If you poke around inside HB, you will see them having these same conversations - I recall one, found by searching the keyword "(de)federation" where their admin was begging and pleading for them to behave. I might have restricted the search to whatever their announcement community is called, which I can usually find by sorting the local communities list by oldest. Anyway, their userbase obviously doesn't care.

This points to why normalization of toxicity is so incredibly dangerous: by not stopping it inside their own instance, they train people that that kind of behavior is okay. Now, of course the users are going to act the same way outside of it!?!?!? You cannot extract blood from a stone, you cannot expect a leopard to change its spots, you cannot (necessarily) expect civility from someone trained on 4chan, and by federating with them and providing zero means to block them, that isn't half as much their fault as ours. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Steve Huffman are all going to do their thang, but it's our choice to use the platforms that they provide.

Lemmy's 0.19.3 was supposed to allow user-blocking - older posts calling for user-level defederation were always told "just wait, it's coming". However, what little protection it did offer has since degraded further - the only thing is does is block communities for someone, not the toxic-AF userbase, and while it used to also block notifications from them, as of 0.19.5 the latter protection is already gone. At this point I expect it will never happen. Bc if it did, people would block Lemmy.ml too, and they can't have that.

Only the authority admins can choose to defederate from hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml too except who are we kidding that's not happening. Some instances have at least blocked certain communities such as ChapoTrapHouse, but obviously meander.xyz has not (https://mander.xyz/c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net), seeming to prefer to leave it up to each individual user to decide which users, communities, and instances to block - except again, you cannot block the latter, not without some kind of bot or doing the work manually for each individual user and community, plus any new ones that may be created in the future. And despite all the posts that seem to indicate otherwise, quite often we are prevented from even discussing the matter. In the 10 months since I made this account, I have only had 3 posts removed - all 3 for criticizing the admin practices on Lemmy.ml. What is allowed to be said is only the tip of the iceberg.

Watching Innuendo Studios' The Alt Right Playbook changed my thinking forever, helping solidify my thinking that while you can lead a horse to water, you cannot make it drink. I am not criticizing what you did here bc you weren't speaking for the sake of changing the actual HB's mind, but to breathe the light of knowledge into the dark corners of the situation, mainly for the sake of the rest of us who know nothing about that game and perhaps are too busy or otherwise not inclined to look up such details. FANTASTIC! But anyway, I now know that people who troll are not worth talking to.

So I'll probably move away from Lemmy, either to PieFed or Tesseract on dubvee.org or both, or lemmy.cafe seems quite welcoming and is the only fully Lemmy instance I've ever heard of that has defederated from all of the big 3 - and notably virtually nothing else (except threads.net), so it's like lemm.ee but without that source of toxicity. It also is running 0.19.6-beta.9, and has fantastic welcome messages on the home page - most instances refuse to update your sidebar content to help guide new users, inclined highly ironically lemmy.ml itself that just has a link titled "What is Lemmy.ml" that points to a post that has since been removed:-D. Both dubvee.org and lemmy.cafe are only run by a single admin though iirc, so seem less stable for the future.

Btw whether you are interested in joining PieFed or not yourself, I highly recommend reading this: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/ - many of those thoughts that you and I discussed over a year ago about voting patterns, with trust based on reputation scores and sorting based on someone's pattern of behaviors, as we do irl, are fleshed out there. They might be great solutions to the problems, or they might be horrible ones, but either way it's an interesting read, and a step forward to making something actually happen!

We cannot control others, only ourselves. New, mainstream people are far less likely to join Lemmy due to all the extremism and toxicity that we allow here, the (mostly false) mantra "you can just block it tho" aside, not everyone wants to treat their social media like they are installing Arch Linux btw.