Blahaj Lemmy Meta

Lots of people who are seeing top-level postings about Hexbear. Net are probably confused about what has been going on and I want to give an SRD-style overview of the whole thing.
Note: As a user of Blahaj.Zone, I am not a neutral party in this and I do not pretend to be. This is how the whole thing has played out from my perspective.

Hexbear. Net is another Lemmy instance that had relatively recently started to federate with Blahaj.Zone and other Lemmy instances. It had previously been known as Chapo.Chat because it began as an instance for fans of the podcast ChapoTrapHouse.
Recently users from Blahaj.Zone (as well as other Lemmy instances) began to complain about the behavior of Hexbear users. The complaints were about rude, obnoxious behavior: Hexbear users calling people "libs" as an insult, denying crimes of Russia and China, denying the crimes of Stalin,...
Such behavior was not necessarily forbidden on Blahaj.Zone, but certain sub-Lemmys had their own rules on these subjects.
One of the threads about Hexbear: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1854795?scrollToComments=true

After an ever increasing number of users calling for defederating from Hexbear. Net, Ada (admin of Blahaj.Zone) opened a thread to talk about it. The thread was quickly inundated with Hexbear users, complaining in turn about being called out in this way. Though many of their comments exploited a current bug in the Lemmy code which resulted in emoji's being embedded as pictures which results in lots of image spam.
Ada responded by removing top-level comments in the thread which were not from Blahaj.Zone's users, because she wanted to get the feedback of her own community, not from anybody else.
This happened originally in this thread: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1959801

The discussion on Blahaj.Zone was a back and forth: Lots of people calling for "leftist and queer unity", others complaining about getting harassed by Hexbear users.

Meanwhile, elsewhere: Lemm.ee, a Lemmy instance operated and managed by someone from Estonia, also opened a discussion about Hexbear - at least partially motivated by the admin's increasing unease of the rampant denial of soviet atrocities and the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union. Russian propaganda in regards to the war in Ukraine was also an issue.
Lemm.ee was largely encountering similar problems as Blahaj.Zone, though the Lemme.ee admin admitted that the Hexbear admin was generally responsive to reports and complaints.
The thread on Lemm.ee: https://lemm.ee/post/4543536

The thread was also flooded with comments from Hexbear users. The admin of Lemm.ee also responded by hiding most of the comments from Hexbear.
https://mastodon.social/@brooklynman/110911292961470110

Back on Blahaj.Zone, a tangent opens up: A Hexbear user complains about c/196, the new home of Reddit's r/196 which had relocated to Blahaj.Zone and has been its biggest community ever since. The Hexbear user complains about their comments being removed, comments that called out the use of the r-word and other call-outs. The user posts pictures of the removal notices.
Blahaj.Zone's admin Ada steps in and intervenes on behalf of the Hexbear user, having a stern word with the c/196 mod responsible for the removal of the comments.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2136643

A Hexbear admin also gets involved and sends a message to the mods of c/196 demanding the removal of the sub-Lemmy's banner, because it contains "fuck tankies²", arguing that tankies is a slur. The c/196 mod refuses and publishes their message.
[²"Tankies" is a pejorative term for authoritarian socialists in the vein of Stalin and/or Mao.]
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1961004

While the discussion if Blahaj.Zone should defederate from Hexbear is still ongoing, the Hexbear admins defederated from Blahaj.Zone without warning from their side, because of...

unaddressed ableist removals from the /c/196 moderators, defense of chasers, no-quarter rules regarding our users, leakage of good-faith DMs from our admin team, and a general lack of initiative to punish these behavior

In her a response to these events, Ada points out in a comment that she never had the chance to adress the ableist incident (she was in bed) while other issues had happened in the past and had been adressed at the time. Thus she could not react before Hexbear defederated.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2135406

TL;dr: Blahaj.Zone's users complain about ill behavior of users on Hexbear. Net. A discussion about defederation begins on Blahaj.Zone. Meanwhile Hexbear users complain about Blahaj.Zone in turn and Hexbear. Net defederates instantly and without warning.

Thoughts?

This is an admin post, intended for blahaj lemmy users. Top level posts from members of other instances will be removed.

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Edit - Hexbear announced plans to deferedate from us.

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~~After recent events, it feels to me that sentiment has shifted and more people are asking for defederation of hexbear than previously~~

~~I've been doing my best to try and mend bridges and keep us connected, as it's my hope that we can maintain trans solidarity and work with them, despite the friction, however, ultimately, I feel that this is an issue for the blahaj lemmy community to decide, not the admins alone~~

~~So here's what we're going to do~~

~~We're going to leave things as they are for a week. That will give time for things to calm down whilst we see if we can work together. After a week, I'll put up a vote and get a feel for where the community is at in regards to our continued federation with hexbear. That poll will run for a week. If there is a strong will to defederate (a clear majority), then that's what we will do~~

I’m not sure what’s going on over there, but half the time I see a post from there or go into a comment section and it’s just…bad. Like old reddit the_donald bad. Constant trolling, etc. You TS just really bad vibes. I’ve been blocking the communities as they come up, but I’m not sure what else I can do.

The server will be briefly down while we install a new updated version of lemmy and restart it.

The maintenance window is 15 minutes, but should be much shorter.

Is anybody interested in making something on this canvas thing?

Never participated in r/places, figured I might give it a go

Edit - This is a post to the meta group of Blåhaj Lemmy. It is not intended for the entire lemmyverse. If you are not on Blåhaj Lemmy and plan on dropping in to offer your opinion on how we are doing things in a way you don't agree with, your post will be removed.

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A user on our instance reported a post on lemmynsfw as CSAM. Upon seeing the post, I looked at the community it was part of, and immediately purged all traces of that community from our instance.

I approached the admins of lemmynsfw and they assured me that the models with content in the community were all verified as being over 18. The fact that the community is explicitly focused on making the models appear as if they're not 18 was fine with them. The fact that both myself and one a member of this instance assumed it was CSAM, was fine with them. I was in fact told that I was body shaming.

I'm sorry for the lack of warning, but a community skirting the line trying to look like CSAM isn't a line I'm willing to walk. I have defederated lemmynsfw and won't be reinstating it whilst that community is active.

We got over a thousand subscribers overnight, and it's still rising. I'm not going to complain because yay numbers go brrrrrrr, but our most popular post only has 370 upvotes so is it a glitch?

I personally am quite against it. I joined Lemmy to stay away from the toxicity on Meta's platforms. I don't want any corporate bodies on the fediverse either and possibly doing to the fediverse what Google did to XMPP

Tomorrow, reddit will be shutting off 3rd party app access. If the twitter migration is anything to go by, that means that the wave of new users coming in the next few weeks will be much bigger than the wave we saw earlier this month.

Our lead techy admin @supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone is also recovering from broken bones and surgery, so she will be slower to respond to issues :)

All of that being said, we're as prepared as we can be. We're currently running our instance on hardware with excess capacity to spare, but who knows if it will be enough.

So, good luck to all of us, and see you on the other side :)

This is potentially a very silly question but it also occurs to me that this may be far more complicated than first glance. It could even vary by instance. Are reports sent only to the moderators of the given community or admins as well? Maybe even the admins of the troublemaker's instance?

If I understand correctly, every instance is hosted on a private server - is it along with all the content like images, videos and text?

If so, how is it funded?

My wonderful co-admin @supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone has made a modification to the downvote system. It's not currently enabled, but if we were to turn it on, downvotes would be available for use, but they would weigh 5 times less than an upvote.

Which is to say, it would take 5 downvotes to counter an upvote. This would let downvotes have an impact on what appears in the hot topics sort, but hopefully mitigate some of the more negative impacts of downvoting.

Are there any strong objections from Blahaj Lemmy users to enabling downvotes with this modification?

When browsing through my feed, especially if I have "all" selected, posts that are usually a few minutes old start appearing at the top of my feed after everything has loaded. This makes things difficult to read as it scrolls down the page. Does anyone else have this problem? I don't know if this is a Lemmy issue or a blahaj.zone issue.

I cant seem to open feddit.nl through this instance, a community i wanted to subscribe to. I cant seem to find a link to that community in the communities tab when searching for all, and when typing it in the browser i get a 404. Does every instance have to manually link every instance or something? Or am i using it wrong?