OpenStars

Ah I see. I actually enjoyed chatting with Hexbears, personally. Immediately after leaving Kbin.social (as it started to go defunct, and was down for weeks at a time), my most highly-received / highest-upvoted content was there, with me snarking on the likes of boomers, politics, and capitalism. I really struggled with my decision to block the instance, b/c I enjoyed that. Too much, I decided:-). Conversely, now that I know more about their style, I no longer enjoy hearing about them:-(.

This really isn't about any personal experience that I had with them. I shared my personal experience to suggest that I halfway knew what people meant when they shared their own stories about them. It's their whole entire style that bothers me, not where it is directed at, and in particular not whether it's directed at me personally or not. Unlike most others raving about them, I don't recall ever having been banned or posts removed there personally.

I did find it annoying to keep receiving notifications WEEKS after my comments, but I suppose even that much is on-brand for ChapoTrapHouse and "the dunk tank", with their "struggle sessions" preferring that more in-depth style. I begrudge them not at all for being true to whatever style they espouse - the trick, I mentioned, lies in that style being extremely off-putting to the uninitiated.

Like if there was a warning message that popped up saying "are you sure that you want to reply to this? users on this instance are known for being quite more than a little... extra in their zealous replies", then that would totally be fine. Just like I'm fine with porn existing - again, so long as it is properly labelled, so that someone doesn't lose their job over coming to Lemmy while at work.

Hexbear's problem is not that it exists, but that it refuses to play nice with others, especially when outside of their instance. e.g. when banned, several of its users have simply switched to their (likely pre-existing) alts on lemmy.ml and continued right where they left off. They admit this - heck, they are proud of this, and I'm fairly certain that in that link I shared to lemmygrad.ml, one user even mentioned having already started to make an app specifically to facilitate getting around instance defederations by using alts to seamlessly navigate using whatever account will allow their content to go through. This is par for the course for ~~conservatives~~ users of "that style" where consent of the ~~victim~~ recipient means nothing (perhaps b/c the message is just "so pure" that it MUST be sent?!).

Anyway I blocked them months ago - that's not the point, the point is how they drive away new users to Lemmy. I want the Fediverse to grow, not shrink. And I believe that this is the best way to accomplish that. Likewise (perhaps oddly?) I am supportive of lemm.ee not defederating from them, b/c that is what works best for users who appreciate not having barriers placed for them by a stronger admin presence (e.g. even exploding-heads.com is not present in the blocked instances list there). That said, I think most instances may want to strongly consider defederation from hexbear.net, and in particular I think it suits the style of Discuss.Online to do so, given our aim to encourage people to speak more - without being in fear of toxic push-back.

Prior to the Rexodus, during the protests, after reading some articles about social media, I decided that I was going to leave Reddit to get away from the toxicity. I did not know yet if I would replace it with anything else online (as opposed to e.g. reading books & otherwise touching grass irl & offline), but I definitely had to get away from that as it was seeping its way into me, and I did not like who I had become (yet as a mod of a couple mid-sized gaming communities there, I couldn't exactly just not see such stuff as continued to come my way).

I truly do want to hear from a wide diversity of opinions - so long as they are offered in good faith. The lack of the latter though... why should someone else's right to speak infringe upon, even trounce (the better word might be "trump"?) my right to not have to listen?

Btw, we did have a heavily conservative (group of?) instances here, exploding-heads.com, although the entire Fediverse individually defederated from them, after which they ceased to exist (I have no idea if those are related somehow or if they simply fell upon themselves due to in-fighting; but either way newer ones did not spring back up, which is the important thing). Hexbear.net, and to a significantly lesser degree lemmy.ml (complicated by their admins also being the main developers of the Lemmy codebase), seems basically to be the leftist equivalent. And the admins of hexbear themselves know and admit to their users trolling the entire Fediverse, as reading my link to the hexbear statement and the links to similar statements within hexbear shows. Even so, they cannot - or will not - control their users. At which point it falls upon others to have to make the harder choices.

PieFed allows such - every single post involving Beehaw is given this message:

This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.

With that link going to the very own words that Beehaw chooses to say about their own platform, rather than words being said about them by someone else. However, Lemmy does not offer this capability, more's the pity. I hold out strong hopes that Sublinks will though, one day:-).

As you say, people will go turtle and refuse to engage, unless they feel that it is safe to do so, thus ironically in order to try to encourage additional content we need to block out content that is hindering that growth? :-)

Btw, your instance did not choose to defederate from beehaw, it was rather the other way around - here is the original notice. TLDR: those are 2 of the largest instances, and mainly they wanted to reduce their EXTREME moderation burden to have everything "just so" as they prefer things to be for them, though they seemed to have made an exception for lemm.ee for whatever reason - see also this recent discussion about it that mentions lemm.ee and discuss.online and in particular this interesting comment.

I would like to see the Fediverse grow, but for that to happen we need to prune some branches first.

It was something that I considered innocuous - probably along the lines of "at least Biden lowered gas prices, which [implication: while not everything] at least is not nothing". Ofc they were having none of that.

And it might have been in the_dunk_tank rather than CTH.

Anyway your question presumes that "weeks" is something that would be shown in the Lemmy UI - but it is not, so all of them will just say "xyz months ago".

Nor, if they somehow did show a period of multiple weeks, would that even be a bad thing? The sidebar of CTH (and TDT) literally says how e.g. "This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes." Their replying in this manner then is a strength - i.e. a match to what they say that they want to do - to "dunk on" people. Then again, the sidebar is hidden by default using the Lemmy web UI in a mobile browser... so how would people, discovering a post by browsing All (lets say by New), even know what they have managed to walk into?

Mind you, like porn, I have absolutely zero desire to stop the content itself, in this case them from "dunking" on one another, my beef was how then that content gets shared across the entire Fediverse, despite it being not a good "fit" with common standards of decency elsewhere. The community statement for discuss.online says:

A general purpose Lemmy instance for discovery, fun, & sharing. It's a Lemmy place for all.

A community for anything and everything that’s not terrible.

Let’s talk! But not like in a “your partner saw you looking up bunnies with pancakes on their heads” talk. Let’s talk about anything and everything. Like how much we love bunnies with pancakes on their heads!

And Lemmy.World's statement says:

Be polite and follow the rules ⚖ https://legal.lemmy.world/tos

and among them is:

Everyone has a right to browse and interact with Lemmy.World and other federated instances free of harassment and/or threats of violence. Please try and be kind to your fellow human, or at least civil. Trolling users is only funny if both parties find it funny. Trolling mods and/or site admins is ill-advised. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang)#Concern_troll

TLDR: remember the human.

BTW, let us not forget that my post has nothing to do with myself as a single user, but rather that of hexbear admins having lied to admins of other instances, and of a lemmy.ml moderator with the backing of those admins telling a user that they want to kill them and hope that they die soon. With those as the chief matters of concern, what possible use could my own experiences be, except as merely yet one more occurrence, shared by thousands across the entire Fediverse who had to discover the hard way what happens on hexbear? (along with untold others who did not stick around long enough to tell their stories)

If I can go on a tangent: it is conversations like this that continually convince me that I need never go back to Reddit. Not EVERY SINGLE conversation needs to be full of snark and vitriol. Being able to discuss things rationally, calmly, and with kindness is possible, if only people will create the space within which they are allowed to happen:-).

And how that relates is: using DuckDuckGo convinced me similarly to abandon Google:-). Caveats include using Google Images, Google Maps, etc. e.g. to look up the hours of a shop (the SEO optimization there works for rather than against me, although tbf quite often I have to bat away unrelated results vying for my increased attention due merely to having paid for that exact privilege), but overall the results of DDG are just extremely much more worth my time than Google's.

As an example, if you search for the keyword "Lemmy", DDG pulls up Lemmy.World as the #2 hit (which notably has ~80% of all active users on Lemmy, so is overwhelmingly deserving of being listed so highly), after the #1 hit being the singer, whereas on Google the first instance mentioned is Lemmy.ml (that has 2,206 active monthly users, compared to Lemmy.World's 17,122 that is roughly an order of magnitude higher, and also housing the most-used communities e.g. !technology@lemmy.world has 16.9k active monthly users compared to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml's top community with 8.44K), and that not until the #4 hit.

i.e., not only are Google results commodified, but as you said they are "ruined" as well - to the point of representing actual & active disinformation (for the sake of $$$) rather than merely misinformation (aka oopsies). We can scroll past one, two, even ten ads, but how do we find our info when the sorting refuses to distinguish between SEO-advanced results and "real" ones? I dunno, perhaps the above one is a poor example (edit: b/c in the past, Lemmy.ml really was the top Lemmy instance, for so very long), but I think you know what I mean regardless:-).

Only 20% - that seems really low?

Housing costs, food, and access to medical care seem like much bigger factors affecting quality-of-life. And we could go on: childcare costs, declining social safety net, rise in not only home purchase costs but also renting as well, enormous rise in cost of higher education, the switch to fascism, all of this would naively seem to me to contribute far more to life than a mere paycheck in the moment, especially if there is lower stability to turn that paycheck into actual living.

The article cuts off fairly quickly though so if it talked about it down below that, I couldn't read it.

Space-X? :-P

Bold of you to assume that we do!:-P

I mean, Trump won so... that illustrates how sometimes things do happen, and it's often best to be prepared for such?

My apologies that me being hyperbolic did not add clarity and instead caused confusion:-). Ultimately I agree, but was adding the point that users who were either savvy or dedicated enough could still get a lot of use out of Google until more recently, whereupon it is now just a huge mess that makes it more worthwhile to abandon completely (in favor of e.g. DuckDuckGo) - even though it was the demise of Reddit rather than the addition of LLMs that caused the sharp decline (+ other things too, e.g. there was a strike of mods at StackOverflow), i.e. Reddit (& others) was propping up Google results for the longest time, which does not excuse Google for allowing such instability, but helps explain the timeline wherein Google results were both "usable" (even if less so than the past) and also "degraded" at the same time.

Whoops I seem to have lost a sentence, wherein I stated that a quick glance at !chapotraphouse@hexbear.net (while not logged in) reveals that literally nobody on this instance has subscribed to that community - and yet, does that matter, since we are talking about the experiences of new members, who can nonetheless (as I did) find these posts while browsing All (which I note is the default behavior rather than Subscribed), especially using New?

And since I've already started adding to the post, here's more: likewise with !technology@hexbear.net and !videos@hexbear.net and !news@hexbear.net, although some people seem subscribed to !memes@hexbear.net.

For those of us who are more tech savvy - even if we don't use Arch btw:-P - it's not such a problem, but how many people will persist in learning how to do that, especially to then be surprised when ever after blocking an instance, those users can still reply (thereby generating Notifications) to them? The top criticism of Lemmy on Reddit is ofc the overall lack of content - especially niche communities - but the 2nd top criticism iirc is our toxicity, e.g. our political extremism problem (a Google search of "Lemmy" pulls up lemmy.ml as the top instance - even though a DuckDuckGo search pulls up Lemmy.World and yet which are mainstream normal people more likely to use? - which has its default feed set to Local, therefore that is what a mainstream normie is vastly more likely to see: "kill the landlords" and other posts advocating for violent upheaval of Western society and other such "both sides equal" rhetoric; which helps me understand why 100% of the people that I've tried to recommend Lemmy to have not only refused to join but admonished me for even having mentioned it to them; NOW I understand that though! b/c OUR experiences, after blocking many communities, are nowhere close to the default that such a new user would see, unguided by someone who knows that it is possible for Lemmy to be experienced differently!!!??!).

Defederation is nowhere close to ideal, but since there are no other options offered really - e.g. labelling, such as is quite helpfully done for NSFW content across the Fediverse, which could offer a more opt-in than opt-out approach; edit: I had accidentally switched those two terms:-D - then what else can be done, in-between nothing (allowing all remote content to also be hosted from this instance) vs. everything (block it all)? I really do wish that other options were made available - but given these two choices, I am advocating for the latter, for the sake of new users who are least prepared to deal with the situation. Also, as demonstrated by clicking the links in the OP, remote content is always available in read-only mode, so it's not like I am advocating that such content not exist, just that it not be hosted here and thereby turn people away by its presence.

Doing so would instantly turn Discuss.Online into the #1 top most welcoming Lemmy instance in the USA, and whether we wanted to specifically push for it or not, make it a top target for Reddit refugees.

That depends strongly on which "public" we are talking about - some extremely intelligent people I have talked to don't even know what Reddit is. Old Google searches got bad, but if you scrolled down far enough, or added "reddit" to the search terms, they used to be salvageable. So it's less of a hard cutoff and more of a long process that brought us to where we are today.