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.
Here’s my view. Lemmy.nz is intended for an NZ audience. Hexbear has been defederated from 5 of the top 8 largest instances. This is problematic for us, as their All is much more likely to show lemmy.nz posts than All on other instances. It starts to feel like we’re being brigaded, even though we aren’t, because their instance is the 10th largest Lemmy instance and yet they don’t see most Lemmy posts (but they do see ours).
I don’t have a problem with international audiences occasionally posting in our posts, even people with no connection to NZ. I think it provides some great perspective on our issues. But when you post a thread, and it gets overrun with international users, I think this becomes a problem.
This may not seem fair on them, but what I want is a friendly-feeling community, and recently we have had a different vibe.
Personally, I have become less inclined to participate. I’ve written up a post about the Papakangahorohoro street, then decided not to post it because by the time I’d written my 150 word article the thread had such hexbear comments as “Get over it crakkkas” and “sounds like the crackers should go back to europe if they dont like it”.
I want to participate in a friendly community, and the last couple of days I have felt like I didn’t want to participate because of the hexbear participation - and the participation of others stemming from that. For that reason, and no other, I think we should defederate. However, I want to hear what others think. Some counter-arguments would be great.
Yeah, I have been attempting to avoid defederating with instances from mine but with HexBear I just kind of had to because they were taking over every popular post.
Edit: I did read OP’s initial exchange and I think OP massively overreacted and the HexBear commenters were largely fine. However, the wider issue still stands which is why I did in my case.
They got that response because of the poor reputation their instance already has, I wasn’t in the mood to engage with them.
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Here’s my view. Lemmy.nz is intended for an NZ audience. Hexbear has been defederated from 5 of the top 8 largest instances. This is problematic for us, as their All is much more likely to show lemmy.nz posts than All on other instances. It starts to feel like we’re being brigaded, even though we aren’t, because their instance is the 10th largest Lemmy instance and yet they don’t see most Lemmy posts (but they do see ours).
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that when instance like hexbear is defederated, they can still see your posts, they can even comment and vote on them. You just don’t see it anymore. They would have to defederate on their side too, to completely block it.
You’re on kbin.social, so I’m gonna make some assumptions about how it works, because I really only have a decent understanding of lemmy - though I’m assuming this is how other activitypub federated services work too.
While it may seem like you (on kbin.social) are replying to this post (on lemmy.nz), that is not the case. You server has a copy of the reply and all the other posts and comments. When you comment, it gets posted to the kbin.social community (magazine?) called [email protected].
Behind the scenes, your server will syncronise your copy with the official lemmy.nz copy.
A user on (say) lemmy.world will also have a copy on their server. Your server will not send your comment directly there, rather it sends it to the only source of truth (the community host server), then the host server will send it out to all servers where there is a subscriber.
By defederating, they will no longer get any updates for any lemmy.nz communities, but will still see their own comments (and other users on their server will see them).
Honestly, I’m not sure what happens when e.g. a lemmy.nz user posts to lemmy.ml who are one of the few large servers still federated with hexbear - do the comments go to hexbear? Not sure. Do hexbear comments made to lemmy.ml federate back to lemmy.nz? Again, not sure (I suspect not).
they can still see your posts, they can even comment and vote on them. You just don’t see it anymore.
This would actually be ideal, as long as their downvotes don’t get federated back to us.
Hexbear doesnt have downvotes
That’s always a recipe for disaster.
Does lemmy not have a block user function where you won’t see their comments? I guess that doesn’t help when you want to wholesale block users from an instance.
I personally haven’t seen anything worth defederating over so far. In any case I usually just scroll past or don’t interact with comments that are inflammatory. However as you’re the admin it’s your call. My only reservation is that we don’t have many contributors as it is.
Also you should have posted your 150 word article anyway.
Personally I would much prefer the smaller, tight knit group of NZ and NZ-adjacent posters over a swarm of non-NZ users that are posting here because they can’t see the vast majority of posts on lemmy (out of the top 8 servers, there are about 36,000 monthly active users. Of those, about 2/3rds of those users are on servers that have defederated with hexbear.)
My 150 word article would have led to more… discussion - and I just didn’t have it in me to start a conversation like that where there were already aggressive and flippant comments.
While I do enjoy the smaller community of the NZ instance currently, if it ever grows larger I think you’ll be facing similar challenges with users as can be seen with the NZ subreddit on reddit. Such is the nature of social media. So it’s worth thinking about how to manage it in the future is what I’m saying, I guess.
Lemmy 100% needs better mod tools. And user tools for that matter. Users being unable to block an instance is a pretty big hole.
Some lemmy instances are trying to foster a friendly community, and really the only tool we have for this so far is to defederate until tools improve.
I agree - imo a smaller but friendlier group who are here in good faith is preferable.
Not built into the platform, but some apps have it.
I’m glad you see the problem.
Actually after reading the context, I don’t agree with OP at all. I want more places to have Te Reo names, and I want people who dislike it to complain so they can be shut down. I love Te Reo and I want to defend it.
Setting aside the Te Reo argument, in my opinion the OP is guilty of much of what they accuse others of and appears to taunt others into further participation (again, my opinion). If lemmy.nz is going to become a closed community, it will simply become an echo chamber of that closed community - this is the biggest failure of social media - is that what users want lemmy.nz to become?
Keep it open. If it becomes a closed community, I’ll probably wander off.
I suspect Lemmy will grow (or die) to allow those that create continual problems to be banned or similar - perhaps we just need to wait a little longer for those features? Defederation seems far too coarse/broad brush to me for what I perceive to be, at this point in time, just a nuisance that can be ignored.
Here here!
I have temporary blocked hexbear so we can have the conversation in peace.
Edit: Apparently I needed to hit save, so now we are temporarily defederated from hexbear.
Thank you. They show up like ants any time Hexbear or the CCP is mentioned.
I’ve read the various comments about it and have no idea why you would have to defederate with them. As long as they play by the rules it should be fine. Just downvote if you don’t agree. The voting system will take care of it.
I think defederation should be a last resort.
Currently less than 1/4 of the votes on this post (the post itself) are from users subscribed to this community. Hexbear users far outnumber us, it’s not even remotely close. With 5 out of the 8 instances with over 1000 monthly active users having defederated them, we are showing up much higher in their All feed. Lemmy.world defederated them, and they have more users than all the other 7/8 put together. Over 2/3rds of lemmy content is no longer available to them, so they see our posts about random NZ stuff, and decide to comment on them. Because there are so many of them, it floods the posts.
Basically, it takes us from being a community of NZ and NZ-adjacent people, to being a community of international hexbear users talking about NZ. It completely changes the tone of the instance.
It’s not something they have done (other than whatever made the others want to defederate), but the point of the fediverse is to curate who you federate with in order to build the community you want, then people join the instances that curate the way they want. I’m not so keen on a community of hexbear users talking about NZ. The occasional one was fine, but to have our threads swamped is just not what I’m here for.
Also, hexbear users are filling all the posts from different instances trying to decide if people want to defederate or not. It’s bad taste.
I try not to be a “my way or the highway” kind of guy, but I haven’t yet seen a good counter-argument to my other post.
Thanks Dave. I had not noticed it at all until this post.
But I get your point, this should be an instance of mainly NZ people. If hexbear seems to take over it’s probably a good idea to defederate.
I can’t see from the two threads I read through anything particular bad or offensive. Are you able to give some examples of where you feel their dialogue is impeding lemmy.nz in some way?
I stopped using my lemmy.world account nearly as much after they started blocking a bunch that I was interested in, and I’d hate to see that going on here, but if there are valid examples I’d like to see them.
So the last few days we have had explosions of comments on some posts, and some of my experience is from posts and communities on other instances, but having come to this post not long after it was posted, and seeing comments like “sounds like the crackers should go back to europe if they dont like it. “too long” fuck off street names over 15-letters are the norm where i live”.
They popped into a post about a name in NZ on an NZ instance to call people racist names.
You and I may have different ideas about what is ok, or possibly the comment has been drowned out by the attention the post got so it’s not so obvious anymore, but to me that is not a thoughtful comment in a friendly community.
Yeah, had to scroll way down to see the comments, but although I think they are a bit dumb, there were other hexbear comments in that thread I agreed with. I’m generally in favour of keeping the community open, supposing you have the ability to ban the trolls if you think it needs it (no idea if you can do that in Lemmy). Defederating just seems like a big step, and your right I find those comments mildly offensive at best but of course it’s your server so up to you the standard you want to keep.
On the votes front, I believe as the admin you can see the vote counts? Are the really outweighing the local voices? Or is the proportion of lemmy.nz vs other instances consistent over time? I previously used my lemmy.world account to access lemmy.nz, and I imagine there are loads of people with accounts on different instances.
Given the low numbers currently I think finding ways to be more open is good, but I can also appreciate not wanting to deal with shitty behaviour.
Yeah, had to scroll way down to see the comments, but although I think they are a bit dumb, there were other hexbear comments in that thread I agreed with.
This is one thing I struggle with. Some posts by hexbear users are so thoughtful, while others are so flippant.
I’m generally in favour of keeping the community open, supposing you have the ability to ban the trolls if you think it needs it (no idea if you can do that in Lemmy). Defederating just seems like a big step, and your right I find those comments mildly offensive at best but of course it’s your server so up to you the standard you want to keep.
What I want for a community isn’t “not offensive”, but actively friendly.
On the votes front, I believe as the admin you can see the vote counts? Are the really outweighing the local voices? Or is the proportion of lemmy.nz vs other instances consistent over time? I previously used my lemmy.world account to access lemmy.nz, and I imagine there are loads of people with accounts on different instances.
I can see the votes in the database. I’ve only checked specifically this post (and not any comments under it), but last I checked there were 23 voters subscribed to !newzealand out of 169 votes. That’s regardless of which server their account is on.
I haven’t checked this for previous posts. That could be an interesting thing to check, to see if it’s unusual (the volume of votes is certainly unusual).
Given the low numbers currently I think finding ways to be more open is good, but I can also appreciate not wanting to deal with shitty behaviour.
I posted a reply here, that’s a little different than my attitude up to now, but I think it’s still a reasonable path forward - though again anything is only a proposal at this point.
That’s a really interesting read. Also blown away by how low user numbers are still. I haven’t been back on Reddit since the 3rd party app shutdown, and I know plenty of others have left. Makes it seem more important to me to build community but it’s a tricky balance to strike.
Thanks for your thoughtful responses. I am enjoying having the kiwi community to interact with so your obviously doing something right.
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.
It’s contingent on them being cooperative and reasonable, but surely they deserve a chance to prove that they can be?
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.
Downvoting doesn’t work when there’s more of them than there are of us, and they all upvote each other.
Agreed. Defederation is a last resort. Let’s not be our own circlejerk.
There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution that works, eh dave?
I feel the fact you decided this was necessary kinda proves my point though.
Not really, I messaged @dave so he could be on top of it if it got ‘interesting’.
Now you have got very anti hexbear and ‘they’ have not been antagonistic in this thread.
No, but they have absolutely flooded the thread. They certainly got antagonistic in the previous thread though, basically calling everyone who disagrees with them racist.
You are the one in that thread getting hun up on a te Reo name when Te Reo is an official language (the only written in Law - English is only a common language as far as I understand), they, and others have called out the developers and you fo a quite an easy Te Reo name.
I have seen issues with 111 having issues with an English street name - Dick st. It took three calls to get EMS to attend because the first two went to (i guess) the same controller who insisted that Dick st was a prank call.
I don’t like how they exclusively use memes, and seem to group post, but on the issue of the street name I think you are in the wrong.
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Do you seriously think that’s quite an easy name?
It’s eight syllables, but I think most minds would chunk it out as three or four units of short term memory (“papa”, “kanga”, “horo” or even “horohoro”) which isn’t too unreasonable to me compared to some more …western sounding? place names.
(Though I am not the person you were responding to nor do I have experience with Maori. Just sharing my take)
I mean, it’s certainly possible to remember, but to describe it as an easy to remember word just seems so elitist.
Even as a white gen x-er with probable dyslexia I would possibly have issues spelling spelling not living there, but if you lived there I really can’t see the problem with papa-kanga-horo-horo (shit, look at that I spelt that correctly first time [yes I looked it to check])
Easier than Worcester
Who said Worcester was an easy name though?
Lmao you toadie, listen to yourself
And now the alts show up.
Swing and a miss
I mean, you’ve had the same hostile attitude right out the gate as the Hexbear crowd, of course people will think you’re one of them.
Pretty common for narcissists to perceive the world as a crowd of bullies working against them. I hope you’re not a grown man acting like this on here.
You really are a sad person.
Every time I read a stupid comment and then check the instance 100% of the time it’s hexbear.
So far I’ve not seen any rule breaking posts.
Edit: I made this comment after only seeing hexbear users in few nz thread but after seeing more and seeing how the partcipate. I think we should defederate. They will never participate in good faith as they are an extremist instance. Majority of the big instances have already defederated with them so its not like we will be singling them out. On the point of “diverse viewpoints”, policy so far bans extreme right wing instances and extreme leftwing instances. All the reasonable view points that a hexbear user could provide can be provided by the many leftists across other instances.
Yeah, that’s exactly the issue. Nothing of value comes from their instance, but they do follow the rules.
Regarding the edit, what is their instance actually about, what are their leanings? I haven’t been to visit, and don’t really want to.
They’re anti nato communists and some socialists. I took a geez at their “why does everyone hate our instance thread” and it seems that in their words, since they have been on the platform for 3 years they have a strong instance culture. They are used to fighting and battling trolls so when they see something they don’t like they swarm on it and argue aggressively.
From my opinion its a political community that focuses on pushing extreme left wing views. They are anti western, anti capitalism and anti racism and bigotry. I laughed because one of the reasons they keep giving for being hated is because “they’re always right”.
I think calling them anti capitalism and anti racist is a bit reaching as many of them seem to support the state capitalism of Russia and the CCP. And I have yet to come across a hexbear user that has ever brought up the current genocide of the Uyghur population in China, they’d much rather point fingers at western countries for their issues instead of holding up a mirror to their own beliefs regarding “communism” in its current form in Russia and China.
I was trying to be charitable since I think they would describe themself that way. Their position is not really logical because they are forced to support Russia and China.
While I definitely agree with the sentiment that they would like to describe themselves that way, but on the other hand no one is forcing them to support those countries. And a sizable portion of those users and supporters seem to be unwilling to have a civil discussion regarding the issues with their “alliances” when brought up by other users.
Who’s forcing them to support genocidal state capitalists?
I cant tell you why they support them it doesnt make much sense to me. I only saw them say that they were all on the same page about everything which means that users cannot deviate from the pro russia/china stance.
That just means that they are choosing to support state capitalists. Nobody forced them to have such awful beliefs but themselves, because they love authoritarian ideology.
Being anti NATO, I suspect they’re also on Russia’s side regarding Ukraine? Yeah, fuck em.
They LOVE Putin and the CCP. They’ll dogpile anyone who disagrees.
Euww. Yeah, they can fuck right off.
They’re authoritarians. The communist stuff is just an excuse to worship authoritarian regimes like the CCP.
Tankies. They are pro authoritarian communist or socialist regimes like China and USSR, and anti western liberal capitalist democracies like US and NZ.
They got banned from Reddit and moved to an isolated Lemmy instance long before the rest of Lemmy got big, but decided to experiment with federation fairly recently.
The only person in this thread that’s not engaging in good faith and trying to cause trouble is you.
So what’s with the attitude in your other comment? Clearly these people have no plans to engage in good faith.
I would not support defederation based on this exchange. Surely the bar must be high for such an action?
Honestly if someone wants to point out how awful Hexbear is, op posted some poor examples.
If you spend a little time there you’ll see things more along the lines of “you’re gonna get the wall when we start the revolution” with a ton of upvotes.
Fair enough, I appreciate the civil response.
I’d be fine with defederating. I don’t care if they bring in more numbers and more ‘engagement’ if that engagement is generally shit and too difficult for the mods to moderate with the current tools available. I’d much rather be part of a smaller but friendly community that is actually familiar with NZ, than a larger more popular one that just turns into another cesspit.
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There was a huge difference in the tone of conversation before and after dave’s temporary defederating, both on the topic of defederating, and the discussion that kicked all this off.
Now there’s only two people calling me racist.
So as an update, Hexbear have defederated us after a brief chat I had with an admin. They updated their instance on it here:
Removed lemmy.nz from our allow-list due to irreconcilable political differences between the instances. As well as them committing to permanently blocking hexbear.net https://hexbear.net/comment/3833816
That’s not quite how I remember the conversation going, in fact I feel like I said it wasn’t permanent (or at least that’s what I was trying to imply):
Thanks for reaching out. I do intend to monitor the situation, in particular when more granular tools are available. But for the moment I think we will just watch from the side lines.
But hey, it is what it is.
This has “you can’t fire me, I quit” vibes.
Does this mean they can see us, but we don’t see them, or are we invisible to them?
I think because we currently have them blocked, and they have now blocked us, this I think means that neither of us see each other (on any server).
Can’t say you didn’t try. Nice work.
Well done Dave. Think you handled it well.
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Being on an instance that defederated them, noticably better now. Just do it…
I wasn’t around when they still on World, but I did see the equivalent to this post on 196.
Essentially the same concerns were raised.
Seems like a good move. It’s a crap dynamic at this point. Maybe later we could re-federate once the numbers aren’t so skewed. If people from there feel the need to discuss NZ issues they still have options. They can join here. They can make their own NZ sub if NZ issues are so important to them.
I have filtered out a lot of the spammer accounts that just spew nonsense.
On one hand I’m lucky I can do that with sync. But on the other hand we shouldn’t have to resort to whackamole.
I wouldn’t mind if it was a few “bad apples”, but every single fucking one of them are here to start arguments, call people racist, and generally act in the most abrasive manner possible.
What’s the argument there? People shouldn’t have oppositional discussions online? You just want to live in an echo chamber?
One of the saddest things about silicon valley social media products is the way they silo people off and prevent exchange of ideas.
And here on lemmy, reddit users who got used to it silo themselves off willingly.
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That’s a common perception of people who are unable to bear someone disagreeing with them. I’ve looked at the actual discussions they’re complaining about. Not impressed by this attempt to turn a tantrum into a site issue.
The issue, as other commitments have pointed out, is that they all, quite consistently, behave in the most abrasive manner possible. It’s not a “few bad apples”, they’re all like that.
But op is literraly doing what they say they’re not doing.
The issue is, there is no discussion or exchange of ideas happening, just a group of people behaving like seagulls.
Very good faith reply here. I have no choice but to take you at face value.
Please share a list of spammer accounts so we can point and laugh (at you)
That makes no sense?
The app I use has a built in filter. You just add a user to the filter and you don’t see their posts or comments.
I like having an instance that isn’t defederated from too much (except CSAM) because I enjoy being able to see and subscribe to what I want. Hexbear is a shitty place, but I don’t like the idea of defederating because my feewings got hurt. I would prefer defederating because it’s a legal/human rights necessity.
If you’re getting that worked up about mild non-offensive inane comments I hate to imagine how worked up you get using a self-checkout machine. Chill out.
Holy shit dude, have you used one?
Please place item in bagging area. Are you using your own bags? [Yes]. Please wait for staff member to come over and give you permission to use your own bags. Would you like a receipt? [No]. Please take this 30 centimetre long piece of receipt paper that isn’t a receipt, it’s just printed with stuff you don’t want.
I don’t think it’s justified getting all upset about a few comments, but if I saw an article about someone getting arrested for smashing a self-checkout machine then I’d assume the machine probably deserved it.
It constantly thinks I’ve placed an improper amount of weight and I’m stealing. As if I’d steal at the most watched area of the store like a chump. And the attendant has to come over four times!
I have actually abandoned my shopping and walked out because of one of those things.
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It’s not like I put the chocolate bar in my pocket while I was standing at the self-checkout? Obviously I did that before going to the place with all the staff.
And who’s gonna watch the video surveilance to make sure I didn’t scan my kumara in as onions?
Once again, the issue is that none of them actually participated meaningfully in the discussion, just turned the thread into one big circle jerk.
None of the individual comments were particularly bad, it’s the overall effect that is the issue.
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Have lemmy.nz reached out to hexbear? Do they know that their bombastic persona can be overwhelming for a small instance? Sounds corny but maybe we just ask them to go easy.
They aren’t ever going to chill out. Their entire purpose is to brigade, attack, harass, and argue in bad faith. The admins pretend to care about this, but they’re in on it as shown by this image. They’re getting defederated a lot right now because they cannot ever behave.
It was the whole point of them refederating (they used to run on a fork of Lemmy) to “dunk on libs” and brigade in general
