Recently I was asked if we’d be willing to reconsider federation with Hexbear, followed by CARCOSA reaching out to me to see if it was something we’d be open to.

They made a post asking if their community was interested in refederating with us, similarly I’d like the opinion of our local users.

Why refederate?

Hexbear has a decent number of sizable active communities:

These all seem fairly well moderated, giving us access to more diverse posts and viewpoints. A lot of our feed right now is dominated by US centric communities, and it’d be nice to get some more variety.

Why not?

They love trolling and I don’t expect them to follow our rules when commenting (primarily “be civil”).

Just looking at their thread about us, there’s a significant number of immature replies slandering us / Canada. I’m not confident their users will engage in actual discussion in our threads, rather than just showing up to throw out insults and memes.

We can try to handle this by banning users / blocking specific communities, but that’s going to increase moderation workload for both admins and mods. Hexbear is self admittedly quick to ban users on their side, but they also don’t mind ban evasion - not ideal for us.

So what’s next?

This is where we solicit your opinions, how does our community feel?

Edit: Well, it looks like the community is overwhelmingly against refederation. Decision made, thanks everyone for your feedback!

  • Shadow@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
    19·
    3 months ago

    I think it’s reasonable to say the community is overwhelmingly againts refederation, so we’ll keep the status quo for now.

    Rough counts of comments and votes from local users:

    • no - 23
    • maybe if/and/or/but - 3
    • yes - 2
    • asymmetric@lemmy.caEnglish
      15·
      3 months ago

      Thanks for asking us and then following through by actually listening.

      This thread is the complete opposite of the “Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot” thread lol.

    • Luci@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      3 months ago

      Thank you for taking this to the community and listening.

  • _spiffy@lemmy.caEnglish
    421·
    3 months ago

    Pass. I don’t really think they match the vibe of the rest of lemmy.ca and many other instances.

  • Canadian_Cabinet @lemmy.caEnglish
    341·
    3 months ago

    I say no. Literally every interaction with HB has been negative. Its like they’re all AIs made to be as annoying as possible

  • IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
    31·
    3 months ago

    Thanks for bringing this to the community instead of immediately making a decision yourselves. It is nice to have the opportunity to be a part of the choice, since it’s open as a possibility.

    That said, no thank you. Lemmy instance blocking still cannot block both posts and users, which means that even though we can avoid their posts as we wish, we will still be inundated by Hexbear replies on every post. Considering that the comments are quite possibly the worst part of Hexbear, this will result in the same shit-show we had last time. The comments on their refederation post just reassure me that we don’t want to be associated with them. I won’t shed a tear to be missing out on the 5 extra meme posts on my all page.

    • Shadow@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      17·
      3 months ago

      Thanks for bringing this to the community instead of immediately making a decision yourselves. It is nice to have the opportunity to be a part of the choice, since it’s open as a possibility.

      The community is what makes this happen. IMHO any major decision that impacts all of you, should involve all of you.

  • lemmyng@lemmy.caEnglish
    271·
    3 months ago

    No. The downsides of refederating far outweigh the benefits: They have a history of acting in bad faith, and the listed active communities have equivalent counterparts on other instances.

  • LimpRimble@lemmy.caEnglish
    201·
    3 months ago

    They love trolling

    Until we get a decent automod, I’m not interested in fighting off even more trolls.

    • IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      3 months ago

      Need an automod that will insta-ban with no recourse anyone posting pig balls.

  • Bo7a@lemmy.caEnglish
    201·
    3 months ago

    One vote for not refederating. Please leave hexbear where they are.

  • blunderworld@lemmy.caEnglish
    141·
    3 months ago

    No thank you. I left reddit to get away from trolls and echo chamber political drivel.