Hello, users of Hexbear:
We wanted to come back and mention that the mod team has been reflecting and performing self-crit on some recent events.
First regarding federation:
Upon review, there are some aspects of federation we could have improved on and some that we feel worked well.
For now, we are satisfied with the current allow-list with one change, we will be adding programming.dev back to the allow-list in approx. 48 hours. You may check out the post discussing and voting on that instance here: https://hexbear.net/post/528899
Furthermore, there are a lot of great comments in the first Admin SPIL JICE post, which can be found here: https://hexbear.net/post/514276
With regard to that, we would like to say that:
There aren’t any more lemmy instances out there to even federate with, all the instances over 150 we are either currently federated with, removed from our allow-list, or they block hexbear.net.
As far as I know, this same set of qualifiers also applies to smaller instances. After the addition of programming.dev I don’t really know any other instances that would be anywhere remotely as impactful as our federation and subsequent defederation from lemmy.blahaj.zone or sh.itjust.works.
We recognize that we could have done a much better job communicating what instances are about and having a clearer process for discussion → voting → federation. We have taken on some of the comment’s suggestions for this process, which I hope can be seen in the programming.dev post.
Specifically what the inter-instance admin communication process looks like, why the instance may be a good fit, and some notable communities there with the programming.dev post. In addition to spacing out not only requests for additions, but the duration of which users are allowed to discuss and vote.
We would like to state that we thought that front-loading the stress of federation rather than drip-feeding it was the best course of action when we initially started federation. The intent was to have a few stressful weeks but remove untenable instances, resulting in a stable allow-list as quick as possible.
This choice caused undue stress to our marginalized comrades, and for that I am very sorry.
With that being said, there are no plans to do any kind of second instance or “air-lock” instance
If another person wants to go through the effort of making an air-lock instance, we can federate, but the mod team does not have the desire or honestly have the bandwidth to admin/organize a 2nd hexbear so to speak
Looking to the future, here are some personal observations of what could occur, after the addition of user-side instance blocking
- I don’t foresee lemmy.ca , SIJW , lemmy.blahaj , lemmy.world , feddit.de or beehaw.org removing hexbear from their blocklist anytime soon
- Maybe the situation with lemm.ee could change
- I don’t see the situation with lemmygrad or lemmy.ml changing as those admins are all chill with us
- The rest of them are small hobby instances which really don’t impact or create drama on our side
I also want to reiterate some points from our code of conduct in attempts at cultivating more good-faith discussion and to help our ND comrades.
“Please “remember the human” and be kind to your fellow leftists.”
“Respect that people have differences of opinion and that every leftist has a place in our community.”
“We are a platform that welcomes anyone who wants to be here in good faith”
How this looks in practice:
- Don’t make excessively dry/hard to parse/reactionary bit accounts
- Don’t label users as wreckers, instead use questions to better understand or block them
- Don’t argue or assume bad-faith from other users, even if they are a young account (remember, people remake accounts often)
- Consider using tone indications when appropriate
- Don’t use ableist language
- Please report posts/comments you find are against the code of conduct.
Finally, I want to remind users that they are able to curate their feed in their user settings, allowing a user to set their feed to All / Local / Subscribed.
All is content from all federated instances, Local is content from Hexbear.net only, and Subscribed is content from subscribed communities (on all instances federated) only.
In addition, you are able to block users, and report any unsolicited or harassing DMs.
Users are encouraged to provide additional feedback, thoughts, concerns, etc. on Hexbear as a site, federation, or moderation in this post.
Thank you for all helping to make this site unique and amazing!
Can the code of conduct be updated to remove mentions of !userunion if we no longer have that community? If I remember, the ban appeals megathread was in that community, so it might clear up confusion with that.
Also, why were many old comms deleted? I feel like a lot of them served a useful purpose, and even if some of them like c/fightinggames were redundant when we already had c/games, I think the new feature of crossposting would make that less of an issue now.
/gen
Would re-adding c/strugglesession make sense if it was used as a “post effortposts on extremely hot takes here instead of on c/chapotraphouse if you think it could cause drama” instead of its past usage of sitewide drama containment community?
Not that I am a big fan of those kinds of threads, but I am wondering if that would also help prevent hostility in on the site in a similar way as the “don’t assume bad-faith” rule clarification. Wondering what the modteam would think
No, we probably won’t be adding back a community like c/strugglesessions that added stress for marginalized people, but thanks for asking. The folks who tried to volunteer moderating it found it exhausting and understandably resigned from doing that comm. Will discuss internally and update if that changes. /gen
A /c/strugglesession is only good as a dumping ground for struggle sessions that go out of control. If Hexbear were on a phpBB forum, admins can exile struggle session comments to a quarantined subforum that’s only accessible by registered accounts of a certain age. But since Hexbear isn’t a phpBB forum but using a shitty Reddit clone called Lemmy, admins lack the capability to move comments around, making /c/strugglesession completely useless.
this is maybe a general fediverse/lemmy question, is there a way to more visually show users when they are posting on another instance or even viewing posts from another instance? Like small symbols or colours.
I think federation on the whole has been a success so far, a funny kind of dialectical process.
I agree and would also like clearer UX when popping out of instance to interact with folx. As far as I’m aware, that’s not a setting that can be be adapted right now. In the future, I’d love to see a bit more of a UX indicator when that occurs as well.
This is all a work in progress. We really believe in what both good federation and Lemmy as a project itself can achieve. Thanks for coming along for that ride, we know dialectical synthesis can be bumpy sometimes.
Whatever you do I hope you keep the format if that thread, that shit was hilarious.
I appreciate so much the openness and careful consideration that goes into administrative decision-making here. This is a beautiful little piece of the internet; thank you for all the labor and love you’ve put into it.
