Thank you - I am glad that you will give it serious consideration, which ofc will take awhile.

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

Hello,

It has been a week, any update on this?

I was disagreeing with you until you mentioned the "new user" argument. I absolutely agree with that, if new users check out Lemmy and the first thing they see is the brainrot from hexbear or lemmy.ml, that would make a disastrous first impression.

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.

Did SJW recently defederate from HB?

I specifically left because they were fighting very adamantly to stay federated.

Weird that they defeded with Beehaw, though.

Thank you for adding not just your vote but your voice.

Thank you for sharing your story - it helps to hear such perspectives:-).

I tried as well, until I realized the same.

The instance block feature is misnamed imho - it only blocks communities on that instance, but as you see the users can still reply to you, triggering notifications, and vote to influence the visibility of your content.

As it should be for any member of the Fediverse, except they do not abide by the rules set forth on most instances, nor are we able to block them, leaving defederation as the only, last resort.

They will still continue to come, via their alts, but it will still help a bit, like having a spam filter for Lemmy - every step helps.

Thank you for voicing your support.

That's a megathread so it makes a bit of sense to be written in a different style. The comments are... odd yes, but I don't care about "oddness" - I am weird myself and celebrate that fact!

AI or human, I only care if they are "toxic", i.e. follow our rules of behavior to encourage rather than shut down conversations.

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.

Lemm.ee and lemmy.zip have very short defederation lists if that's your thing

One reason not to is that it would block access to such high-profile communities as !Firefox@lemmy.ml. It looks like at least one person on this instance is subscribed to that community. Then again, new users are constantly getting themselves banned for no reason that they can fathom - perhaps mentioning China or Russia or North Korea in a not-favorable-enough light? - and it's very confusing and off-putting to them, which like hexbear.net can drive them away from interacting on the Fediverse. Ofc that instance can do as it pleases, but so too can we and why choose to host such content here when the admin practices are so confusing, lacking transparency? Also many hexbears have alts there that they use to troll with (though tbf if a bunch of places started defederating from lemmy.ml, they would simply move elsewhere - but still, it would help somewhat even if not perfectly!).

The real trick is that there, far more so than on hexbear, many innocent users exist that would get caught up in the sweep. Ideally we could turn off access to it by default, but then allow people to opt-in to it if they wanted? And/or at least provide a warning label so that new users are not taken unawares when trying to comment in communities located on that instance - bc once you know the rules, to avoid discussing anything even remotely political, then it's fine? Except neither of those is functionality that exists on Lemmy.

So yeah, I am strongly in favor of defederating it too. Not as a punitive measure but a supportive one to maximize welcoming new users to the Fediverse. I wholly support the decision of e.g. lemm.ee to not defederate from lemmy.ml - bc that's what best implements their own vision of maximizing not welcomingness but total access to as much of the Fediverse from one account as possible - but at the same time, that's not what we are about here. The mission of Discuss.Online is very different, and for us (again, for new users of this instance) it seems to me to make sense, to defederate from lemmy.ml? But I will support whatever our fearless leaders - who do literally all of the admin work:-P - decide in this regard (but I will indeed hold out hope for this outcome!:-).