Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)
The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.
Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.
However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their "drama communities" as well.
Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them
After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear (a) , followed by more resignations (a)
In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.
There's also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts "as a bit" using wording that they were not aware is misgendering ("fella") which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the "bit doing" during this heated period.
This "struggle session" is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back , and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.
Honestly I think this speaks to the value of having user-level blocking of instances rather than defederation. Maybe one day that will be incorporated into Lemmy (or similar).
You can do it now in PieFed, or some apps like Sync or Connect. Otherwise you can only block communities but not all users from an instance, short of becoming an admin yourself or moving to one that has done what you wanted to see done. More details in !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca.
I doubt we'll ever see it in Lemmy proper, especially as the protections that were offered in the past took so long to arrive and then were subsequently rolled back to become weaker - it's just not a priority for the admins who constantly ban others at the drop of a hat, but don't seem to want to build tools that allow the reverse.
I had no idea that was built into piefed, that's great!
App-based is... Not great IMO, it needs to be part of the base or its just not viable.
Yeah PieFed lacks a lot of basic polish (e.g. neither user tagging like @openstars@piefed.social nor a post/comment preview ability have been implemented yet) while on the other hand there are so many cool features that already exist, above and beyond what Lemmy offers (like custom blocking of all users on an instance, and categories of communities helping guide new users into subscriptions). Plus with it being written in Python rather than Rust it should catch up fairly quickly in what it does lack, even though again in other ways it's already ahead.
Also I've noticed that I am almost never downvoted (maybe once or twice on >400 comments so far) since I switched. It's highly relevant that unlike my previous instance discuss.online and before that startrek.website, piefed.social has defederated entirely from hexbear.net. People have even commented like "I'm sorry you are getting piled on", but I have to go to another instance to even see it. It's fucking beautiful 😍 - PieFed actually offers the ability to block spam while accessing Lemmy content!!! ❤️
Well to be fair, hexbears cannot downvote you anyway since they have them disabled instance-wide
That... is an excellent point actually.
Wow, in that case I truly don't know what's going on. Sometimes I see downvotes for the same content on discuss.online, but there are no downvotes visible on PieFed.social. Perhaps there was a federation issue, or some other instance federated from one but not the other.
Thanks for the reminder - I don't want to spread misinformation:-).
Edit: but separately from vote counts, the point about PieFed allowing users to block spam is still valid!:-)
If piefed doesn't have an apub ingest queue, it's very likely it's just missed federation activities.
New posts and comments continually show up so I thought it does (assuming the only other alternatives would be the API, which they said they don't want to use, or web scraping, which similarly they wanted to avoid), but it does seem not entirely stable e.g. sometimes communities will get duplicated so there must be a backend bug in that process. So for a mere one or two downvotes to disappear especially at a time of higher-than-usual traffic leading up to and following the USA elections, it very well could be that.
It would not be the first instance to have such occurrences - e.g. aussie.zone and programming.dev to name a couple - so I haven't worried overmuch. But it's definitely not a selling point for PieFed either, nor perhaps a detractor since Lemmy suffers identically. Or at least did prior to 0.19.6 that hopefully will solve a great deal of that, especially when deployed specifically onto lemmy.world.:-)
ye, let's hope l.w. doesn't take too long with that. They're still 3versions back.
True, yet they were specifically waiting for this one, so it's a different expectation this time:-).
You got me invested, now I kind of want to have a PieFed account…
Check it out:-). Keep your old account though, bc there are some federation issues - e.g. I submitted a post yesterday and it never went out, though I use my older accounts more to receive pings, and check out posts that haven't made their way onto PieFed.social yet. Note that that happens to smaller Lemmy instances as well, including Aussie.zone and programming.dev, so I don't know how much of those types of issues relate to the PieFed software vs. something else along those lines.
It does take a bit of getting used to. But see e.g. the categories of communities on the top of each post, and the hashtags are the bottom (here's an example) - so many things that people have been asking for on Lemmy, that PieFed already has (but also many things that should work but don't so... yeah it's an odd mixture of both at once:-).
I really hope that PieFed will get its little polish, but as of now it sounds amazing!
I tend to think so, yeah:-). Mention my name and you'll get a discount (obviously joking bc it's entirely free and always will be, as it is open source code!:-).
The problem is that this really harms broader outreach efforts. If the fediverse is only tolerable with the right block list, then most people who try to give it a shot will just be turned off immediately. And that's not even getting into the potential security issues associated with malicious instances.
Malicious instances could still be defederated though.
The problem is that users also need the option at user level.
The biggest security risk with the fediverse is arguably the ability to serve individual users malicious content from your instance or another host you control. Defederation is the best defense against that.
And in no way does adding user options to block all users from an instance change that.
Why are you arguing against users having additional controls?
Because the existence of those tools are being used as am excuse for not doing the thing which actually helps. In addition to the whole first half of my comment where needing the right block list to make the fediverse tolerable is not a sustainable practice.
I think you're confused.
There are reasons to defederate. Malicious instances are one example.
There are many reasons not to deferederate, like users on a particular instance being assholes to a specific user or group of users.
A user cannot, today, block users from an instance. They can block individual users, they can block communities, but individual blocks can be easily worked around.
A better option is for that user to have the option to block an instance (and its users) that others are fine with interacting with.
You are trying to rework that into something its not.
Edit: Ahh, the no reply just downvote. Says everything. Goodbye.