Hexbear admins decide to shut down two communities. All hell breaks loose.

They did exactly the same thing with Lemmy.nz, threw a shit fit and defederated, after a certain someone made a post suggesting we defederate them.

It was a very "you can't fire me, I quit" thing.

Ye, this thing keep happening. I was recently in a discussion where someone was accusing slrpnk of authoritarianism for blocking hexbear immediately and pointing to the various defed threads on hexbear and arguing therefore that hexbear is the example to follow for democratic decision taking.

Then an Hexbear admin unilaterally decided to defederate from jlai.lu claiming it had "reactionary" users and "no effort was made to address this" (no jlai.lu admin was contacted nor prompted about the existence of such users).

This is funny because it sort of mimics Russian, Chinese or North Korean politics to a degree as well. Everyone's authoritarian, fascists, Nazis - except for them, the beacon of democracy, freedom, and values.

It's interesting that they would accuse anyone if being authoritarian when their own ideology is distinctly authoritarian.

Any time.i hear "reactionary" I just interpret it as the speaker plugging their ears and saying "lalalalalalala"

Je fais un tour sur jlai.lu de temps à autre, donc j'ai été un peu regarder ce qu'il s'est passé. Cette manière de vous tomber sur le râble sans même tenir compte du fait que vos utilisateurs, admin inclus, étaient plutôt d'avis que le thread dont tout est parti avait été ouvert par un gars froissé par ses interactions avec eux, et aller jusqu'à vous traiter de nazis pour le simple fait d'être francophones... C'est juste "😦"

Thus they lied either way? Either preemptively to other admins or after being caught by their own - so whichever may be worse, it's still lying either way.

I honestly don't believe they actually lied. I think they were being earnest and only claimed they were being manipulative when caught by hexbears to save face.

Having read everything that's been linked here, I'm inclined to believe this.

This is the action which made you realize that they are operating in bad faith? Not... gestures wildly

It's of a piece with a lot of the behavior I see on Lemmy. It is, at the root, hostility to collaboration. It's the model where the person speaking is automatically right, and anyone who doesn't reach the same answers as them is an enemy who must be either corrected or defeated. Once you adopt that mindset, then of course lying to people to achieve that defeat is justified. After all, the people with the bad ideas are hurting everyone, on purpose, and they must be stopped. Reasonable conversation and argument doesn't enter into it, at that point.

The thing is, there's no single person who's got all the answers. There aren't any worldviews that apply correctly to all situations. Part of the idea of talking things out is that you can learn from others, detect missing pieces in your own thinking and correct them before they become too deeply ingrained into your worldview. I see way too many mods who think that their job is to remove the wrong ideas if someone "attacks" their community by posting them, or instance admins who think their job is to "wield" their instance against the people with the incorrect ideas. I think adding tribalism to the mix, allegiance to the other vegans or anarchists or whatever, just makes it ten times worse.

Even if the liberals or non-vegans, or whatever, are wrong, then the right answer is to talk with them. I understand that it might be difficult, because they might have the model that they have to defeat your incorrect worldview without listening to anything you're saying except to detect things they should disagree with, but for as long as that's your model on your side, you're doing something wrong, regardless.

I'm missing something. What was the difference between what they said in matrix chat to other admins, and what they said to their users? Because from your description it kinda sounded the same.

I wonder what some other “bits” are.

Like a lot of other insular online communities, the humor has gone through multiple levels of "deep frying" that it becomes almost alien to an ousider looking in.

One admin there pretty much admitted that their only purpose for interacting with the fediverse is trolling. There is legitimately nothing of value lost by ignoring them.

"SLA"? Service Level Agreement?

Tbf the emojis being giant was due to them running a modified version of Lemmy that allowed those but to themselves they appeared smaller (iirc?).

Though I definitely blocked the instance for those other two reasons - the toxicity of interactions and low quality of posts and comments.

The users act like children so makes sense a nsfw instance would defed it.

The plot thickens lmao

They seem to have a really messed up line of reasoning, just the claim that it was all a ploy to manipulate other instance admins was insane

This is the most interesting development. it really exposes their finest member's mind's inner workings:

Well, time to leak private messages now right!

I'm so glad I'm not federated with hexbear & ml.

You can do it now in PieFed, or some apps like Sync or Connect. Otherwise you can only block communities but not all users from an instance, short of becoming an admin yourself or moving to one that has done what you wanted to see done. More details in [email protected].

I doubt we'll ever see it in Lemmy proper, especially as the protections that were offered in the past took so long to arrive and then were subsequently rolled back to become weaker - it's just not a priority for the admins who constantly ban others at the drop of a hat, but don't seem to want to build tools that allow the reverse.

The problem is that this really harms broader outreach efforts. If the fediverse is only tolerable with the right block list, then most people who try to give it a shot will just be turned off immediately. And that's not even getting into the potential security issues associated with malicious instances.

Damn, I had 2 beers and a 3 minute argument about tupperware.

The wife and I slept in today so we went to our local taco shop called Maskadores. It's basically Subway for Mexican food. Pick your dish, pick your meat, then your toppings. She had carne asada tacos with lettuce, pico, queso blanco, and cilantro. I had a chile relleno burrito. Literally a chile relleno wrapped in a tortilla with rice, refried beans, guac, cilantro, and pico. It was delicious.

I had some coffee, bupropion, and atomoxetine for breakfast. Mmmmmm!

I'm about to make toasted blueberry Pop tarts.

I ate a Catalan biscuit called Rosquilla, it's very sweet with a touch of Anise so one is more than enough with some tea

I don't know the name of it in English, but I know it had egg in it!

I could crush a biscuit with butter and jam. A nice, unsalted butter. Maybe even sweet butter if you can swing it.

Waffles with maple syrup.

Your wife sounds amazing! Is she single? Tell her lemmy says sup

Black coffee. Nothing better than a smooth, fresh Americano in the morning.

Maybe you should cool it with the kangaroo beastiality.

But yeah I remember them doing that shit and people like that have no place in the fediverse. We need to annoy sunaurus until he defeds from them.

Of course the members of an extremist echochamber tend to usually be friendly towards each other. Makes it even more amusing when we see all hell breaking lose and the masks coming off.

I have others blocked, only a couple because of bad user or mod behavior. Most haven't done anything wrong, they're just in languages I don't speak and it was filling my feed with posts I couldn't read, lol.

They seem to have burnt a lot of their regulars with this one. I read two heart wrenching posts from ND people in their comms who were respectively devastated for being banned frivolously, or being stressed about potentially being banned frivolously. And I totally understand it as RSD is a common symptom and most of us are traumatized for being constantly excluded. It's part of the reason why I try to be careful with the banhammer because I know how much it affects ND people.

I got curious and read a couple of the threads. I think they are mentally ill. In my brief interactions with them, they called me a liberal and sent me threats of violence, and didn't want to hear about reasons why Biden was good. Fair enough. This whole mess sounds for all the world like an LLM hallucinating a deranged exaggerated caricature of a far-left community.

I can't even make sense of it. An admin went on an alt account, and banned their own main account, and then everyone got really mad about that, because they were being transphobic when they sent a message to their other account, and now they're saying the whole thing was a "bit," and the site has too many male users, and there are a whole bunch of people who got banned somehow that they're now unbanning, and also they're tightening up their policy about bigotry and apologizing because they blamed the whole thing in the end on the males, and that explanation would imply there's a difference between men and women, which they can't do. It was a struggle session. I am not making any of that up.

As far as I can tell, there is no problem at all and never was, and they managed to create a massive problem. It's like someone was walking down the street, and somehow fell down, and all of a sudden their leg fell off. I did learn some new words, though.

Bioessentialist.

these people have nothing better to do

I'm confident a significant portion of their accounts are run by paid propagandists. They're just following orders.

Portmanteau of "Threaded" and "Fediverse" (which is itself a portmanteau of "Federated Universe"). Effectively "Threaded discussions Fediverse".

Lemmy.world is by far the most redditesque userbase. I've had a much improved Lemmy experience since unsubscribing to most of it. Hexbear is its own thing, unknown in my experience and unique to itself.

Sounds like an experiment from a Fallout vault. Interesting, but it would likely devolve into a single person using a macro to auto ban every other admin besides themselves or their pals.