill all slavers) are ignoring that at this very minute violence is being perpetrated against us by the very people they don’t want us to speak violence towards. We are in a class war. Every bit of healthcare witheld, every person starving, every empty house is an act of violence against the Working class by the Capitalist class. And that’s not even getting into the physical violence they use to enforce their will via the police, military, and nazi-adjacents.
So in summary, violence against the oppressor is self-defense and liberals undermine that right on behalf of Capital by calling it incivility. A bit ranty, but does that about cover it?
Ok yes the bit about self defence and an insistence of a polite society makes sense. Yeah, it does make sense that even if one were to be ‘mean’ or use vernacular which others may not like (but which are not inherently bigoted like deadnaming or misgendering, racist, ableist, sexist, etc) the response by people against communists or anyone who is working to defend themselves is unacceptable and a key insight into where said peoples priorities lay. One can be taken aback or even offended but it doesn’t necessitate an extreme reaction as it’s definitely not proportional (especially when you include history/context)
Did I sort of get the gist of it?
Okay, can we get like, posts from other sites to have red backgrounds with caution tape all over so we don’t forget?
Honestly i was going to ask for same.
Like a little bit of red outline css around the comment box in federated threads, maybe with a warning linkback to this thread.
I’m not bright and had one comment already where I thought i was commenting on a dunk_tank thread, but it was external. I wasn’t too rude, but i’m gonna fuck up eventually.
This is a major use-case for the kind of custom CSS reddit used to have. It enabled every community to be unique in appearance and immediately identifiable. This results in much quick code-switching when users move from community to community.
This would be awesome, especially if we could color code specific instances too (i.e. give our lemmygrad comrades a great red, etc.)
It’s clear that the struggle session now is what role we want to take in Lemmyverse, and how much we’re willing to change our site culture in pursuit of that.
Frankly I don’t see the point of most of them. I’ve seen a good argument for being nice to Blahaj, but beyond that trying to enforce these rules just seems like a trap that most Hexbears will fall in to pretty quickly.
The culture and norms here are largely incompatible with other instances. Our normal posting behavior is viewed as overwhelming brigading by a number of other instances. Our attempts at good faith dialogue are rebuffed by deeply ignorant people unaware of their own indoctrination. At some point, for many people including myself, that results in a degree of frustration and heated tempers. And the admins of most instances seem to be completely on board with the distorted State Department version of history that we’re trying to dismantle which likely mean it’s a matter of time before they defed because we’re SEESEEP apologist genocide denying tankies. We can’t do anything against bad faith ignorance of that magnitude.
I’ve seen numerous complaints that our emoji culture is disruptive and “image spam”. I theoretically could post without using emojis, but I wont. Giving up one of my favorite aspects of Hexbear to have frustrating conversations with extremely ignorant liberals isn’t worth it. I’ll stay home rather than engage with other instances.
A lot of people already think we’re bots or paid agents of hostile governments. The same bad faith accusations that anything that disputes the official US version of reality is the work of machines and spies that we castigated on Reddit is all over the lemmyverse in force.
And, ultimately - The vast majority of these people are boring reddit liberals. Whatever changes we make we’re making to cater to the people we despise for their hegemonic dominance of culture and society. Chapo and Hexbear were created as refuge from these people where we wouldn’t have to deal with them, play in to their vile civility culture, hold back about saying what was really happening in the world, or follow “both sides” site rules that accommodated all kinds of reactionary scum as long as they toed the line on the rules.
What are we gaining from Federation? What’s the upshot? What’s the pay off? It’s very nice having Lemmygrad and Lemmie.ml comrades here, and I understand the argument for staying federated with Blahaj, but beyond that I don’t see Federation contributing anything, while we’ll have to bend significantly on our core culture and indeed the purpose of this community to accommodate, literally, the liberals.
I remember back in the day when if your forum got raided, you would raid their forum, and you weren’t able to successfully muster enough people to raid their forum, it was a skill issue. Raiding was a fact of life on the Interwebs. Absolutely nobody would honor your “pls no raiding” sign and people wouldn’t cry if their raid accounts got banned. I absolutely hate this crying about bRiDgAtInG Redditism.
“But this isn’t healthy for the fediversirino!” Look around you. Every instance is defedding from every other instance. Just look at how lemmy.world has defedded from that piracy instance with everyone just saying, “dude, just create two accounts for each instance.” So, basically treating two lemmy instances like two forums without federation. The fediverse is already balkanizing, and it’s going to be so fractured that within a year, there wouldn’t be any sense to even conceive of a fediverse.
Smarter people here have already came to the conclusion before me that I am having right now: that federation is entirely overhyped and won’t pan out in the way Ledditors think it would. Most likely, an instance would just federate with like 5 other instances, and the largest instance would eventually cannibalize the 5 smaller instances so you’re stuck with a large active instance “federated” with a bunch of dead instances.
Our attempts at good faith dialogue are rebuffed by deeply ignorant people unaware of their own indoctrination.
I say cheers to your entire post and wholeheartedly agree. I’m here as a refugee from the liberal system of things and really don’t agree with the decision to federate with other instances beyond Lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml. But I will stand by the mods’ decision nonetheless.
The section I highlighted of your post reminded me of this banger from The Matrix, which I will tweak slightly here:
“[Capitalism] is a system, [Hexbear]. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. [Workers.] The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so [indoctrinated], so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
Our normal posting behavior is viewed as overwhelming brigading by a number of other instances.
This is what bugs me so much. While I recognize that spamming PPB with the emoji bug right now is a problem, I feel like we shouldn’t have to restrict our lemm.ee meta post, and that admin at least acknowledges we aren’t brigading.
From that thread:
They have quite a large userbase who are very active on Lemmy (often so active that they leave the impression brigading all popular Lemmy posts).
Obviously perhaps a bit weak, but this kind of education could help some of the growing pains as well, since other instances probably see 10 of us simultaneously and think it’s a brigade when it’s just our normal behavior. Also, the fact we don’t have downvotes might be something that other instances should be aware of (i.e. we don’t downvote and move on).
Please let us know when they fix the emoji bug, BTW. I’ve been limiting my use on other instances out of respect for the bug (except on Lemmygrad, whose users all get a from me), but I want to see our big beautiful emotes.
However it is preferable that they explicitly state it rather than having weasal excuses like “their emojis are too big” or “they jump into our instance’s meta discussions”
Almost all of them operate in bad faith. They are just looking for an excuse, and I don’t see any problem with giving them that excuse if defederation is a foregone conclusion for them.
I don’t understand, why are y’all trying to cater to them? they’ll just come up with other shit or straight up lie, beehaw defederated from lemmygrad for “hatespeech”, are you going to ban everyone from using the word cracker so they don’t defed?
if an instance blocks us for ideological reasons whatever that cannot be helped. However it is preferable that they explicitly state it rather than having weasal excuses like “their emojis are too big” or “they jump into our instance’s meta discussions”
they explained it right here. they want defederations to happen for clearly stated ideological reasons and not excuses.
However it is preferable that they explicitly state it rather than having weasal excuses like “their emojis are too big” or “they jump into our instance’s meta discussions”
They’re just going to lie and exaggerate anyways. I see value in making it so they have to be even more ridiculous with the lies and exaggerations, but folks should expect every lib instance to eventually defederate over “the commies were mean to me once” posts.
Liberals are actually more petty than commies and it’s important to not overestimate them just because they cover it with normalized language.
And the admins of most instances seem to be completely on board with the distorted State Department version of history that we’re trying to dismantle
We’re never going to dismantle anything if we can’t even handle interacting with other Lemmy instances.
