OpenStars

Society is breaking down, thereby leaving us open to someone claiming to offer to restore "order & authority" and "the rule of law".

Exactly how the conservative Alt-Right used "bUt ThE eCoNoMy ThO" and the situation in Gaza where "BoTh SiDeS sAmE" to win the recent USA election. It worked then, why wouldn't it work again now, to make "free speech" illegal?

Well, huge caveat: I have no idea if this will happen, I only worried about the possibility that it might, hence starting my comment with "I would not be too surprised to find that..."

And to break out into a meta-discussion: damnit, now I'm hedging my words again, reiterating over & over again the caveats and bounds outside of which I did not mean to extend my words into territory that I never said, yet I seem to feel that others will undoubtedly accuse me of having stated (almost as if I had done so directly?) nonetheless - just like I used to have to do with Reddit. I really hate how one cannot seem to say anything genuine on the internet without being accused of all sorts of crap. I think it's b/c you cannot have adult discussions with children (of whatever physical age) around. Meh, it is what it is. This is "social media" and meant just for fun & casual conversations - we will never solve anything of substance here though:-).

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. I think you’re spot on.

I think you just answered your own question:-).

Follow the money / incentivization trail. If such media blitzes were not happening, then the people behind them aren't doing their jobs properly and they should be causing more, according to "that way" of thinking, imho (or perhaps we're too small, and yet here we reflect what is being discussed elsewhere too, so even if only by trickling in from the outside, such trends should still be visible here?).

For anyone wondering what this means, my own take is:

Everyone can still read hexbear's content in read-only mode, it is now only the interactions that have been severed, due to too many bad-faith occurrences (many links given in this post, or rather in posts linked to from that post, offered as justification by the various instance admins for why they too defederated from HB) where the HB admins have not upheld their own promises regarding the shared codes of conduct nor their own instructions to their userbase (to constrain the trolling to only inside of communities hosted there, where it is more expected and unfortunately for everyone else even outright encouraged by the admin team).

There are many many instances that still remain federated with HB for those that want that. Especially lemm.ee as the #3 Lemmy instance (after #1 which is Lemmy.World with ~80% of the entire Lemmy userbase, and #2 is lemmynsfw.com), or sh.itjust.works as the #4 instance, but also another USA-based one is lemmy.today - see https://lemmy.today/c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net. This defederation will help keep Discuss.Online true to its own motto of facilitating friendly discussions without that source of trolling spamming us constantly. Conversely, other USA-based instances that defederate not only from HB but also from lemmy.ml is lemmy.cafe and dubvee.org, and both of those are great options as well (though each quite a bit smaller than DO, and the latter has a significantly more narrow on-ramp to the Fediverse that is more akin to Beehaw that is heavily curated to avoid toxicity - which ofc some people will absolutely love, even as others absolutely will hate:-D).

And before someone mentions midwest.social, there seems to be some controversy surrounding claims of abusive moderation practices on that one. It does have some cool communities such as !theonion@midwest.social and !lotrmemes@midwest.social but you don't need an account on that instance to interact with those.

Anyway it is fantastic to have so many options available! In particular, while the worst excesses of HB are easily avoidable by those of us who are already aware, new users will not know, and many are turned away from the entire concept of the Fediverse to come here and see such, and then leave as a result rather than learn how to block them. i.e., HB having been "opt-out" rather than "opt-in" was hurting us, so I am glad to see that trend reversed. You can always find HB content - nobody has taken that away, though indeed you can no longer interact with it using a DO account, due to the limitations of the tools that we have been provided with.

And this in turn makes the Fediverse friendly - again not so much for us who already knew about HB, but for new users who will not know, yet now have a greater chance of sticking around (rather than be intimidated out) in order to find out how great we are:-).

I am excited to see what will come of this:-).

I find this to be excellent news - thank you!:-)

Before you go too deep, the mod responsible apologized, the ToS were amended, and this is all being discussed out in the open. The 24 hours mutings are already rescinded, and no new bans are said to be planned as a result of discussing the topic moving forward (as you said, unless it looks to be planning something in the future, which is just a whole other thing entirely). i.e. in the face of this huge event the admins PANICKED, but ultimately everything is already calming down and returning to a semblance of normalcy - and that whole process took less than half a week! This is nothing at all like spez's take-it-or-leave-it Reddit.

That said, it's good to take advantage of decentralization anyway, and yes the anarchy instance (that you mentioned below) looks awesome (I enjoy much content hosted on it and greatly respect its admin and their overall contributions to us all here:-) and I think you will be happy there. If this event caused you to question your priorities and what you hope to see moving forward into the future, then that's a good thing to increase your future happiness level:-). Though I wanted to point out that in that case it's less "Lemmy.World = bad" and more that you are finding a better fit for your needs. LW is what it is, and it's not Reddit, even if it is not anarchy either. I for one find it absolutely fantastic that both can exist on the Fediverse side by side together, enriching all of us, each according to our own needs and desires:-).

I would not be too surprised to find that there were... "sources" promoting the recent uptick in violent rhetoric. Not that the underlying current of resentment did not already exist, mind you, but pushing it forward more strongly in order to sow FUD?

Either way, I expect that if such is not here already, it at least will be on its way. The excuse that this will give Trump to shut down avenues of free speech is just too perfect for me to not at least suspect some kind of involvement beyond mere coincidence.

People always seem to forget this, especially when they want to say something and it would work out in their favor if you believed (or at least would not strongly contest) this and would just let them talk. Your own consent to have to listen to them seems to matter not at all, so very very sadly to me:-(.

They can be fun to talk with. They can also be extremely harassing, though tbf more for people who don't know what !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net is all about - i.e. who have not read its sidebar text. And yet, many apps (like Voyager, and the basic mobile browser web UI) do not show that? Like porn, it's mainly only bad if you stumble upon it unawares - e.g. while at work - and would have to opt-out of it. Which, if Lemmy was that way, then many people would have to simply cease checking Lemmy while at work on those devices.

Many of the users on lemmy.ml who are seen harassing people the most outside of the actual Hexbear communities are self-admittedly alts of Hexbear accounts. Consent means nothing to them, apparently, so when hexbear.net was defederated from Lemmy.World a year ago, they simply shifted over to an account that wasn't blocked. Like an incel who will never cease telling you what a "nice man" he is, they simply WILL NOT stop.

Which is all the more sad considering how many legitimately nice conversations go on daily inside of the many other Hexbear communities. But those conversations aren't why Lemmy.World and so many other instances chose to defederate from them. In the post whose link I sent earlier are a bunch of other links where each instance makes its own determination and offers links to exact posts and comments that they felt justified their decision to defederate, if you want to read through some examples. Tbf many have since been deleted by their creators, though that should tell you something right there, about the transparency and integrity of Hexbear users who when blamed don't always retort with the truth so much as do whatever they hope will work so as to be able to dunk on people (and thus when caught, lie, even the instance admins, to other instance admins even!?!?!? which I also put a link to that event as well in that post).

TLDR: I get it, it is not literally every single comment, user, and/or community that does it, but it is there, if you spend more time looking. There are exact links there if you want help finding them.

Woah.

Ofc it won't stop alts from leaking through - nothing can stop that - but in fighting against spam, every little bit helps.

Will you now be using it as your primary instance recommendation on Reddit? There is perhaps literally nothing better for that, so this is fantastic news that may help even the non-USA parts of the Fediverse by allowing the bringing in of more users who will feel safer to talk than they would have before, due to harassment for having a USA centrist (which let's be real translates into a global and especially from the EU perspective, right-leaning) viewpoint. Comics, memes, hardware, woodworking or more techie Maker stuff and so many other hobbies, I hope to see more discussions about them all, with this helping people on Reddit to now be less resistant to joining.

🎉🥳💐🎇

Genuinely thank you for your input, particularly not in spite of but because it seems to run counter to the prevailing opinion of the moment. imho we strongly need that level of diversity of opinion that, like your answer here, is delivered in good faith 🙏:-).

The defederations happened just prior to me joining Lemmy, while I was still on Kbin, so while I have read about them far more extensively than most, I can only imagine what it must have been like at the time to live through. I do get a sense that what was known then about hexbear is different than today - there seemed to be more hope about it? While now even hexbears themselves seem to have lost that, knowing that even if someone manages to control themselves personally that so many others in their midst are still refusing to - they see it, and some are truly saddened by it, but they cannot control their instance admins anymore than the admins seem willing to control the users.

Fwiw I probably would have agreed with you, back then. In fact I know I would have, bc I said similar things back then about Lemmy.ml - "it's just a large instance, and people are humans so we're not perfect and this stuff will happen anywhere that has a sufficient number of people..." I have really changed my tune substantially since then, seeing it (Lemmy.ml still here) differently than I used to (as more of an institutional outcome of admin+moderation practices than individual decisions). Now back to hexbear: they really did deserve the benefit of the doubt too, at first. Before hearing e.g. about the instance admins lying to other instance admins. It was a grand experiment, to see if it would work.

Also, we hoped for more tools by now. Many of us hoped that Sublinks would be ready - I still do but obviously it's not here just at the moment - and we were promised instance blocking, which turned out to be such a disappointment, plus it makes hexbear opt-out rather than opt-in which I think is so very damaging for new users. If hexbear could just be opt-in, that would be someone's personal freedom of choice, but to federate it alongside all of the other content from the entire Fediverse as if it were the same, with zero warning despite how we know now how it is not being delivered in good faith... it's different now than it used to be, and the tools just simply aren't there to offer us any truly "good" options. It's either full acceptance of them, or full defederation, and that's not a great place to be in but it's where we are.

Lastly, new users are increasingly being steered away from Lemmy.World even if purely for centralization reasons - they may even start refusing new signups at some point, as they currently have ~80% of all users right now on that one server. It's too much load and it's causing problems sending content out to the other smaller instances, even here iirc (albeit much more rarely than most instances).despite how fantastic the uptime has been. And there is a need for a general-purpose USA-based instance, to perhaps host communities such as an AskUSA. So I for one hope that things here as well differ from the past, and that people do not simply jump onto Lemmy.World, but rather that the Fediverse would be more diversified by being spread across more instances such as this one.

Thank you again for sharing your perspective.

And does Lemmy.Today block anything at all? I don't even so much as see the Blocked Instances tab at https://lemmy.today/instances. Not that we are trying to chase anyone away but bc this all seems relevant so it helps to put it in one easy to find place for retrieval:-).