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?

  • Shadow@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
    3·
    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
      6·
      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
      4·
      3 months ago

      Thank you for taking this to the community and listening.

  • _spiffy@lemmy.caEnglish
    81·
    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
    71·
    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

  • LimpRimble@lemmy.caEnglish
    41·
    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
      1·
      3 months ago

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

  • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    I’m somewhat open to it, IF moderation can keep up with the increased workload. We have to make it clear that while we might welcome new opinions, call us all libs or whatever, we need to show no tolerance for users engaging on Lemmy.ca solely to be a nuisance, which we saw quite a bit of last time. If there’s a sizable contingent over there still intending to sow (-🐽-) chaos it’s probably not worth the effort to re-federate.

    Hexbear users can run their communities like a zoo all they want, but they have to leave the zoo there when they visit other servers.

  • Bo7a@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

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

  • lemmyng@lemmy.caEnglish
    21·
    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.

  • masterofn001@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Upvoted for visibility.

    I’ve heard of them.
    None of it good.

    I haven’t noticed an absence of the instance in the communities i interact with. ie. I’m happy with the current federated communities.

    There is a peace here that is unlike other sites/forums.

    So, please, NO.

  • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Absolutely not. I will be switching instances if this happens. I have had nothing but bad experiences with Hexbear users and I do not wish to ever have to interact with such toxicity again. In case anyone has forgotten, their only reason to federate with other instances is to “dunk on liberals” and brigade to push a specific agenda. They specifically said as much back when they planned to federate with .world. There is zero intent for participating in good faith from most of their userbase.

  • AmosBurton_ThatGuy@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Absolutely not. I will straight up abandon my account and move to a different instance if .ca federates with hexbear. There’s absolutely nothing good about federating with that shithole.

    Edit: That being said, thanks for giving the .ca community the opportunity to share their opinions instead of making the decision yourself, even if you probably knew it wouldn’t be a popular option.