As many other threads have popped up about this over the last few days, I thought I’d raise a thread on kbin about this too.
From what I’ve seen, they seem like mainly inflammatory trolls who steadfastly support either Russia or the CCP while adding little of value to actual discussions elsewhere on the site.
Was a vote to federate with them in the first place even had?
What’s everyone’s thoughts?
Nonscientific strawpoll:
Yes, please defederate. I have seen enough of their activity through kbin to think this is the only sane option. They are not interested in debating, they are a troll instance or close enough to not matter.
I’ve already ranted about this today, so I’ll just cross-post:
When people explicitly participate in bad faith, I frankly don’t get what’s so terrible about showing them the door, or in this case, turning off their megaphone line to other instances. If their behavior is great, terrific, super-acceptable and cool where it comes from - wonderful! It can stay there, and the rest of us can see less childish trolling. Because that is 100% “their thing” at an instance level.
Whatever excuses, “boo hoo Reddit was so mean to us years ago”, whatever crocodile tears that “it’s not everyone”, whatever “eThIcAl ImPlIcAtIoNs” of blocking or defederating - I don’t give a shit about excuses trolls make, sorry not sorry. Being taken seriously is not a Right, let alone when you obviously just want to dick with people. “Yes, sure, let me get into Serious Debating Position right in front of this boxing glove on a giant spring I just watched you set up.”
Every discussion about this is not only provoked by their consistently shitty behavior, it also tends to get derailed, trolled and sealioned across instances proving the point immediately. Droves of people are fed up with the whole thing - or would be, if the threadiverse even had “droves” of people left. It is directly and indirectly harming participation: surprise, most people do not want another 4chan, whatever the paintjob.
Their alleged, tragic, Reddit-discriminated backstory seems a lot less convincing going by their current behavior. Instance gets federated, people immediately start to troll and “dunk” like the brave Internet Warriors that they are, and are not subtle about it. When notified “that’s not really cool here, could you not?” the response is a solid “UP YOURS” because they’re Just That Cool and/or literally “Owning The Libs”. This remind you of anything?
The threadiverse was something I’d idly mention to friends (at least the more political and leftist ones, because even before this shitshow, it was relentlessly politically shrill as fuck) and hoped I’d eventually get to seriously recommend. Now I just can’t recommend it to anyone: a dying, troll-infested, technologically suspicious mess, circling the drain.
I see a lot of discussions regarding hexbear defederation, but surprisingly not much about lemmingrad. From the surface, the last one seems much shittier place.
They’re both pretty terrible.
I’ve seen their brigading on lemmy communities before. They will also serial downvote anything they don’t like.
Personally, I would vote to defederate from both Hexbear and lemmygrad. Kbin is nice because it feels like the majority of people are posting, commenting, and overall discussing in good faith. It’s a nice culture. Neither of those two instances fit with it.
I agree. Even barring any other factors, the intense toxicity of a community ruining another isn’t exactly a fresh concept. Hexbear and lemmygrad, like 4chan, are more garbage than gold, and they’ll drag you down to the dumps with them.
Pretty sure we’re already defederated from grad. We don’t have an instances page yet where we could check, but that’s been merged into kbin’s code and should be available next time the site gets a version update.
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I think Lemmygrad being larger might also be an issue.
I haven’t seen Lemmygrad brigade or engage in the same 4chan trolling shittery. I’ve seen their genocide denial, though. They’re both bad, but Hexbear, as far as I’ve seen, is much more disruptive.
I have read a few posts about the hexbear trolls but have not seen a thread were they are present.
Can anyone point me in the direction of what you are talking about?
You can see their pro-russia propaganda in this thread pretty clearly, as an example:
https://kbin.social/m/worldnews@lemmy.ml/t/422878/Ukraine-expands-conscription-removes-medical-exemptions-for-HIV-hepatitis-mental#comments
While the comments are shit (they came across a lame trolls), I don’t see them as bad enough to defederate.
If this is the worst, I would vote no at the moment.
That’s not really the worst, I’ve seen people calling others racist for making fun of Xi Jinping with a Winnie the Pooh meme and intentionally trying to rile others up by acting like their community is above others, but the common thread here is that every Hexbear post I’ve seen is bad faith trolling and there’s no reason they need to be allowed into normal communities. Defederating gets rid of a bunch of wackos in one fell swoop.
Defederating gets rid of a bunch of wackos in one fell swoop.
Does it though?
For how long?
If hexbear is cut off won’t the trolls just migrate to different instances?
Not likely. They’d been bottled up in hexbear not bothering anybody for a while before they decided to federate. They spend so much time circlejerking it makes sense they wouldn’t even notice going back to that.
Counterpoint: There is no fun being a troll when everyone agrees with you.
The whole point is to say bad things to spark outrage among normies.
That is why the trolls want to be on Twitter and not Truth Social.
If hexbear gets cut off, it becomes boring to the trolls and they will move on.
This wasn’t meant to highlight the worst I’ve seen, just the first one I found afterPons_Aelius asked for an example.
As gk99 said, none of their arguments are in good faith and they don’t contribute worthwhile content of their own to make it seem worth federating with them.
This wasn’t meant to highlight the worst I’ve seen,
Then what was the point of the link?
If you are not willing to provide evidence of what you think is the problem with the instance, there is no way for me or others to judge.
Trust me bro, they are bad., is all I am seeing in this thread.
Because you asked for a link where they were acting in bad faith? Its Russian propanda
And all you came up with was a few troll comments.
Again, I have herd multiple accounts saying how bad they are, yet yours is the only link.
You say they are bad, prove it.
Otherwise it is just a call to your authority saying they are bad.
Again, post some links rather than replying without them.
Edit: @Whisp
downvoting me without providing evidence kind of proves my point.
Nah I don’t owe you shit lol. Go find it on your own
Do you have any examples of that kind of posting in kbin magazines? For now I don’t see a problem.
Once they start spamming kbin I’m all for defederation. Especially because there are few moderation&blocking tools available right now.
They are not federated with kbin.social, so they cannot post here. We’re invisible to them. We have to endure their posts, but they cannot see our responses.
Ok, that’s a good argument for defederation. Onesided federation makes no sense.
I rarely see their posts. I’m assuming they only ever show up in all? Cause I oddly only ever see complaints about them but never the content themselves unless they post in the complaint threads about them. Not to say I’m against defederation. I would defer to those who spend more time in all of that’s really the case of what’s occurring. It’s just hard to see whether it’s a small problem or a big problem when I only ever see one side of it. Personally, I’d rather assume folks are being rational with their complaints. Though I would rather not see the toxic communities and magazines that exist only to make fun of others, no matter how toxic the targets may be.
I read a lot of news and political discussions in various lemmy instances, so it is probably a problem of my own making.
I wouldn’t even mind the trolling and insincere arguments themselves, but having to see propaganda or misinformation while being unable to respond to it makes me feel pretty helpless (I mean, I could respond, but they would never see it). I think I might be happier without them.
I just tried to block them myself, but there seems to be some kind of bug currently that prevents domain blocking (see my other comment above).
It is not, they’re pretty fond of hijacking things. If they’d stick to relevant topics half the problem would be gone.
I actively try to prune any predominantly political shit from my feed and I’ve still seen a bunch of them with a characteristic shitposting (and not the good kind) vibe.
I don’t see why so many people insist on waiting for very specific harm to be done. Kinda seems like “C’mon everybody, leopards wont eat our faces too!”
Any thread that mentions them (that they can see, at least) immediately blows up into a pile of vapid garbage. They ruin every thread they appear in and there’s no reason to believe they’ll be any better here than they’ve been elsewhere if ever they do decide to federate with us. Also, they do seem to be adding instances so it’s not like there’s no chance they’ll target us too. Or, uh, heroically bestow upon us the boon of their inanity or whatever they think they’re doing.
“I know he smears shit on the walls but unless you have proof of him smearing shit on your walls I’m letting him in”
I see a bunch of hexbear users there, but I also see plenty of anti-that-post posters from lemmy instances as well. This is the first time someone has bothered to post any examples, which is helpful.
Just check hexbear.net, their behavior is largely identical inside and outside of hexbear. It’s best to go directly to hexbear rather than checking via federation as they block quite a bit from view.
Do it
As others have mentioned, hexbear hasn’t added us to their list of allowed instances yet. They block everyone by default. I’m definitely in favor of following lemmy.world’s lead on this and preemptively defederating them, though.
Kbin does already block lemmygrad, and hexbear is basically just lemmygrad with a vaporwave theme and an even more annoying culture. I imagine this is just a question of when @ernest gets around to blocking them. That could potentially be a while though, so it’s probably worth pestering him a bit on this particular issue.
One thing to keep in mind is they don’t federate with kbin.social; so they can’t see your posts or replies, and can’t reply to you. I believe your upvotes won’t federate (maybe to other instances, but not to theirs at least). Downvotes work the same as they do for any other post as those don’t federate in kbin to begin with. One-sided federation in the fediverse seems like it can be a bit confusing to users, I’m not sure in what case it’s a good idea in since it can be like talking to a void.
It’s more so not wanting to see those kind of comments in the first place. It’s not really feasible for me to block every hexbear user.
I choose kbin as my instance since it seemed mostly leftward leaning and full of chill people.
They’re needlessly antagonisticEdit: I also chose Kbin for it’s superior mobile web UI <3 Ernest
I certainly wasn’t trying to counter your post in any way or anything (especially as a non-kbin.social user), just provide information for people who might not be aware. kbin.social users basically have to see all of their posts with no way to interact or exchange with the other party, giving them little options. And for people who are unaware of this, they might be replying to their users in hopes of discussion or debate that will never happen
Oh no, not at all! I appreciate the knowledge. I’ve been here for a bit but haven’t worked it all out yet and I’m sure others haven’t either.
Even if you had been disagreeing, it would have at least been a constructive conversation unlike the ones started by HB 😜
Ooooh, that’s why they haven’t attacked me yet! Hahahahaha yaay I can call them tankie meme-trash all I like and even support defederating them and they won’t dump six thousand inane meme-posts on me for it . 🎵
Exactly! I vote to defederate from them on our end, because otherwise they can just decide to federate themselves and brigade and troll their way through our magazines. Some Kbin magazines might not be prepared for that.
Nothing they do is in good faith, so why bother with them?
I’m glad to hear that they don’t federate with us but they do seem to be federating with single/few instances over time so there’s some chance that will change. I’d feel most comfortable defederating them before they do target us and make it impossible to talk about anything but tankie memes here too.
[Weird joke but also yes] I vote YES on Kbin Bill 423371!
Yes. I vote for a preemptive defederation lol.
Jean Paul Sartre would vote to defederate:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge.
But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
Hexbear, as an entity, exists to troll and disrupt discussions, not to participate in them.
Something I don’t understand: I wanted to block them myself by going to https://kbin.social/d/hexbear.net and selecting the block icon on the right. But when I do that, this thead here becomes empty. Is that a bug or a misunderstanding on my part?
Definitely a bug, I found someone who explained how the bug works
Thanks. Then I will simply exercise a little patience and try again in a few weeks.
The issue is here https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/1019. It was fixed with a PR but I don’t believe that PR has made it to kbin.social yet
I can’t find the thread again, but the bug boiled down to Kbin blocking all comments whenever a blocked domain was set, any blocked domain.
So what’s the process to decide if an instance should be defederated or not?
Ultimately, it’s up to the administrators of the instance. In this case, @ernest (not sure how to tag, never tried before - Thank you for all you do, by the way!)
In >my< opinion, it’s best done in collaboration with the community by gathering feedback and having a conversation about it and trying to find an agreeable consensus, which is what I was hoping to accomplish with this thread.
This is one in a long line of similar posts on different instances, sort of impromptu votes, almost. Admins make the call but the fediverse being what it is, it’s supposed to be reasonably democratic. Or, y’know, we could all up and move to a more values-aligned instance.
Setting aside politics for a second, their size could prematurely erase any identity kbin was going to develop.
I also think we need better mod tools before federating with big, active communities. And the ability to have someone take over magazines without active mods, so the little magazines getting by without them don’t just become spam havens for shitheads. Some of that should get added in the next big update.
Sooner the better for every instance.
Yes please! CAn’t block them and it’s getting annoying.
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I have had no interaction with anyone from Hexbear. Personally do not support Russia or the CCP, But I also stand against defederation, regardless of their stances on any topic. It doesn’t make someone a “inflammatory troll” just because they hold different opinions than you. Even if there really are inflammatory trolls coming from that server, it should be enough to block them if you personally dislike them. In general, it’s healthy to expose ourselves to a wide diversity of opinions, and to respectfully discuss topics with people who disagree with us.
As someone who was around for the rapid transition of 4chan from an over the top caricature of racism into an actual racist shithole, no. Just… no. And then another few for good measure. No one laments the absence of assholes. They receive an audience to their caricature, we receive walls of text, bad faith arguments, and general assholery. Not all of them are bad, and I sincerely like a few of the hexbear users, but I’m not going scoop between the putrid piles of defecation to find a piece of corn to eat.
What, 4chan used to be ironic? When was this? I need to get in the way back machine to see that :D
Absolutely. It was the same sorts who ended up in /r/atheism but with an incredibly thick layer of “satire” to keep people away. Wouldn’t you know it, saying race and orientation based slurs all the time didn’t keep everyone away. And bob’s your uncle, racist shithole.
Well of course Kbin’s resident Bible-thumping, Fox-watching, birth-forcing, Jew-targeting, TERF-defending, bad-faith arguing, Tucker Carlson meat-riding champion of free speech who compares trans people to murderers, thinks fascism no longer exists, and deletes comments critical of him would have no issue with Hexbear.
Go figure.
“respectfully” is the keyword here, not diversity of opinion.
