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TomboyShulk [she/her] @hexbear.net

On sh.itsfulla.chuds, and the plan going forward

Greetings gamers and those who wisely abstain,

It has become clear to us that even in the short while we’ve federated, the situation with sh.itholefor.nazis is entirely untenable and we will be defederating immediately. Multiple instances of ableist and homophobic slurs directed at our users, overwhelming litigiousness against even the most innocuous comments by our users, and just a general ethos of reactionary behavior. We’re done and out.

One of the concerns with embracing TC69 thought on site bans with federation is that the user would basically be just hexbear-side hidden and blocked from our comms, free to post reactionary content without the fear of Lenin behind them. That was a silly concern. We will resume our pre-federation policies regarding site bans.

:07:

301 comments

  • I didn't realize how bad that instance was when I voted to federate...

    Thank you to our wonderful mods and admins who worked so hard to remove reactionary nonsense from the users of that instance!

  • Good riddance to bad rubbish.

    Not just are shitjustworks users some of the most willfully ignorant people I've yet encountered, the instance mods (from what I've seen) are just massive shitheads in general.

    Fuck them, fuck their site.

    As always, uphold TC69 thought and death to America.

  • Disappointing. We picked up real support among some there.

    All we are doing is isolating ourselves from ideological participation, and thus leaving the npc libs that are otherwise amenable to hearing our side at the mercy of fascists without opposition.

    My position is that time should be allowed to play out to ban the fascists and clear house, this is a process that takes time when federating because initially there are a lot of them and they don't all make themselves known at the same time. As time goes on however and more and more get added to the banlist the issue would die down, leaving out the fascists while leaving the npc libs still capable of hearing what the left has to say.

    • My position is that you cannot federate with an instance full of fascists if you're operating a safe space for trans people. The shit that we had to endure during last few days made me seriously consider to leave the site, and i'm still unsure if this is the right place for me when people think we should grow our userbase with recovering nazis. If this repeats itself, i'm definitely gone.

      • And mine is the same as it has always been, I participated here with the expectation we were aiming to build a pipeline to create socialists, just as we had done in many spaces on reddit. While simultaneously at the same time taking advantage of the slow downfall of reddit and setting up a future of non-corporate spaces off-reddit.

        I've said many times before, I'm not here to create a socialist play house. I want to create socialists. And if this place is just creating an insular distraction for socialists to hide themselves away from capitalism on the internet then it is not something I will support. I get why some people want that, but I don't see it as good for socialism. I have the same negative attitude towards most communes, where people just end up building them for escapism from capitalism, not for influencing society and building real socialism. I don't want a digital commune for escapism. I'm not really sure where I'm at with it right now, but I do feel quite negative and like I'm edging close to leaving, I keep asking what the point of being here is, how it's productive for socialism, and I can't answer that anymore. I'd end up going to any spaces that are simply connected to as much as possible where I can do influence, but if many of us do that also we just become considerably weakened without the large collective of people that is considerably weakened in strength.

      • I have faith in the mods here. They will always have your back. We have a great little community here

    • The main problem is that shitjustworks was too reactionary. It's probably the most reactionary instance we had federated thus far. Like, their entire name is "lolol we call ourselves SJW lololol." It's one thing to have an anti-communist userbase with "apolitical" management that we can push back and draw people on our side and to our site (this is basically lemmee), but once you have anti-communist mods running around hiding their power level while subtly trying to get people on board with the fascist pipeline where even the lemmee Ledditor noticed something fishy, it's time to write off the instance as a loss and pull the plug. Just look at how Goat acts and how they're pretty good at having plausible deniability even when the mask slips sometimes. They aren't just some clueless sinophobic Ledditor, but is 100% a fascist hiding their power level. They're an opp and should be treated as such.

      For me, I'm still of the mind that people should defederate from us rather than we defederate from them, but I'm not going to miss them at all. None of the rank and file added value to Hexbear at all and unlike blahaj, they don't have any real people from marginalized communities to onboard. They're just a bunch of Canadian Ledditors who think an instance called SJW is top kek, so they can all get fucked.

    • I don't disagree with the idea, but having seen some of the vile DM's our users have been receiving, protecting this space for marginalized comrades was the right call.

      • I and others received those DMs from Lemm.ee users too. Real nasty stuff, but it died off. In part I think because @[email protected] was happy to permaban people for sending such PMs. As long as the SJW admins were doing that I would expect it to die down after some time cleaning house. The benefit here is that our presence in federation would also get the people behaving this way permabanned and act as a suppressing effect for that kind of behaviour - positively improving SJW. Assuming they actually take the action on it like Sun did/does.

        If however they weren't taking those actions then the whole post and reason for defederation would be different in my mind, because it wouldn't just be about bad users it would be about bad administration protecting that behaviour and by extension fostering it (the same issue as blahaj).

    • they've been targeting trans women to DM nasty stuff to. dunking and re-educating is all well and good but targeted harassment is a step too far.

    • I think some federation leftover is good, but I also think that we ought to look at how we can deal with the contradiction of safe space for marginalized users who brought their perspectives up on one hand and the want to be a visible public force for anarcho and communist talking points.

      When we find a process for that we ought to see how hexbear wants to move forward (i.e. try again).

      I wouldn't mind a breathing or ocean like ebb and tide mechanism. Withdraw a bit (except from some instances), deal with technical and social means to stop the negatives, find a bit of unity and expand again.

      Though it seems to be good to be permanently federating with some instances, as there is habituation that hexbear is there, most of the problems seem to be in the first few days/weeks when our culture is accepted or a local interaction with it is created.

      • the best idea I've heard is setting up a containment instance -- lib.rehab or whatever -- and have that instance federated widely while hexbear itself keeps federations more conservative. as long as the two hexbear instances stay federated, we're not splitting the userbase, and it gives people a way to get a reprieve when the sludge gets tiring.

      • Yea if we are like federating it'll be good to mayb put up like a warning that we just federated with Y and shit might be annoying for a couple weeks before bans and avoidance settle. So there's no confusion about what type of space we actually want to maintain and how we want to integrate w new users. Plus it could help to explain like what federation and etiquette etc is expected during the federation period cuz I have no idea what's going on typically

    • I didn't see myself or anybody gaining traction with anybody there. Maybe we could've in time but it would've meant going back to square 1 and relitigating all the conversations we've had with libs on other instances. Plus I felt like there was a good chance of it provoking a backlash towards defederating more broadly.

      Generally I agree with you but in this case I didn't get the impression that any of them were gonna listen.

    • All we are doing is isolating ourselves from ideological participation, and thus leaving the npc libs that are otherwise amenable to hearing our side at the mercy of fascists without opposition.

    • The last expansion added lemmygrad, some hobbyists, and a bunch of liberals. The results were mixed but we could live with that I guess. This one exposed us to something resembling old edgy 4chan/IRC style debaters, it's a different sort of user, I haven't seen that style in a long time. We should at least have a deeper look at the instances we want to federate with in the future.

      Gotta wonder though.. when there's trolling against trans people even from small alternative communities that are supposed to have more refined 'protest users' against reddit or other media, what's the state of the anglosphere internet in general? Also it's funny how it maps that the countries lemmyverse people dislike happen to be the countries the collective west is in a cold war with right now.

    • Yeah without federation hexbear probably dies. The past few months prior to federation were dire. So many pointless internal arguments and the amount of users and activity seemed to be dwindling. Getting back onto upstream Lemmy and some form of federation was desperately needed.

  • Yeah, even though I was all in on federating it's not worth our trans comrades being harassed; had no idea how consistently shite that site would be.

  • My main metric for "did we win" is "how many of us are going into their threads vs how many of them are willing to come into ours."

    Owing to the small scale of the conflict, i hereby declare september 4th to be lowercase-v-day.

    • i don't think anyone wins when we're just getting pissed off and arguing with people who refuse to consider what we're saying. i could just do that on reddit

    • when we have 10 nazis in a thread about trans issues on c/news, i really do not give a fuck if there's 100 of our posters dunking on them on their instance, that just means i no longer want to visit this site. If you value dunking on chuds that much, just make an account on some fash instance instead of bringing them here. What's so hard to get about that?

      • it's made me dread checking my notification bell. I've started giving it some time in the hopes that some mod cleans out the triggering stuff before I see it. but that's also super unfair to the mods.

  • I hear the lemmy devs are working on instance blocking on a per user basis. Does that include the ability to mass block users from a specific instances so you can't even see their posts made directly to your own instance?

    Because if that's the case, then it sounds like it'll be the solution to the question of federation. Any user could then decide to mass block all other instances and set the feed to local to go back to pre-federation Hexbear.

    • Nah what's the point with federating with instances that hate us and we hate them? We had a really nice thing going here before federation. If you're a hexbear user that wants access to the wider fediverse just sign up for lemmy.ml and instance block what you don't want to see. I don't get why we're intentionally turning this place into reddit

      • To be clear, I'm not talking about SJW, that place should be nuked from orbit.

        For the rest of our current federation network, I think we can be a massive positive leftist influence in a way that was never possible on reddit. For the first time ever, a viable social media platform exists that is not for profit. Here we only answer to the Hexbear admins who are our side. We don't have to fight tooth and nail with hostile admins just for the continued existence of our community like we did on the old subreddit. What's more, if I recall correctly, the second biggest generalist instance that we are federated with, lemmy.ml, is administrated by the same people as lemmygrad.

        Putting that all together, federation has given us the opportunity to swing these large instances left with our continued presence here. We can bully reactionary users on other instances out of thinking they can say whatever hateful shit they want undisturbed like they could on reddit. We can expose the good faith, non chud users to leftist perspectives they would have never otherwise seen. If all goes well, we have the potential to build a large and united left unity social media platform that won't be suppressed by the need to produce profit.

        But if we defederate entirely, we will be leaving Lemmygrad to deal with libs alone. Any Hexbear users who decide to combat liberalism on other instances will be isolated and without the support of their comrades. We'd be the ones getting dog piled and not the reactionaries. Not only that, Hexbear will slowly die off as a result of user attrition without a pipe line pulling in new users. Since federation, we've been seeing our active user count go up consistently for the first time in years.

        The chuds on lemmy suck to deal with, but they are incredibly disruptive and loud, obscuring all of our new comrades who silently joined us after federation gave them a chance to see what we're about. Day by day I see less chuds wandering into Hexbear because they can't help but get themselves banned. We'll eventually reach a happy equilibrium when they're all gone, leaving only the good faith libs who are the most receptive to what we do here.

        Given all of that and the fact it may soon be possible to defederate from the rest of lemmy on an optional user by user basis, then I don't see any downside in staying federated with the instances we are currently.

  • We pull away, cannons smoking, and disappear back into the fog as the enemy rushes to put out fires, plug leaks and bail water out of the hold.

  • Been pretty checked out cuz federation was annoying but I might do a effort post on mass line which would also be helpful for the mods/admins to describe this stuff too.

301 comments