Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.

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Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.

Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.

The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:

  • “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.”
  • “The West’s role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.”
  • “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term “rules-based international order.” It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”

The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to “dismantle western propaganda” and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.

In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.

Here are some examples:

“I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”

“All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”

Overall community comments:

To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.

We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.

  • jake_eric@lemmy.world
    287·
    1 year ago

    Sure, but having fewer accounts is easier: that’s the whole purpose of federation in the first place, isn’t it?

    It’s fine now, but I haven’t been on Lemmy for that long, and I don’t want to have to make a new account every few months to see a new instance.

    • solrize@lemmy.world
      11·
      1 year ago

      Maybe “federation” or something like it should actually take place on the client side, so you’d join instances with almost the ease of subscribing to communities. Then the client code would handle combining feeds, using the right credentials to post to a given place, funnelling DM’s from multiple instances to a single inbox, etc.

      I think if we are here now, the fediverse vision has already failed. Defederation is a last resort yet this is the third round of drama in the 1 month past redditgeddon? Two actual defederations and one extended discussion set off by a single troll on another instance.

      So, I think fediverse decentralization hasn’t yet gone far enough. Thus the idea of handling instance coordination on the client rather than leaving it up to server admins.

    • Zaktor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      A single login solution is to find a third party that federates with both lemmy.world and hexbear. Hexbear’s list is pretty limited so it’d have to be one of those, but unless others follow lemmy.world’s choice you’ll be able to see and post on both instances.

    • Lifecoach5000@lemmy.worldEnglish
      63·
      1 year ago

      Well I think this is just the nature fediverse as well. You gotta respect the admin and it’s really not super hard to use multiple logins with different instances via an app.

      • Jilanico@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        1 year ago

        If Lemmy starts to allow seamless migration of accounts across instances, this will become less of an issue. But I suspect creating multiple accounts isn’t going to be palatable to most users.