LinkedinLenin [any, comrade/them]

We should definitely be defederated if our crimes are not only being annoying, but also violating linear time.

lmao for real, people fleeing sanction-induced poverty is one thing

but where the fuck they getting punishable by death from? Call of Duty?

Just in case you’re reading this as an attack on you:

as if every user holds the same opinions and inherently knows the nuances of this debate.

I meant that the other user was acting as if you were one of the people accusing us of brigading simply for posting on a non-local instance, when it’s pretty clear you weren’t.

Fwiw that user specifically has been shitflinging a lot and they’re a relatively new account. I suspect they’re either someone from Hexbear that doesn’t want federation to work out, or a third party just trying to upset people.

It wasn’t relevant to you in particular at all, just a weird transference of aggression, as if every user holds the same opinions and inherently knows the nuances of this debate.

Our anarchist users are also vocally against western imperialism. Leninists will voice their opinions through their Leninist lens, or perhaps their experience of the world will lead them to preferring a Leninist analysis. But the same is true for our anarchists, trotskyists, syndicalists, whatever.

It’s more that people who are used to a small or different Overton window will group all anti-western-imperialism stances as “Leninist” (or more accurately, they’ll group and dismiss them all as “tankie”) because they don’t yet understand the nuances.

I don’t really want to relitigate your experiences and these issues in this thread (especially because I’m a visitor on lemm.ee), so I’ll try to be succinct. But I’m happy to continue elsewhere if you want.

What we mean by “broad tent” or nonsectarian is that diverse opinions aren’t explicitly banned or removed (as long as they aren’t pro western imperialism or anti LGBTQ+). That means shitflinging and low effort sectarianism (ideally) isn’t allowed. It doesn’t mean people aren’t allowed to voice disagreement about ideologies and geopolitics. And since we don’t have downvotes, we aren’t afraid to voice disagreement, unlike Reddit where you just anonymously downvote and move on. This difference is certainly a culture shock at first, but I’ve come to prefer it. Even if everyone else disagrees with you, you still have a voice, rather than getting buried in downvotes and hidden.

As much as our users call people liberals derogatorily, in equal amounts we get called bots and shills and tankies (which is especially funny when directed at our anarchist users). I’d personally rather name calling be avoided in favor of good faith discussion, but it’s difficult to assume good faith on the internet.

Hexbear has been around for three years, all the while dealing with a constant stream of bad faith wreckers and doxxers from 4chan and the like. Ultimately our goal is to foster a broad-tent leftist culture, with primary focus on LGBTQ+ and anti-US-imperialism. Within those two focuses we have a wide range of leftist tendencies, from anarchist (syndicalist, ancom, etc) to Marxist (trotskyist, leftcom, ML, etc). We, I personally, see good-faith disagreement as tremendously valuable and necessary for growth of ideas. We do our best to discourage sectarianism (within the bounds of anti-imperialist, pro-LGBTQ+ leftism) while encouraging discussion.

I really dislike the idea of defederating for difference in political opinions. That kind of thing merely recreats the kind of echo chambers found on corporate social media. I believe Lemmy has potential to be better than that. Differences in philosophy and politics and culture should be moderated at the community and personal level rather than broadly sweeping instance blocks. This leaves the agency up to communities to set rules and define their cultures, banning people as needed at this level rather than simply cutting off entire communities. It also gives users the agency to choose whether to block instances, communities, or users they’d rather not interact with (instance blocking on a user level is coming soon I believe).

The other reasons people give for defederating us (although I believe politics is primary) are spamming and brigading. The former is due to: the oversized emoji bug in Lemmy (we’re sorry for this, on our side the emojis are normal sized so we don’t even realize they’re spamming) as well as the novelty of federation and lack of clear delineation between local and federated posts. The emoji bug will be fixed, and in the mean time we’re on notice to try and avoid using them while on other instances. The novelty will quickly wear off. As for delineation between local and federated, this is a mistake that’s gone both ways: lemm.ee users stumbling upon a hexbear post and not understanding why they’re being responded to differently, as well as hexbear users stumbling upon a lemm.ee post and commenting/meming as if they’re on their home turf. In either case, the rules of the given instance and community should be followed and enforced through bans rather than defederation, and ideally there’d be some CSS to make it obvious when someone’s on another instance to make it easier to follow said rules. Defederating because of this happening would be like a person on Reddit posting their /r/NSFW stuff on /r/awww by mistake, and /r/awww unilaterally blocking all /r/NSFW users, as if there’s no overlapping userbase.

As for brigading, by and large I think people are overreacting because they’re used to the walled garden Reddit has become in its profit-seeking attempts to ban wrongthink. Keep in mind that Hexbear users have no ability to downvote (literally removed from the site for other reasons a while ago), so at most a “brigade” (or most often simply seeing a post on our front page) will be a bunch of (soon-to-be normal-sized) emojis and opinions you may disagree with. If a user is breaking a comm or instance rule they can be banned. If they’re engaging in bad faith or spamming they can be blocked. Hell, even if they’re engaging in good faith they can be blocked if a person simply doesn’t want to see takes they disagree with. But ultimately it seems like a non-issue to me. Allow those of us that want to engage with diverse opinions to do so, and allow the rest to block as they see fit.