The last few posts made here, they’ve shown up, made the most inane, idiotic, and pointless comments, upvoted each other in a frenzy of circle jerking, and generally made a pest of themselves.
They’re a nuisance, and add nothing of value to the Lemmy experience.
Hi Dave. You make some very good points and you seem like a reasonable guy. I’d like to weigh in with some additional context from another server that is currently wrestling with this question.
Of the top 8 servers, lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, and sh.itjust.works are the three that have not defederated hexbear. Ironically, hexbear chose not to federate with sh.itjust.works when they connected to the rest of Lemmy, so although we never defederated them, they don’t see our content. I see all of their comments on other instances, but they never see me/us, and thus never harass our users directly. I take a strange pride in the fact that the current boogeyman of Lemmy was actually scared to federate with SJW 😅
Unfortunately for you, it also means that hexbears are only seeing content from 2 of the 8 largest instances. They have 1.6k MAUs. You guys only have 140. Lemm.ee has 3.7k, lemmy.ml has 2.9k, and SJW has 2.3k.
In my view, the hexbear community is actually a positive force on this platform. They are frequently abrasive, but they ultimately have the potential to contribute to what we are building here. They are extremely active and some of them are quite intelligent. But they’ve also become accustomed to a privileged position on their own walled-in platform, and they need to be reminded that their views are considered very extreme by the average person.
It seems to me that the actual content posted by hexbears is not necessarily the problem, but rather it’s the volume of comments and upvotes that disrupts the natural flow of the community, causing people such as yourselves to feel as if you’re being brigaded. I think with the support of hexbear admins and some time to adjust, hexbear users could learn to be less overbearing in terms of their engagement with content on other instances.
My general position is that this would best be resolved by speaking directly to the hexbear admins and requesting for them to control the behavior of their users. That being said, the specific transgressions referenced in this post are quite mild, imho.
You obviously need to do what is right for your own users, but I tend to view events from a strategic perspective, and my assessment is that hexbear users can be a benefit for Lemmy, and it’s not too much of a burden to work through these minor conflicts and try to bring them under the same roof with the rest of Lemmy. It’s contingent on them being cooperative and reasonable, but surely they deserve a chance to prove that they can be?
I’ve had a lot of conversations over the past day or so. I feel my view changing from one of the volume being a problem, to more that past actions are a problem.
Hexbear has done something to get defederated from 5 of the largest servers. Largely Lemmy is politically left (as was reddit), and I would argue a larger portion of Lemmy users are leftist (compared to reddit). My understanding is that Hexbear, as a whole, are not fascist-left, and I don’t think anti-capitalist views are hard to find on Lemmy. My point being: I don’t think their political viewpoint is the reason 5 of the 8 largest servers defederated them.
If this is the case, and they are willing to work towards a world where they can coexist on Lemmy, I feel they should be working with the large instances to prove this. This is much more beneficial to the wider Lemmy ecosystem, and seems to me to be a solution to our problem. If they work with large instances to get federated, it proves they are serious about being responsible members of the Lemmy federation. And if they build the trust of larger instances to the point of being federated with them again, it helps our issue of being too visible.