I just spent my lunch break checking out the instance and scrolling through the top weeks posts and checking out the comments.

Hard no.

1. Basically all their posts are political, except very pro-china, pro-marxist, anti-ukraine. Theres not a single post i consider a value add if it appeared in my scroll. Even if I gave the users and their viewpoints the benefit of the doubt, this would be like adding /r/china, /r/russia, /r/communism to my subs. I can’t think of a single reason i want this.

2. I’m not giving the users the benefit of the doubt. Their comments are indistinguishable from what a ccp or Russian employee would post.

All we would be doing is opening a potential vector for propagandists to attack. They post nothing of interest.

Nah. No thanks.

One of the lines in the sand for me is when people are unironically pro North Korea. I don’t want that on my feed.

And to a lesser extent I don’t want to see weird tankie bootlicking of China either. And I’m not talking about legit good things China has done when compared to other superpowers, I’m talking weird posts that read like full propaganda state sponsored bs, and if you disagree with them in any way they will dig through your intire account history to try and find something they can use instead of actually having a discussion about the topic you originally disagreed with.

Authoritarians don’t want open discussion they will just link you half a shitty book explaining how there’s actually no such thing as authoritarianism.

Edit: I’d like to add that searching lemmygrad for Ukraine will show some really awful takes. I want freedom for Ukraine same as Palestine, Tebet, Hong kong, el Salvador, ect just because the main empire in the west is on the fascism side of authoritarianism doesn’t mean I will cozy up to other authoritarians.

No thank you. I have zero interest in dealing with genocide apologists, regardless of their purported idealogical leanings.

Big no.

Echoing from what some others have said, I went back 3 days worth of content from them and found ZERO worthwhile posts.

At least hexbear is somewhat funny in their shit posts, and it’s easy enough to block or filter users who constantly post in their begging for money community.

Meanwhileongrad exists for a reason. I’m content enough to see the smoke from the self immolation that happens from afar.

while hexbear, .ml, and similar communities do engage in genuine praxis in the form of mutual aid and other such assistance forums, their rhetoric and dogma is enough to absolutely destroy any amicable sentiment that might build up imo.

everyone in the comments talking about leftist unity and historical awareness is an idiot and a hypocrite. historically whenever anarchism collaborate with the red fash, we get crushed on all sides. there isn’t an instance that has gone differently. we can be that instance.

the lack of genuine rhetoric, absolute widespread acceptance of bad faith argumentative tactics, and general behavior of .ml and hexbear’s communities are both so egregious as to warrant not federating with either community, honestly. i agree with the sentiment found elsewhere in these comments that i have nothing to be gained watching western incels post about how much they love north korea and daddy putin in my feed.

i can’t and won’t be friendly with people who espouse those views and honestly, if db0 were to start federating more of these communities it would denigrate the space enough to make me want to leave. part of what i like about here is that there is no weird snakey people trying to convince people of crazy fucking conspiracy theories. just anarchist nerds doing tech shit. if we invite these people in, we’ll lose ourselves. i don’t think i’d want to use a forum that will leave me associated, no matter how loosely, with literal fascists. it’s a big part of what drives me away from mainstream social media to here and if need be it will drive me away from here, too.

I tried to make Hexbear work for a while. I ended up blocking them because they kept wasting my time, having to check any source, and statement I ever saw from them, with basically all then falling apart.
I thought maybe blocking some offending hexbear communities would be enough, but then kept seeing the same pattern on anything hexbear associated. In the end I burned out on it.

I suspect that most others will equally come to the conclusion of instance blocking, which I think makes the pivotal problem here. Can we allow federation with an instance that the vast majority of our userbase has blocked?

On an individual level I agree, that you can “just block lemmygrad/hexbear/ml/world/startrek” if you don’t like them for any reason. But that basically leaves interaction with that instance to all the others. It’s fine if a few do it, but if most do it, it resigns the platform to uncontested bullshitting from lemmygrads side.

At first that might then load the mods. They can’t really block lemmygrad if they have to moderate their communities from them. But then what about the lies, misleading statements, that got me burned out. The stuff not obviously problematic, and not a rule violation either. If noone bothers checking and contesting that, or those few that do argue then get overwhelmed by lemmygrad votes and downvoted into oblivion on those enclave threads, then the uncensored state of your instance posts will be hell and we will simply be closing our eyes to it with the blocking.

At that point, other instances will come to know us as the ones with lemmygrad brigading in our posts, and the easy solution there is not to figure out how to get rid of the lemmygrad stuff bleeding thru their own defederation, but to simply instance block us.

In summary, I don’t think personal instance blocking helps with the nazibar problem. We can only federate if enough people will not block lemmygrad.

A hell no, how can I make sure my vote is tallied? I usually don’t vote but in this case I’m heavily against. I’m not against opposing sides, but only if the opposing side of open to other opinions as well, lemmygrad is not really open with extreme views.

No. Does not sound appealing. Refed with them so a huge chunk of us get fed up and have to manually block, knowing they’re still nominally connected to the instance? I really don’t want to be surrounded by that stuff nor by people being influenced by it.

Edit: Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I dislike it. If you hop over there and read many of their posts, they don’t just lean hard left/right, they are in a genuinely alternate reality. Like, you could move some of their posts to an alt-history roleplay and they’d make more sense. I’m down to hear different views, but I want them stemming from this reality. Harder no than before.

Hexbear is insufferable a lot of the time, no thanks.

No.

I usually don’t engage with gov-stuff because this instance is running smoothly and the users (& crew) here steer it very well.

But on this I have to vote. Because historically if a left movement came into power, the dogmatic Marxists have always sought to persecute the other, especially more progressive (eg. antiauthoritarian), leftists - even if they cooperated with them before and/or helped the movement to succeed. There is a fascist wave and it is getting worse - but (left) authoritarians are not allies, they’re enemies (sooner or later).

Better to stay defederated IMO.

They are ban heavy for daft reasons so ruins the experience for new users. It’d be different if they had daft ideas but engaged with debate; but they don’t - and it’s just feeding more people into an echo chamber that has some people just as far gone as MAGA.

Recent years have taught me the dangers of that and how little most people are able to critically think about things. Less of an issue on this instance I imagine, but even anti-authoritarian spaces are being increasingly captured by authoritarian interests.

Id support the top 5 worst offenders from the power tripping mods community to be defederated by default across as many instances as we can convince. Punish censorship.

Do not defederate from any instance unless they are actively malicious (eg flooding with illegal content, targeting users with harassment/doxxing, or exploiting something). Though the second one is tricky as what constitutes “harassment” is tricky.

A user has the option to block instances if they feel content on said instance is offensive or disagreeable to them.

Rather than deny autonomy to users, refederate, and allow users to practice their own autonomy. If they’re terrified of the spooky leftists they are free to block the instance

No. One vehemently disagrees. The instance was built around far-left authoritarianism, while praising “communist” leaders as gods. Those who do not see the mistakes of the past, are doomed to repeat it.

One may have their personal gripes with Hexbear, but at least one doesn’t think their world wraps around being purely Western contrarians.