cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/113726

I couldn’t find any tools to check this, so I built one myself.

This is a little site I built: the Defederation Investigator defed.xyz. With it, you can get a comprehensive view of which instances have blocked yours, as well as which ones you are federated with.

The tool is open source and available on GitHub. Hopefully someone will find it useful, enjoy.

  • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Honestly it sounds about right. Prior to federation our news megathreads occasionally broke 1k comments over a week, and that’s only a small subset of the userbase. Hexbear users have cultivated a culture that encourages being more online, and we were already extremely online. No downvotes, for instance, means that if you disagree with someone you have to comment, and we obviously disagree with the political opinions held by the majority of people so there’s quite a bit there. Also worth noting that if an admin/mod expressly calls for us not to comment on a post, as was the case on the second defederation discussion post on blahaj, we won’t.

    • -V0lD@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      I’m surprised at how reasonable and self reflective you are. Breaking the instances stereotype a tad

      But, you bring up a point that I’ve always wondered about. Why would an instance not have downvotes? If I hosted an instance I’d prefer to not implement upvotes rather than ever getting rid of downvotes, considering they are basically required to filter out the bad faith content without engaging with it.

      • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        considering they are basically required to filter out the bad faith content without engaging with it.

        Well there’s where the hexbear magic happens. If we see bad faith content it’s basically open seasons to very vocally inform the poster how bad faith their post is.

        • -V0lD@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          I could imagine that this often leads to harassment. Are there any measures in place to prevent that?

          • carl_marks_1312 [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            If by harassment you mean getting piled on for the bad faith take, then no there’s nothing except the offenders self-crit to prevent that.

            If by harassment you mean a user that posted a bad take getting followed and dragged in other threads, then yes. Mods take action to prevent that. Everyone has a right to disengage at HB

      • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Early in the history of the site, some bigots were finding trans users and then downvoting all of their posts and comments. The admins confirmed this, and went through and banned the offending accounts, but they just made alts, so the permanent solution was to eliminate the downvotes. Our moderation is so strict that bad faith arguing is banned on sight.

        Also we’re not as scary as all the libs would have you think. We’re just, again, extremely online, generally confrontational, and have political views outside the norm. All this adds together to make us abrasive when we have to explain something that’s taken for granted on our instance for the 50th time.

        Also we have more emojis than anyone can remember, some of which render as giant on every other instance. Spoilered is a picture of a cartoon pig pooping which I'm using as a demonstration because I know it's one of the giant ones, and also one other emoji as a treat

        kobeni-dance pigpoop

      • Puffin [any, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I believe the original reason was that there were people downvoting trans positive content, and this let people be transphobic anonymously. (Conversely, transphobic content can easily be removed by moderators.)

        And let’s be honest, despite what reddit people might say, people don’t only downvote bad faith content, they use the downvote as a “disagree” button.

      • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        queerphobic people were downvoting people just because they were gay/trans/etc, so we took note of those people, banned them, and removed downvotes so it couldnt happen again