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:
- https://hexbear.net/c/games
- https://hexbear.net/c/technology
- https://hexbear.net/c/movies
- https://hexbear.net/c/food
- https://hexbear.net/c/vegan
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?
Edit: Well, it looks like the community is overwhelmingly against refederation. Decision made, thanks everyone for your feedback!
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.
Yeah I left my last instance and signed up here specifically because of Hexbear. Fuck that.