Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)
The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.
Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.
However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their “drama communities” as well.
Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them
After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear (a) , followed by more resignations (a)
In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.
There’s also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts “as a bit” using wording that they were not aware is misgendering (“fella”) which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the “bit doing” during this heated period.
This “struggle session” is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back , and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.
WTF. @CARCOSA@hexbear.net is now suspecting me being behind some sockpuppets because they claim I leaked private messages
By which they mean the screenshot I crossposted in the OP above from their own comm’s public comments!. That screenshot was in turn from a discussion in a public matrix chat for lemmy admins.
I am willing to give people the benefit of a doubt, this is some really fucking manipulative behavior and it’s pissing me off!
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.
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
I hope the instances burns. I’ll never forget Hexbear users threatening my life. Fuck. Them.
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.
We need to annoy sunaurus until he defeds from them.
Please do not do that. I pay monthly to be on lemm.ee precisely because lemm.ee doesn’t generally defederate from other instances. You may not like hexbear, but I appreciate seeing certain posts from there and learning about viewpoints that may challenge my own.
That’s your issue, not mine.
Why not just block the instance for yourself? Then everyone wins.
I still have to see their horrificly uneducated fascism supporting comments.
We need to annoy sunaurus until he defeds from them.
People like you should be banned.
Feel free to ban me from your instance, buddy.
I’ve been following the drama too. Total misstep from the hexbear admins/mods. I didn’t catch that TC69 deleted their account though, kind of a shame because they seemed to really stand up for trans people. I like hexbear, I agree with a lot of their points and like their community. I do not always agree with them, but I respect them in their fight and struggle. It’s one of the only places I felt safe talking about my feelings about the recent US election because many people felt similar. I don’t post or comment much on hexbear, I really should though. Hexbear did a survey that revealed a significant amount of their users were trans. I did not understand why the mods said white cis het men were the problem and was the majority of their userbase. I am a mixed bi cis latina, I know I do not have a hexbear account but I just wanted to point out that their assessment is wrong. I just hope they can recover from this.
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.
Yup. I blocked the instance after being on the receiving end of such a frivolous ban, together with bad faith modding, and having people jump down my throat a few too many times over miscommunication interpreted the worst possible ways to justify “dunking” so that they can look cool to people on the Internet.
What the admin did wrong was to let those comms exist in the first place. Not only can such behavior have deeper effects on those of us who are ND but, by allowing the comms, they helped to cultivate a toxic culture on the instance that is at the root of much of the inter-instance drama. They’ve been celebrating and rewarding dehumanizing and deriding others, which motivates others to create situations, whether through behaving poorly or tailoring context so that they too can be celebrated and part of the in-group.
ND is neurodivergent in this context I assume, what is RSD?
Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria
Goodness. I’m reading the description and this really hits close to a lot of things in my life. Even down to having ADHD and commonly being mistaken as bipolar disorder. (I casually took one of those online tests about it this morning because I’ve been wondering about my mood swings.) A lot of my “spirals” lately have been tied to perceived rejections.
Speaking personally, them stating they outright lied to other instance admins is just one step too much. Wielding our collaborative spirit for manipulative purposes just sows distrust, and is downright asocial behaviour. It’s so out of line, that 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. But if not, that’s even worse.
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.
This is the action which made you realize that they are operating in bad faith? Not… gestures wildly
You made me spit my coffee :p
As much as I love my personal instance overlord for most of their beliefs and being a generally good person, they are incredibly naive, I assume purposefully so to avoid ever accidentally upsetting someone
Its an admirable trait to a degree even if it is incredibly frustrating
It’s not naivety. I try to be charitable as a matter of course because I’ve been personally burnt too many times by people being uncharitable towards me and my ND expressions. It’s a learned behaviour I have, to make sure I don’t attack someone for a mere misunderstanding. Of course even I have my limits.
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.
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.
You can see both on my screenshot and my link. They themselves claimed they were lying as a ruse. It’s not me editorializing.
No no, I’m not claiming you’re editorialising. I’m just having comprehension issues and failing to understand, thus I’m trying to get an ELI5. So basically, as I understand it, hexbear admin urges others to shut down their drama comms, then proceed to announce they’ll be doing the same on their own instance. I’m not seeing the duplicity or clash of motives? Maybe I’m just bad at understanding this drama stuff.
I guess they were not technically lying about their actions although one could argue they were not really planning to truly shut them down but primarily to rename them. That said, they did lie about their motives and objectives for doing so to the others with the aim of manipulating them to do the same (i.e. shut down their own “drama comms”).
The point being that any such manipulation erodes the inter-instance camaraderie of admins.
They absolutely lied. They said they shut down some communities for one reason, when the reason was something different and they planned to keep going with their own clusterfuck communities and activities. They were just hoping other people would stop doing it to them. Pax and chronicon both used the word “lying” in their messages.
I don’t see why they bothered. Most instances will get rid of their evil communities without needing to be prompted by a Hexbear recommendation, kind of a “fool me 50 times, shame on me” type of thing, and the kind of people who like evil communities on their instance will keep them going regardless.
Ah I see. Thanks!
I was also confused. Thanks for the clarification.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand what the appeal of all of this is.
I think it’s the same hunger for excitement that makes sports appeal to people, or leads people to create drama at work.
That was a ruse in an attempt to get the other admins to close their drama communities like the ones that harassed vegantheoryclub admins but I did not expect the hexbear sleuths to find that so not only did the ruse fail but I blew up any chance of doing another in the future with other lemmy admins while further alienating hexbear users.
It blows my mind that they thought this would work.
Hexbear users are alienated because they enjoy being annoying. That’s it. That’s the secret. They can always stop doing that, that’s always allowed. Being dishonest isn’t great, but there are a lot of people in authority on Lemmy that are dishonest, and it’s mostly not a problem.
I also like the implication that it was the unmasking of the ruse that made it not work, instead of the fact that this is the stupidest ruse I’ve ever heard of.
Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the “bit doing” during this heated period.
Not in general, of course. It’s only a problem right now during this heated period. I wonder what some other “bits” are.
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.
Interestingly, some Hexbear users accused the francophone instance jlai.lu to be authoritarian when it opened a discussion, and a poll for the community to vote about defederating from Hexbear (a final decision has yet to be made).
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).
Then this happens, again with complete disregard for the community members.
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.
As in .ee defed them? I like .ee purly because we dont defed most instances even if they are toxic.
Same. I’m an adult. I can choose what I want to see on my phone while I poop.
Their votes will still influence your feed though. In that way, you don’t get to choose entirely freely what you want to see, they will influence what you see as well.
You are lying. Hexbear disabled downvotes. They can’t downvote anything.
Please don’t accuse me of lying. Upvotes obviously influence the feed. I am aware that hexbear has disabled downvotes.
If you were on reddit at the time when /r/the_donald was a menace, you should know how harmful even upvotes can be.
Luckily upvoting doesn’t change the ranking of posts
You dropped this: /s
username checks out
Sometimes i look at what they say while i poop so i can compare them on an equal playing field
Smart.
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.
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.
Slrpnk, the instance full of hippies and anarchists, is authoritarian? Lol how do they come up with this shit
It’s so funny coming from Hexbear users who simp for Putin and Xi
Because they blocked hexbear without a vote apparently.
It’s interesting that they would accuse anyone if being authoritarian when their own ideology is distinctly authoritarian.
Every accusation is a confession.
Hexbear users are stupid enough to think that way.
Any time.i hear “reactionary” I just interpret it as the speaker plugging their ears and saying “lalalalalalala”
“Everything I don’t like is reactionary”
Broccoli = literally Hitler
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 “😦”
What did everyone have for breakfast this morning? My wife made biscuits and I ate one with butter and fresh strawberry jam. It was delicious.
Black coffee. Nothing better than a smooth, fresh Americano in the morning.
No food? Just coffee?
Just coffee for me thanks.
Waffles with maple syrup.
Nice! I love waffles and I’m an artisan maple syrup maker. My favorites are big, fluffy Belgian waffles with berries, whipped cream, and maple syrup or chocolate chip pecan waffles with maple syrup.
I love waffles and I’m an artisan maple syrup maker.
That’s pretty awesome. “Tree to bottle”? That is, are you doing the whole process from managing trees, through to tapping, and concentrating? My grandfather was in the rubber industry, so, I find this stuff incredibly interesting.
Yum. Berries on Belgian waffles are also my favorite. Definitely miss all of the varieties from growing up in the PNW.
That’s pretty awesome. “Tree to bottle”? That is, are you doing the whole process from managing trees, through to tapping, and concentrating? My grandfather was in the rubber industry, so, I find this stuff incredibly interesting.
Yes. Not only that but I build the machines and automation to bring the sap in from the trees, store it, run in through the RO, and store it again for boiling. I also welded the evaporator that I use to do the boiling.
I had some coffee, bupropion, and atomoxetine for breakfast. Mmmmmm!
I don’t know the name of it in English, but I know it had egg in it!
I’m about to make toasted blueberry Pop tarts.
The breakfast of champions.
Damn, I had 2 beers and a 3 minute argument about tupperware.
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
Nice.
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.
Sounds awesome.
Your wife sounds amazing! Is she single? Tell her lemmy says sup
She makes great biscuits. And waffles.
I could crush a biscuit with butter and jam. A nice, unsalted butter. Maybe even sweet butter if you can swing it.
Honestly, this online “revolutionary” shit is really starting to give SLA vibes. When I joined lemmy, I really gave them a chance, even though I’m strictly against authoritarianism of any stripe. I eventually blocked the instance, not because of negative interactions, but because my feed would be filled with their shit talking communities and all the comments were just gigantic emojis. It was just out of control shit posting.
“SLA”? Service Level Agreement?
Symbionese Liberation Army
Ha, that’s like the US version of RAF. Also that name sounds like straight out of Disco Elysium :D
It’s a made-up nonsense word, lol. They really were some clowns, too. They were predominantly white, with the exception of one black and one Latino member, but they would try to pretend like they were black by “speaking like black people” because they had taken an AAVE class in college. Deranged behavior.
Measurehead : THE SYMBIONESE ARE NOT LIKE THE FRAIL, BILE-RIDDEN VERPERTINES OF THE LOWLAND BASINS OR THE SORROWFUL, SALT-RUBBED NOMADS OF INSULINDE. THEIRS IS A LINEAGE OF BIOLOGICAL ASCENDANCY, BORN FROM THE SACRED, ORGANIC INFUSION OF THE BIOSPIRIT ITSELF. WHERE THE BLOODLESS LOWLANDERS PINE FOR HEROIC GLORY AND STUMBLE IN THEIR CRUDE, SEGMENTED BODIES, THE SYMBIONESE ARE ALREADY UNITED – A RACE WHOSE FLESH IS AS THE EARTH ITSELF, WHOSE SPIRIT KNOWS THE SECRETS OF UNITY AND WHOSE BONES ARE INFUSED WITH THE VERY BREATH OF THE BIOARCANA.
Ah that’s the good shit!
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.
That almost sounds like it’s intentionally disruptive to other instances of it is normal size to them, but large to everyone else.
Nah for most of their history they didn’t federated with anyone, and made some custom changes to the software. So when they did federated there were a few issues like that
And somewhere in there they mentioned running off their own devs, so lost some ability to make such changes.
And now they are running off their mods and some admins too, so entirely on-brand, as in not necessarily intentional but they cannot help themselves.
Ah, I see. God to hear that wasn’t intentional.
I wanted to block their instance before it was possible in Lemmy, but thankfully my instance admin did. Nothing I’ve ever seen from them made me want to interact with them.
The users act like children so makes sense a nsfw instance would defed it.
Honestly I think this speaks to the value of having user-level blocking of instances rather than defederation. Maybe one day that will be incorporated into Lemmy (or similar).
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 !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca.
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.
I had no idea that was built into piefed, that’s great!
App-based is… Not great IMO, it needs to be part of the base or its just not viable.
Yeah PieFed lacks a lot of basic polish (e.g. neither user tagging like @openstars@piefed.social nor a post/comment preview ability have been implemented yet) while on the other hand there are so many cool features that already exist, above and beyond what Lemmy offers (like custom blocking of all users on an instance, and categories of communities helping guide new users into subscriptions). Plus with it being written in Python rather than Rust it should catch up fairly quickly in what it does lack, even though again in other ways it’s already ahead.
Also I’ve noticed that I am almost never downvoted (maybe once or twice on >400 comments so far) since I switched. It’s highly relevant that unlike my previous instance discuss.online and before that startrek.website, piefed.social has defederated entirely from hexbear.net. People have even commented like “I’m sorry you are getting piled on”, but I have to go to another instance to even see it. It’s fucking beautiful 😍 - PieFed actually offers the ability to block spam while accessing Lemmy content!!! ❤️
You got me invested, now I kind of want to have a PieFed account…
Check it out:-). Keep your old account though, bc there are some federation issues - e.g. I submitted a post yesterday and it never went out, though I use my older accounts more to receive pings, and check out posts that haven’t made their way onto PieFed.social yet. Note that that happens to smaller Lemmy instances as well, including Aussie.zone and programming.dev, so I don’t know how much of those types of issues relate to the PieFed software vs. something else along those lines.
It does take a bit of getting used to. But see e.g. the categories of communities on the top of each post, and the hashtags are the bottom (here’s an example) - so many things that people have been asking for on Lemmy, that PieFed already has (but also many things that should work but don’t so… yeah it’s an odd mixture of both at once:-).
I really hope that PieFed will get its little polish, but as of now it sounds amazing!
I tend to think so, yeah:-). Mention my name and you’ll get a discount (obviously joking bc it’s entirely free and always will be, as it is open source code!:-).
Well to be fair, hexbears cannot downvote you anyway since they have them disabled instance-wide
That… is an excellent point actually.
Wow, in that case I truly don’t know what’s going on. Sometimes I see downvotes for the same content on discuss.online, but there are no downvotes visible on PieFed.social. Perhaps there was a federation issue, or some other instance federated from one but not the other.
Thanks for the reminder - I don’t want to spread misinformation:-).
Edit: but separately from vote counts, the point about PieFed allowing users to block spam is still valid!:-)
If piefed doesn’t have an apub ingest queue, it’s very likely it’s just missed federation activities.
New posts and comments continually show up so I thought it does (assuming the only other alternatives would be the API, which they said they don’t want to use, or web scraping, which similarly they wanted to avoid), but it does seem not entirely stable e.g. sometimes communities will get duplicated so there must be a backend bug in that process. So for a mere one or two downvotes to disappear especially at a time of higher-than-usual traffic leading up to and following the USA elections, it very well could be that.
It would not be the first instance to have such occurrences - e.g. aussie.zone and programming.dev to name a couple - so I haven’t worried overmuch. But it’s definitely not a selling point for PieFed either, nor perhaps a detractor since Lemmy suffers identically. Or at least did prior to 0.19.6 that hopefully will solve a great deal of that, especially when deployed specifically onto lemmy.world.:-)
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.
Malicious instances could still be defederated though.
The problem is that users also need the option at user level.
The biggest security risk with the fediverse is arguably the ability to serve individual users malicious content from your instance or another host you control. Defederation is the best defense against that.
And in no way does adding user options to block all users from an instance change that.
Why are you arguing against users having additional controls?
Because the existence of those tools are being used as am excuse for not doing the thing which actually helps. In addition to the whole first half of my comment where needing the right block list to make the fediverse tolerable is not a sustainable practice.
I think you’re confused.
There are reasons to defederate. Malicious instances are one example.
There are many reasons not to deferederate, like users on a particular instance being assholes to a specific user or group of users.
A user cannot, today, block users from an instance. They can block individual users, they can block communities, but individual blocks can be easily worked around.
A better option is for that user to have the option to block an instance (and its users) that others are fine with interacting with.
You are trying to rework that into something its not.
Edit: Ahh, the no reply just downvote. Says everything. Goodbye.
I love that for them!
I’m so glad I don’t have to see their BS. Very happy being defederated.
I like popcorn.
The hexbear folks can have their clownshow, just keep it in the clowncar. Sounds like the drivers are tripping balls and the clowncar needs some maintenance.
The election is over so it’s obviously time for an instance wide reorg.
