this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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guessing this doesn't include hexbear.net because they aren't federated yet but they have 270k posts and 3.6 million comments on their own, mostly well before the start of this graph, so it ought to start at more like 500k
But I'm so glad to see lemmy taking off properly, not just used for some niches. FOSS internet infrastructure that is accessible to end users is so important, it safeguards a lot of important freedoms, etc.
What's the story behind this defederation? I missed that
it does basically boil down to what other people have said but I'll elaborate.
The reasons are political disagreements from the admins of lemmy.world, and them taking the site's zealous left-wing opinions and shitposting culture as prima-facie evidence that hexbear users cannot be trusted not to break lemmy.world rules (unstated which rules) by pushing "their beliefs and ideology". It almost sounds reasonable until you think about it like, at all. It's an explicitly political instance (though honestly >50% of the posting is just news of the day and banter), so of course the users will by and large have those political opinions and post them. As long as they do so within the rules of lemmy.world I don't see the issue personally.
I can sort of understand why tbf. Just playing the devil's advocate here but the issue is that today it's fine and shitposts are shitposts but Poe's law will come into action at some point.
That's not the actual reason. Hexbear was openly advocating for their "army" to brigade other instances once it was federating. It just so happens that the basis of that brigading was going to be political.
Lemmy.world pre-emptivly decided it wasn't worth the hassle of having to deal with that.
TBH reading "their" opinion on Russia and the Russia war I can see why people would just simply want them to stay within their weird island. Well defederation is still not a cool option in general for the platform as a whole but I can see how admins of instances read stuff like that and can't help but let their own opinion influence their decision. I would probably stay away from these as well.
Hexbear only recently started opening itself up to federation. It’s one of the old leftist instances that was around before the reddit api fiasco. Think lemmygrad but more tolerant and pro-lgbtq.
Basically the powers that be determined that Hexbear "violated" Lemmy's TOS by being a little too right wing (their opinion) and therefore chose on behalf of the entirety of Lemmy that the instance should be defederated.
Source
I live here but to be clear, lemmy.world is not "the entirety of Lemmy".
#LemmyDrama
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wasn't trying to stir shit, its just interesting (though entirely understandable) how that site gets left out of these kinds of posts. It has a lot of inertia to still have 1500 monthly active users, and a huge amount of content, after >3 years of being split off from reddit and receiving little outside attention
I find it funny when people cry "FrEdOoM oF eXpReSsIoN" when instances defederate. Isn't this the whole point and the good thing about federated social media? People who own the instances decide what to do with their instances
Why is Hexbear so popular?
It's fairly big relative to other lemmy instances because it's been around for over 3 years, and it was a lifeboat site for people that frequented r/chapotraphouse before it was banned from reddit (which was a relatively huge sub).
Over the past year or so they worked to switch from a heavily modified fork of lemmy back to a more modern upstream version of lemmy, mostly by redeveloping and contributing features that were missing, like custom emojis, to upstream lemmy. So now there's more attention being paid since it is now using a federation-compatible version of lemmy and intends to actually federate with a limited subset of the lemmyverse
Thanks for the very detailed explanation!
Same, I just found it after seeing the lemmy instances graph. It's nothing to sneeze at.