The last few posts made here, they’ve shown up, made the most inane, idiotic, and pointless comments, upvoted each other in a frenzy of circle jerking, and generally made a pest of themselves.
They’re a nuisance, and add nothing of value to the Lemmy experience.
Here’s my view. Lemmy.nz is intended for an NZ audience. Hexbear has been defederated from 5 of the top 8 largest instances. This is problematic for us, as their All is much more likely to show lemmy.nz posts than All on other instances. It starts to feel like we’re being brigaded, even though we aren’t, because their instance is the 10th largest Lemmy instance and yet they don’t see most Lemmy posts (but they do see ours).
I don’t have a problem with international audiences occasionally posting in our posts, even people with no connection to NZ. I think it provides some great perspective on our issues. But when you post a thread, and it gets overrun with international users, I think this becomes a problem.
This may not seem fair on them, but what I want is a friendly-feeling community, and recently we have had a different vibe.
Personally, I have become less inclined to participate. I’ve written up a post about the Papakangahorohoro street, then decided not to post it because by the time I’d written my 150 word article the thread had such hexbear comments as “Get over it crakkkas” and “sounds like the crackers should go back to europe if they dont like it”.
I want to participate in a friendly community, and the last couple of days I have felt like I didn’t want to participate because of the hexbear participation - and the participation of others stemming from that. For that reason, and no other, I think we should defederate. However, I want to hear what others think. Some counter-arguments would be great.
Yeah, I have been attempting to avoid defederating with instances from mine but with HexBear I just kind of had to because they were taking over every popular post.
Edit: I did read OP’s initial exchange and I think OP massively overreacted and the HexBear commenters were largely fine. However, the wider issue still stands which is why I did in my case.
They got that response because of the poor reputation their instance already has, I wasn’t in the mood to engage with them.
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I could be wrong, but my understanding is that when instance like hexbear is defederated, they can still see your posts, they can even comment and vote on them. You just don’t see it anymore. They would have to defederate on their side too, to completely block it.
You’re on kbin.social, so I’m gonna make some assumptions about how it works, because I really only have a decent understanding of lemmy - though I’m assuming this is how other activitypub federated services work too.
While it may seem like you (on kbin.social) are replying to this post (on lemmy.nz), that is not the case. You server has a copy of the reply and all the other posts and comments. When you comment, it gets posted to the kbin.social community (magazine?) called [email protected].
Behind the scenes, your server will syncronise your copy with the official lemmy.nz copy.
A user on (say) lemmy.world will also have a copy on their server. Your server will not send your comment directly there, rather it sends it to the only source of truth (the community host server), then the host server will send it out to all servers where there is a subscriber.
By defederating, they will no longer get any updates for any lemmy.nz communities, but will still see their own comments (and other users on their server will see them).
Honestly, I’m not sure what happens when e.g. a lemmy.nz user posts to lemmy.ml who are one of the few large servers still federated with hexbear - do the comments go to hexbear? Not sure. Do hexbear comments made to lemmy.ml federate back to lemmy.nz? Again, not sure (I suspect not).
This would actually be ideal, as long as their downvotes don’t get federated back to us.
Hexbear doesnt have downvotes
That’s always a recipe for disaster.
Does lemmy not have a block user function where you won’t see their comments? I guess that doesn’t help when you want to wholesale block users from an instance.
I personally haven’t seen anything worth defederating over so far. In any case I usually just scroll past or don’t interact with comments that are inflammatory. However as you’re the admin it’s your call. My only reservation is that we don’t have many contributors as it is.
Also you should have posted your 150 word article anyway.
Personally I would much prefer the smaller, tight knit group of NZ and NZ-adjacent posters over a swarm of non-NZ users that are posting here because they can’t see the vast majority of posts on lemmy (out of the top 8 servers, there are about 36,000 monthly active users. Of those, about 2/3rds of those users are on servers that have defederated with hexbear.)
My 150 word article would have led to more… discussion - and I just didn’t have it in me to start a conversation like that where there were already aggressive and flippant comments.
While I do enjoy the smaller community of the NZ instance currently, if it ever grows larger I think you’ll be facing similar challenges with users as can be seen with the NZ subreddit on reddit. Such is the nature of social media. So it’s worth thinking about how to manage it in the future is what I’m saying, I guess.
Lemmy 100% needs better mod tools. And user tools for that matter. Users being unable to block an instance is a pretty big hole.
Some lemmy instances are trying to foster a friendly community, and really the only tool we have for this so far is to defederate until tools improve.
I agree - imo a smaller but friendlier group who are here in good faith is preferable.
That happened to me too. I came in yesterday with something to say, and when I saw that some of the first people in there were making overly simplistic statements using (problematically class-based) American insults with hexbear-specific spelling, I just didn’t want to post in there.
They have a full on culture of dogpiling/bullying using in-group memes and it gets overwhelming.
I say this as someone who a) likes the name Papakangahorohoro and b) thinks the locals should thank their lucky stars that it’s not named after a local councillor’s friend’s uncle like so many new development streets are.
Oh boy, I hate reading history and learning about how many towns used to be called something else, but some government promised a person if they did a thing they could have a town named after them.
Te Wera a Waitohi aka Waitohi aka Picton is a crazy one. The NZ Company cycled through naming it Horne Bay, Newton Bay, Cromwell, Beaconfield then finally settled on Picton after a guy who was into slave trading. Facepalm.
Not built into the platform, but some apps have it.
I’m glad you see the problem.